PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - F-35 Cancelled, then what ?
View Single Post
Old 16th Sep 2015, 17:24
  #7605 (permalink)  
pr00ne
 
Join Date: May 2003
Location: London/Oxford/New York
Posts: 2,926
Received 139 Likes on 64 Posts
CM/Turbine D,

Some one certainly will!

Not only will I fault his logic, but his facts and recall too.

We'll start here...

"only 100 or so were built before the program was terminated."

You may have been around when McNamara's folly evolved, but you obviously didn't stay long. 653 were built, and they served until 2010.
F-111A, F-111D, F-111E, F-111F, F-111C, FB-111A, all superb low level all weather strike attack aircraft that were virtually unmatched globally in terms of reach and payload. Only Tornado came close.

P1154 has more synergy with the F-35 than the F-111, and that ran out of luck purely because they could not, and still have not, manage to get Plenum Chamber reheat in engine nozzles to actually work.

RAF and RAAF were also pretty intimately involved with the F-111 in it's evolution and development.

Compare any complex military aircraft development programme with F-35 and you will find an awful lot of similarities.

If you have to call any element of the F-111 programme a folly, then I suggest that the shipboard F-111B, and the fact that it had an F in it's nomenclature at all,are a better place to start.
pr00ne is offline