PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - F-35 Cancelled, then what ?
View Single Post
Old 1st Jun 2013, 13:52
  #2656 (permalink)  
LowObservable
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Far West Wessex
Posts: 2,580
Received 4 Likes on 2 Posts
Spaz - It's sponsored by LockMart (indeed, IIRC, when it was published LM and Chemring were the Williams Foundation's only sponsors).

It's also quite old, including such howlers as:

Additionally, modelling and simulation have developed to the point where the F-35 program can complete a great deal of testing on the ground, where it is cheaper, safer, and easier to fix problems. F-35 flight testing will be conducted largely to validate models, rather than to ‘discover’ what the aircraft will do in flight, as used to be the case.

This claim was dubious in the extreme at the time, and people who had read the Clarke short story linked above knew better:

There was a bombastic tone in Norden's voice that made us suspicious of his claims. We did not know, then, that he never promised anything that he had not already almost perfected in the laboratory. In the laboratory - that was the operative phrase.

Since then that bogus claim has been exploded entirely, as a major cause of overruns and delays, and was one of the major issues identified by Frank Kendall as "acquisition malpractice".

Other things - the Tornado F3's imposition of what the internet kiddies call SURPRIZE SECKS over the F-15 was done with JTIDS, not L16, and while great fun for all involved depended on an overconfident adversary.

Also:

No manned fighter aircraft can compete with missiles that attack at over twice the speed of sound and manoeuvre at 60 ‘g’.

A missile can pull a lot of g as long as the motor's burning. A coasting missile can't, for very long.

One big miss here is the blurred distinction between BVR and WVR. So-called WVR missiles have a lot of range, while supersonic agility, EW and missile-warning make the BVR picture more dynamic.

As for the rest - I don't know what it brings to the argument that hasn't been discussed here.

Last edited by LowObservable; 1st Jun 2013 at 14:03.
LowObservable is offline