Now add the expected maintenance costs over the life of the aircraft.
- How many hours of flight can the F-35 do before it needs to be hangered?
- How long does it take in the hanger?
- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)
- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?
- Is the plane even finished the design phase?
The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.
"- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)"
Yes. One of the major improvements over the F-22 is the way the stealth coating works. Its baked in to the skin of the aircraft. It does not flake off, it does not need to be constantly reapplied. The F-22 and all other prior stealth aircraft, F-117 and B-2 are hangar queens because of their fragile stealth
coatings. This is not the case for F-35. Not only is a game changer but it was also a requirement to make a carrier based stealth fighter actually practical.
"- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?"
Just as capable at servicing any other carrier based aircraft. The F-35 its actually smaller than the super hornet in every dimension so space shouldn't be a problem. Its much smaller than the F-14 was. And its biggest servicing issue wasn't its size but the complexity of its swing wing.
"- Is the plane even finished the design phase?"
Ok, now I'm starting to wonder if you actually have informed criticisms or if you are just an F-35 hater and only want to spread FUD.
All carrier aircraft are typically brought into the hangar for several hours of maintenance after every flight. But if necessary the F-35B can be immediately refueled and rearmed on the flight deck and sent right out again in a matter of minutes.
Maintainers on a carrier can do fairly complex repairs, including engine replacement. If they need more working space in the hangar then other aircraft can be parked temporarily on the flight deck.
The F-35 is primarily a strike fighter so supersonic speed isn't that useful. The biggest problem with flying at supersonic speeds is it drastically increases fuel consumption, and the F-35B has a very limited fuel capacity. British carriers have no tankers.
As long as an aircraft is still in active production the design phase is never "finished". Updates will continue for decades. The F-15 design is about 50 years old and it's still not finished.
The F-22 production program was cancelled in 2011 because there was just no funding available. It wasn't possible to fight the wars in the Middle East, and procure more F-22s. Something had to give.
> The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.
Why? The F-22 is an air superiority fighter. The F-35 is a multi-role fighter. They're built for different purposes. It's crucial to understand the difference.
That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them. Every time the F-35 turns in a miserable performance report its mission profile is changed to make it look like less of an embarrassment.
The F-35 wasn't intended to do everything. There are certainly those who have tried to make it do everything but that wasn't the intent of the program.
For example it was never meant to be an air superiority fighter. While it does have a great radar, missiles and even a gun on the air force version it was never meant to fill the role of an F-15 or F-22. The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35.
The new Digital Century program shows the AF hasn't forgotten about the importance of dedicated platforms. However given the cost and development times of modern aircraft it takes a new approach to make them practical.
The navy has also been clear about the role of the F-35. It wont ever be used as an F-14 replacement. They are actually working on that separately.
As for other customers, different militaries have different missions and needs. It is true the F-35 is capable of filling most roles if needed. Some nations may rely on it as their air defense backbone. That's a secondary capability but when you only have the budget for one fighter and this is the only 5th gen on the open market then its defacto the best option.
The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35.
Shame that in exercises the F-35 loses visual-range fights with the F-16 even when the F-16 is carrying external fuel tanks.
The issue is that it's almost universally worse than all the specialty aircraft it replaces at that specialty job. It's worse at fighting insurgents than the A-10. It's worse at dogfighting than the F-16. It's worse at air superiority than the F-18.
Yes it was... and Congress decided to tell the military what it needed instead of the other way around - hence the "jack of all trades, master of none" that is the F-35.
The F-16 is considered an air superiority fighter[1], although it is used in multi-role missions as well.
It's fly-away cost in 1998 was around $18.8MM[1], which is about $31.9MM today... or less than half the cost of each F-35.
Congress forced the idea of the F-35 onto the military as a low cost modern do-it-all aircraft. Then the Marines drove a huge part of the F-35 development, which ended up requiring VTOL/STOL capabilities etc, things no other branch wanted or needed and where subsequently ripped out of their variants anyway.
The final result are three different airframes that look similar, but don't share many parts, and don't outmatch the incumbent plane in each category (A-10 for CAS, AV-8B for VTOL/CAS, F-16/F-15/F-18/F-22 for AS and multirole, and probably a few others I'm leaving out).
So... why continue with the F-35? Sunk cost fallacy, mostly. It would be far better to take the lessons learned from this bleeding-edge program and apply them to new, purpose-built aircraft that each branch actually wants and needs.
In Hearts of Iron, you play as a country during WW2.
As Germany, you face threats from Britain (ships, fighters and bombers), France (mostly land forces) and Russia.
What do you build?
Air superiority fighters win dogfights (F22 today) but are only useful vs Britain.
Close Air Support (A10 today) beat tanks, but lose in the air.
Multirole fighters (F35 today) work in all three theaters, but not as well as the specialists.
Given that the next war might be vs Russia (Crimea situation), Taiwan / China (Naval), or maybe even terrorists in Africa or Middle East, multirole is the obvious airplane to build today.
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So Air Force wants a multirole fighter that can take off from airstrips / airports.
Marines want a multirole fighter that can take off of Wasp Amphibious Assault Ships (ramp launch)
Navy wants a multirole fighter that can take off of their Aircraft Carriers (catapult launch).
This gives F35A, F35B, and F35C variants. But since they all wanted a multirole fighter, it makes sense to try to make the three variants as similar as possible. You want to standardize the gun, standardize the bullets, standardize the fuel, standardize the software.
> That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them.
Really, you can thank the the F-4 Phantom II, F-16 and both versions of the F-18 (the A and C, which is a much larger aircraft) for this. All of these planes excelled as both fighter and attack aircraft, and showed it was possible to do both missions well enough.
No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It’s differences can range from types of munitions to avionics. The fact you said a multirole fighter is more limited shows you really don’t know the differences. A multirole is actually more capable. A multirole like F-35 can do air superiority but it won’t outperform an aircraft designed specifically for air superiority like the F-22. The F-22 does not do air-to-ground strikes. The F-35 can.
Being capable of doesn't make it the primary role. Yes the F-22 can drop a few bombs... but that's the problem.. a few. It doesn't have the load capabilities or external pylons (without compromising it's stealth entirely) to carry significant munitions or preferred role-specific munitions to be really effective in CAS or ground attack. Nor is it's cannon a comparable replacement for the GAU-8.
- How many hours of flight can the F-35 do before it needs to be hangered?
- How long does it take in the hanger?
- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)
- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?
- Is the plane even finished the design phase?
The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.