WGCDR Chris Mills, RAAF (Retd) - Killing the Raptor program is transparently a marketing ploy .....
An odd-ball opinion which may have some merit but only if you like conspiracty theories. The F-22 is a superb aircraft with a specialist role. It is quite expensive, and restricted in the number of different things it can do well, but it is vastly better at what it does than any other aircraft ever built. This includes the F-35 and anything the Europeans or Russians will be able to make within the next 10-20 years.
time I'd like to ask if there are vested interests who will benefit from retaining the JSF program.
Of course there are, just as there are vested interests behind the F-22 and F/A-18. Asking that question is like asking if there is a vested interest behind the Commodore, especially in the light of the axing of the Falcon.
Chewy509 like many I am starting to wonder about the management of the JSF project on all sides. Constant over-runs, budget concerns, and the acquistion recently of SuperHornets as stop gap makes me wonder what's really happening?
Well, first up, the F/A-18E/F purchase shows that our planners are not completely stupid. They have seen that the F-35 is going to be late, they know that the F-111 is becoming unworkable and the old F/A-18s are not going to last much longer (combination of metal fatigue from too many flying hours and outdated design) so they bought a very capable, cost-effective, mature, reliable aircraft that will do the job until further notice and thus save us from having to make a major commitment to the F-35 until much later, when it is a bit more mature and ready for prime time.
Meanwhile, the F-35 is taking longer and doing less than originally expected; it weighs more than they planned, and will cost more too. Indeed, at this stage, it is behaving exactly like almost every other major military aircraft design and development programme in history. Relax: situation normal. Of course it will cost more and arrive late; these sorts of projects always do.
Chewy509 Will the F-35 take on the SU-27/SU-30 of our neighbours?
Yes, quite comfortably. It doesn't have the high-alpha performance or the ultimate payload/range capacity, but it has vastly better avionics and comms - and these are the things that win air-to-air battles: between 90 and 95% of all modern air combats take place at BVR (beyond visual range) and transitional distances. These are the ones the F-35 (like the F-22) is designed to win.
Chewy509 recent calls to restart building the A-10C for the CAS role ...
ddrueding Bringing back the A-10 would be a pretty obvious move IMHO. Significantly more ordinance on target than an Apache, for less money and with better survivability.
Totally different roles. Since at least the Second World War, possibly earlier, air forces have scrambled to replace old, slow, vulnerable CAS aircraft with fast, modern, more survivable aircraft. And since almost that same time, armies and the people actually responsible for CAS have scratched around trying to get hold of something slower and older and more suited to putting the ordinance in exactly the right spot. Over and over again we have seen this same process. The reality is that very expensive, large, fast aircraft like the F-35 (ditto the Su-30, F/A-18, F-15, Tornado, and all the others) are simply not very good at doing CAS. So calling for yet another life extension for the old A-10 isn't actually a reflection on the F-35 at all - if we were all flying F-22s or Tornados or Su-30s or F-15s, it would be exactly the same. Different aircraft, different jobs. Just because you have ordered some new sports cars, that doesn't mean that you can afford to sell your delivery vans just yet.
Chewy509 maybe it's a numbers vs technology game ...
In warfare, technology has been more important than numbers since at least the time of Napoleon; arguably a lot longer than that.
Chewy509 Part of the problem with the JSF project, is that the platform must complete many roles ..... in short the F-35 will have to replace the following aircraft: A-10, F-15E, F-16, F/A-18, AV-8.
Actually, just the F-15E, F-16, and F/A-18 at this stage. As more-or-less stated above, it can't replace the A-10, and my guess is that it might not replace the Harrier/AV-8 either, or at least not for quite some time. But yes, it is indeed a very tall order.
time (a whole lot of arm-waving panic) ...
Not so. It improves on all five of the key aircraft it is to replace - F-15, F/A-18, F/A18e, F-16, and F-111 with a combination of stealth, increased range (F-111 aside), better avionics, and much better sensors.
time Supposedly, even this may not be a huge improvement over what can be achieved with tweaks to the F/A-18 design.
Yes, and I am going to be the world's greatest lover (as soon as those pillls I ordered arrive). You can't graft low observable technology onto an aitframe as an afterthought, it's not like black paint. It has to be built in and designed for from the outset.
time Apparently, the F-35 has a similar sustained turn rate to a 1969 F-4 Phantom ...
You mean a 1958 F-4 Phantom, I presume - it was already a mature, well-tested design in service around the world in 1969.
But actually, who cares? Turm rate was important in 1970. Turn rate and high-alpha performance stopped being important 20 years ago when highly agile, off-boresight missiles were first deployed. Since that time, the manouverablity requirement has shifted to the missile, while the sensor power and communications/situational awareness requirement has become more and more important.
time A technical analyst singled out the US and UK navies' vertical landing requirement as the biggest problem compromising the design.
Absolutely. This puts a huge handicap on the designers. But, apparently, they still believe that they can achieve a better result with the three-version JSF than they could have done with two completely different designs. Given the cost of designing, testing and manufacturing a modern military aircraft, they may well be right.
time Not the first time a defense project has been a disaster, the difference this time is ......
