Some more Red Flag (to a bull**** artist) goodness:
"...After about two weeks at Red Flag, the joint strike fighter brought down 15 aggressor aircraft for every one F-35A defeated. Its kill ratio has improved since then, but the data has not been finalized as of yet, he said. For a fighter jet in an air superiority role, a kill ratio that exceeds 10-to-1 is considered “very good,” [Brig. Gen. Scott] Pleus said. The F-35 also fared well in air-to-ground missions...."
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"...From a maintenance perspective, the F-35A achieved a mission capable rate of about 90 percent during Red Flag. The issues encountered by maintainers were mostly one-off problems, like a broken generator, and did not reveal any systemic flaws of the aircraft, said 1st Lt. Devin Ferguson, of the 388th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron...."
Red Flag may affect whether F-35s deploy overseas this year
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"...Although they don’t have an updated figure, the pilots told us that the F-35 kill ratio was higher than the 15-1 figure they initially reported. While F-35A pilots continue to say that their success against Integrated Air Defense Systems and ability to bomb targets is at least as important as their ability to kill enemy fighters, the fact is that the kill ratio is a simple baseline against which the plane can be judged."
http://breakingdefense.com/2017/02/f...-every-flight/
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"...With the inclusion of the Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL) and Link 16, the F-35 was able to share one threat picture across 70 aircraft, Lt Col Dave DeAngelis, commander of the 419th operations group says. Where threats were communicated via radio on legacy aircraft, MADL saves time by communicating with the F-35’s wingman, he says....
...The service does not yet have a tally of F-35s hit by integrated air defenses or surface to air missiles, but the action report with those details should release in about a month, the USAF adds.
“The F-35 mission was to get in undetected and hit targets, so we weren’t there specifically for air to air role,” Lt Col George Watkins, commander, 34th fighter squadron says. “Our ratio has gotten better but I don’t have the final numbers. We saw an improvement in our pilot’s proficiency throughout Red Flag and that number was just F-35 kills and depth.
Since its last Red Flag exercise at Nellis two weeks prior, the USAF turned up the heat on its F-35As with more advanced SAMs. The service also leveraged some blue forces to fly on the red side to increase threat numbers, Lt Col John Wagemann, director of operations for 414th combat training squadron says. At its peak, more than 20 red aircraft flew against blue forces, he says....
...the [USAF] service is making Red Flag more challenging for blue forces by improvising. Once red forces were killed during the Red Flag event at Hill, those same aircraft returned “alive” to the fight later, Wagemann says.”
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/ar...d-flag-434174/