Salute
ProPax!
Where are the factual basis for :
Most of its advertized features, like the helmet vision toys, don't work.
The helmet is working very well or we would have had numerous crashes when the folks are doing things you have not thought of or can imagine. Have you seen the optical and other sensor systems that dwarf anything previous fighter/attack planes have? You can actually look thru the floor using that : helmet toy".
Makes it real easy to land on a small carrier like the Marines do. Awfully nice to "check six", ya think? The radar is an orderr of magnitude more capable than existing attack planes anyone has flying.
Please see the many topics at :
F-35 Lightning II
And then this
:
AND it falls out of the sky for no apparent reason
Where is that news breaking headline coming from?
This plane has had a lower crash/loss/whatever in its first few hundred thousands than we have seen since the F-106 in the 60's, and maybe the USAF A-7D in the 70's.
There is a lotta difference between "falling outta the sky" and "hitting the ground when you do not want to". The only in-flight loss of the F-35 was a Bee model that USMC flies and it had a fuel line failure. We had one takeoff motor failure here in Florida, no "crash", and USAF plus P&W motor folks figured out how to cure the problem.
And then,
Who the heck still wants to buy a $100m thing that's worse than most of $30-50m things available in abundance on the market!?
Price is now less than the $100 million unit cost, and remember that military unit price includes "x" years of repairs, modifications, upgrades and the amortized amount that the whole program costed from concept to contract to testing to tooling up to all the training and such. Hell, even Boeing sold the 737 Max, with its fatal flaw, arguing that no additional training costs or such woukld be required of the buyers. Explain that to the families over 300 folks such as yourself, the " Professional passenger ", from your profile. Oh yeah, your small SUV would cost a million dollars if the company only made 1,000 of them and tacked on a percentage of the design, development and such of your cost. SO it's more a basic economis lesson than a political assertion.
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I flew three planes within one year of when they were adopted by USAF ( although one was not declared "operational" for the military mission for another year). So my opinions of the F-35 safety record is not without a few thousand hours of experience.
And then.....
So to summarize, F-35 is not "stealth" for the foreign buyers with some saying it's worse than the 40-year-old F-16.
If I told you that the F-35 looks like a small bird on basic air traffic control radar or various air defense radar systems. I would not be bragging. It is not completely invisible, but so small that it can be too close for you to react.
The jet has a transponder for "peacetime" use when training and to allow civilian ground radar to "see" it. Otherwise, go to the military websites and see what the opposing pilot reports are when encountering the beast. Oh yeah, go to other sites and see how much of a "dog" the thing is at an airshow. See:
Gums sends...