.... that people who should know better are panicing already. Relax. This is normal, It happens every time. Most people who are familiar with defence matters predicted it years ago.
time Goodbye air superiority.
Balderdash. Air superiority is founded on (a) crew training, (b) sensor ability, (c) everything else.
time I can't help but thinking that it looks just like a typical large software project. Everything is designed by committee and massacred by project managers. Costs are exploding, it's years behind and there's no end in sight.
You got it in one. It will cost 3 to 4 times what was predicted, and arrive 5 years late. Situation normal. Tell you what, name three major combat aircraft projects in the last 50 years that have not been late and over-cost. Hell, name two. (I can think of one. There are probably some others, I just can't think of them at the moment.)
time (Interesting but irrelevant stuff about turn rates.) The F-35 is also much slower than the 1960s F-4E or F-105D. So the F-35A aerodynamic performance is retrograde when compared with 1960s legacy fighters.
Not at all. Just about every modern military aircraft is slower than the 1960s ones. The F/A-18 is quite a lot slower than the Mirage III it replaced, for example. Why? Because speed was proven to be important during WW2 and in Korea, so they designed faster aircraft in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in the Vietnam era, they discovered that manouverability was still important (most combats were still at close range at that time, of course, and missiles were short-range things with very little intelligence), so during the 1970s and 1980s they designed for manouverability. (Hence the lower straight-line speed of aircraft of that generation - f/A-18, F-16, and so on.) Then, about 20-years ago, off-boresight weapons and very effective BVR missiles and radars came along. So now, the smart designers are going for bigger, more powerful radars and lower radar signatures.
time One of the cool things about that Sukhoi demo is knowing that the pilot doesn't have to think about or even understand how to co-ordinate all the flight control surfaces, including the thrust vectoring. You just yank on the joystick and it does the rest ... okay, not quite. Same with the F22
Same with all modern (latest-generation) military aircraft. The F/A-18e is an example. The crew are supposed to be busy doing other stuff, like shooting you.
Pradeep One of the problems that I understand faces Oz is that there is no real replacement for the F-111 bomber that we use to project power. The US isn't going to give us the stealth bombers that they use to fulfill this role, and we don't have the carriers to project either. Hopefully a few of the operational diesel subs will be able to sink a few enemy ships before being discovered.
Do you know how much the B-2 costs? A pair of B-2s would cost about as much to buy (assuming the US was willing to sell) as it costs to run the entire RAAF for a year. Yep, no worries, order a couple of dozen - got a credit card handy?
The Oz subs are a complete disaster. They spend more time in dock under repair than out of it. I don't mean that as hyperbole, I mean it literally - more years in dock being fixed than years on patrol doing their job.
The "no replacement for the F-111" tale is an old one, and wrong, wrong, wrong. The F-111 has fantastic performance, load-carrying ability, and range, but it is horribly vulnerable to SAMs or fighters. It's no use having enough range to truck a bomb to Moscow if they can see you coming from a hundred miles away and shoot you down the moment you cross the coast. The F-35 & A330 tanker combo is far more able to delier a payload onto a defended target, and astronomically more likely to come back safely afterwards. Not to mention much more able to do that every day instead of needing a week in the shed being worked on before each mission.
ddrueding The F-111 and the B-1 used to be incredible aircraft. This particular role is something AU needs more than pretty much anyone else (except for Russia). Perhaps developing something in-house based on the -111 tech would be a better solution?
Cute idea, not feasable. There are three main tasks. First up, you need to re-engine them - a very large job.
Then you need a complete replacement of the electronics for this aircraft which, although much modified over the years, was designed in the early 1960s. The electronics fit-out, remember, typically accounts for around 50% of the total cost of a brand-new aircraft.
At this stage, with two of the three tasks completed, we have spent quite a lot more than it would have cost to do the same job with some nice new off-the-shelf F/A-18s or F-15s from Boeing. (Yes, we didn't have to build all-new aircraft, but we had to do a lot of refurbishment and mess around redesigning the air intakes to suit the new engines and then custom design and custom fit a brand-new electronic fit-out into an airframe that was designed in 1961.)
Now you need to make the F-111s less visible on radar. You do this by throwing away the aeroplane and designing a new one.
Short answer: buy an F-35 instead. Or, if you need it now and can't afford to wait until the F-35 is properly sorted and more reasonably priced, buy an F/A-18F. You could get an F-15, a Typhoon, a Rafale, or an F-15 instead, but the F-18E/F is the pick of the bunch. It's bigger than the European pair ( = more range, better radar), very reliable and easy to maintain, and quite a lot newer than the F-15. Note that it is NOT a slightly modified F/A-18 classic, it's a whole new design with only a handful of shared parts, and it was called "F/A-18E" instead of having a new number simply because they needed a way to pretend to Congress that it wasn't a new aircraft at all, only an upgrade - "just a new head and a new handle, but same old axe, honest mum".)
Chewy509 I do believe that the current Gen5 aircraft under development (eg The F-22, F-35, PAK-FA T-50) will be the last to have pilots in them.
They said the exact same thing about the English Electric Lightning, the Mirage III, and the Lockheed F-104 back in 1958. One day it will be true, but people have been born, grown old, and died since they first started saying that.
