F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

[Courtney Mil]

Well, just on the g issue for a moment, to be honest ~5g sustained for a modern 'fighter' is very poor - I'm guessing that was what prompted Henra to think about the comparison to the F4. 20 years ago, I was teaching USAF F-15 students BFM where they would be expected to employ max available g - in that case 9g - and they would be expected to maintain that until forced to slow down at the combat floor (or base height if you prefer).

While you are generally quite right about the importance of g/rate/radius becoming more apparent once WVR, it does also have an effect at range when exchanging BVR shots. You want the bad guy's missile to see a big, rapid increase in sightline rate to force it to burn energy by making a BIG navigation turn (make his missile's constant of proportionality work for you)either to re-establish the collision or to avoid being somewhere it doesn't want to be. The best way to do that is a max performance turn using best sustained g once your first shot is in the air.

We don't have enough information available to do the calculations about turn perfomance and drag on the F-35. But just consider the subjective issues. The airframe is a drag machine to start with, given that big frontal area because if the internal weapons, the wing loading is high, it has a very powerful motor. So, in a turning fight, it starts with a lot of drag, overcome by a lot of thrust. Assuming they don't plan to try to fight at 50 degrees aoa (just because they can) I think its perfomance will not be too badly affected by the relatively small additional drag index of a couple of pylons with some extra AAMs strapped onto them.

Yeah, I know the max sustainable g was reduced a long time ago. I used it as an example because, it's one of the performance areas that often gets eroded during the develop, production and in-service phases of aircraft. I think LM were lucky to be allowed to let that one slip by. Remember that the key performance parameters don't usually go down to that level of detail, so sustainable g was never likely to be one. KPPs tend to be more like sortie generation rates, combat radius, weapons load, survivability, etc. Sustainable g would than become one of the factors that influences 'survivaility'. If you see what I mean.