Thread: The RAAF and the F35 program

Just buy the Russian Su35 and be done with it ,
The F35 is and always will be a white elephant.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the...f-16-who-17753

its a crap plane

Not crap exactly, but certainly nowhere near well enough designed as it should have been. The high tech systems will be great (eventually), but you cannot get away from the fact the Chinese copy without the STOVL design limitations imposed on the F-35 is what it should have been to begin with.

it will get shot down 100km before it gets to the battlezone

"it will get shot down 100km before it gets to the battlezone"

Without F-22's as fighter cover, most likely! Unfortunately the F-35's are NOT a 5th Gen Stealth aircraft, more like 4.5 Gen, and then only from the frontal aspect. They are going to have to work REAL hard on tactics and electronics to keep these things alive in a real furball against top level adversaries who will nullify any advantages the F-35's might have. I'm not really worried about these aircraft in Low-Intensity conflicts, but for various reasons, High-Intensity conflict will sorely test these aircraft. We will likely lose our Air Force in an afternoon.

Sounds liked they are getting the gun sorted. edit didn't know air to ground gunfire was part of the brief.

Joint Strike Fighter completes first airborne gunfire test - CONTACT magazine

Some of our RAAF aircraft are amongst this lot. Concurrency - what a mess.

108 U.S F-35s Won’t Be Combat-Capable | War Is Boring

A friend of mine in the US sent me this. He's in the avo industry but at what level, im not sure so I have no idea what the level of accuracy is but I trust him.

So here's a short list of the problems as they are reported today. Sheer incompetence for the most part. And yes they'll get fixed over the next 10 years to the tune of billions of $ more:
a radar that shuts down the moment it identifies multiple targets, an EOTS system that has less resolution and capability than a bloc 1 F16, a radar that continually generates false targets to the point of being useless, a gun system that throws the aircraft balance off when the aerodynamic door is opened, engine nacelles that melt when in vSTOL mode, oxygen equipment that causes pilot black out, a helmet that is so fragile/jittery and causes so much overload and double vision that most of the sensor inputs are turned off, unacceptable wing drop in the transonic range causing the aircraft to spin, differences in the aircraft that mean you have to have model specific equipment if you want it to do multi-role work (it's baseline specification), an RF signature ( largely caused by the Link-16 data link signals and the high powered radar) that is so big that all the aerodynamic stealth is irrelevant and any base line Soviet passive detection system can find them, targetting software (2B and 3i) which only allows direct action bombs ( it can't fire stand off weapons which is absolutely ludicrous on today's battlefield), ridiculously short range ( it can't even fly as far as an F16), inability to diferentiate between hostile and friendly radar emissions from the ground because the MDL upload data isn't working and there's only 1 facility that can do the uploads anywhere in the world, none of the cannons on any model are authorized for use or even test because the software isn't ready and the DOT opinion is that the helmet display is so jumbled that if they did fire the gun in close air support that it's a 50/50 chance of friendly fire each time, the wing loading is so high that it can't fly slow or loiter over the battlefield and nor can it make tight maneuvers to respond to fire support calls, during catapult launch it has severe vertical oscillation and it is currently barred from ship board operations because it is so dangerous ( it slams the pilots head around and 70% of launches have resulted in pilot neck injuries), the wings tips aren't strong enough to carry Aim-9x and in order to do so General Bogdan says the wing has to be re-designed outboard of the wing fold, it takes 55 hours to do an engine change ( the requirement is 8 hours) and this is with one aircraft in the hanger (when does that ever happen?), the bandwidth capability of the ship's transmitters mean it can take 2 days to upload an ALIS file and finally the damn things are broken so often that pilots are lucky to get 10 hours air time per month. The minimum considered acceptable for combat readiness is 30. Lack of air time has been a major factor in the 14 deaths associated with the aircraft.

intresting. The taxpayers should be outraged at the purchase. Without even talking about the Tiger helo debacle.