F-35 – Deadly if Ever Becomes Fully Operational

[longknife]

Makes one wonder. All of this technology and so-called capabilities and, let's say it is finally cleared for full combat roles – who soon will be become obsolete?


The story is @ The Aviationist This photo shows all the weapons the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is designed to carry

 

[whitehall]

Surely not at one time.

 

[longknife]

Surely not at one time.

Sorry, didn't link but saw a military blog this morning that showed one fully loaded and it almost appeared that all of that stuff was in there!

 

[williepete]

CAS testing:

F-35 Close Air Support Testing Military.com

Still using Have Quick? Wow. We had that back in my day when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I see FACs are still using the 9-line format. Some things are eternal.

 

[TimothysAlaska]

A flying brick could be deadly with the right avionics package. A lot of hoopla when all the upgrades on older aircraft make em just as deadly. It's not the airframe but the avionics.

 

[williepete]

Just finished watching a C-SPAN Washington Journal segment with guest Marcus Weisgerber. He's the Global Business Editor for Defense One. He fielded quite a few calls. I got a much clearer picture of why the program has been so screwed up from the beginning and why costs have gone up so much.

One, there was never a plan B. Two, we thought we were at a design stage where everything could be ironed out on the computer. Flaws still emerged after production that now have to be retrofitted to hundreds of airframes to fix. Frustrating.

Washington Journal Marcus Weisgerber F-35 Joint | Video | C-SPAN.org

 

[longknife]

I've read on several military websites that the F-35 is being certified for full operations. Just had a static test of the nose gun that equals or betters that on the A-10.

 

[RubberGloveSeduction]

A flying brick could be deadly with the right avionics package. A lot of hoopla when all the upgrades on older aircraft make em just as deadly. It's not the airframe but the avionics.

This is false. Your flying brick gets detected and targeted at a much farther distance, it isn't as deadly when shot down. Do you think they used F-117s with inferior avionics (they didn't even have radars) to attack the more highly defended targets just for giggles? Of course not, F-117s and B-2s could penetrate airspace in Iraq and the Balkans that F-15Es, B-1s, and B-52s could not.

Look at the recent reports from pilots that have been testing F-35 against 4th generation aircraft, F-35 has been dominating because they can't find it. Aggressor squadron with experienced pilots flying F-15Es with good upgraded AESA radars got completely waxed by F-35s, and they've had problems running some exercises because ground radars couldn't located the F-35s to target them, F-35 pilots had to turn on transponders. Read comments by pilots who have trained against F-22s and been on the wrong end of that 30-1 kill ratio, they are frustrated because they can't find the F-22s and end up playing rounds of dodge the surprise incoming missile.

I'm amazed that anyone could accept the logic of one plane being much harder to detect and target than another offers no advantage, when planes are shot down after being detected and targeted.


Reference = The F-35 is so stealthy, it produced training challenges, pilot says

The F-35 Lightning II is so stealthy, pilots are facing an unusual challenge. They're having difficulty participating in some types of training exercises, a squadron commander told reporters Wednesday. During a recent exercise at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, F-35 squadrons wanted to practice evading surface-to-air threats. There was just one problem: No one on the ground could track the plane. “If they never saw us, they couldn’t target us,” said Lt. Col. George Watkins, the commander of the 34th Fighter Squadron at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The F-35s resorted to flipping on their transponders, used for FAA identification, so that simulated anti-air weapons could track the planes, Watkins said.
...
Watkins said he can take four F-35s and “be everywhere and nowhere at the same time because we can cover so much ground with our sensors, so much ground and so much airspace. And the F-15s or F-16s, or whoever is simulating an adversary or red air threat, they have no idea where we’re at and they can’t see us and they can’t target us.”