I'm including the price of the engine, which isn't included in the price we pay Lockheed for the F-35.  Assuming the engine works of course, and the planes systems work, and isn't down for constant maintenance, and the helmet works, and the gun works...oh wait there is no gun worth mentioning...etc

The avionics are expensive, and you will want fully upgraded for both.  Also, at this point you have to eliminate most R&D costs because they are sunk costs at this point.  Actually rolling out an F-35 once production gets going is not going to be significantly more expensive than rolling out a new F-16.



 

I hope the guy's right...

You're saying something that can do 4 Gs at 600 mph at 65000 ft is superior to another jet that can do 5 Gs at 400 mph at 30000 ft, correct?

And the. The first one can come straight out of that turn and recoup any speed lost almost immediately.

Thanks for the posts - this has been my favorite F-35 / eff turdy five thread so far!

In that case, the "4G" aircraft would have vastly superior sustained turn performance.  But, sustained turn performance might not be everything.  Instantaneous also plays a role.  But, blowing your energy in a turning fight also plays a role.  

To put a real number to things, the F-18A/C is no turning slouch in air-to-air, but it's a < 4.5g aircraft with regard to sustained turn rate at expected ACM altitudes / stores configurations.

The G limits you posted were program-instituted during testing, not actual airframe limits.  

If you look at the F-16, it has CAT I, II, and III stores limitations, to include preventing it from even going inverted with CAT III, reduced roll rates, AOA limitations, with G limits based on load.  It turns into a dog, with a lot of aerodynamic drag that causes higher fuel consumption, which then requires external tanks, which then increases drag even more.  The caveat to that is the conformal fuel tank option for the F-16, but they still slap wing station fuel tanks on it to give it more combat radius, and full CFT's reduces structural G's.  No matter what plane you're flying, if it has a lot of gas on board, you can't just yank and bank like a stripped F-16 at the air show, no matter how many movies and video games indicate otherwise.  This thing called physics gets in the way.

The problem with the F-16 is that it was designed to do what a P-51 did in the daytime against fighters within visual range.  As soon as it was FSD'd, they saw that it was a very accurate bomber with the CCIP mode and the pilot's visibility and HOTAS, unlike the other strike, CAS, and tactical bomber platforms in the USAF at the time with analog instruments.  Overnight, the F-16 was turned into a bomb truck, to the chagrin of its designers and the pilots that flew it.  They wanted to turn and burn like Chuck Yeager over Nazi Germany or against North Vietnamese Mig-17's, but aerial warfare had evolved, and birds like the F-14 and F-15 simply had way more combat radius, larger/more powerful radar, and were designed to fight the BVR fight.

So the F-16 got strapped with more and more gas, more Mk.82's, then Mk.84's, then GBU's, and now JDAMs in as long as a combat radius mission profile as external fuel would allow.  The US has just never used it as a lightweight daytime fighter, outside of Red Flag and Top Gun aggressor birds simulating Mig-29 performance envelope.

This is why an F-35 with more internal fuel than an F-22 makes sense for the USAF, with about the same common stores load as F-16's are currently carrying, but with next generation avionics-which were the real revolution introduced with the F-16 HOTAS/HUD/DFLCS and later DEEC.  The F-35 avionics suite is light years more advanced than even F-16C/D Block 50/52 and the F-16E/F.

The initial model numbers of the F-16A/B were meant to be replaced by 1999, so those have been run through an MLU program, one of the primary focuses being fixing hairline cracks in bulkheads, since the airframes have been subjected to loads outside of the design parameters.

The short story is that 4th Gen fighters are obsolete, unless they are integrated into a 5th Gen Fighter network.  On their own with old school methods, they are Raptor and JSF targets.  5th Gen Fighters can engage threats with other fighters' weapons, so that the electronic signature environment is so confusing to the threat, if he even gets legitimate RWR indicators.  The days of being vectored to an intercept by GCR are over, and F-15C tactics already made those days pretty much worthless.  You go toe-to-toe with guys flying US-made fighters who have trained over and over for years, to include training against dissimilar aircraft, real-world combat deployments, and a lop-sided kill ratio of 85-0 for the F-15A in just one campaign, then look at F-22 and JSF, and your salad is getting tossed.

Now introduce stealth plus supercruise plus the newest AMRAAM, and you have serious problems as an enemy interceptor.  Firing solutions happen much faster, without you knowing about it, because you don't even have targets.  It's better to stay on the ground and preserve the investment your country paid for your training and bird + missiles, in a hardened shelter that can take JDAM hits, so the next US-friendly regime can use this asset for your nation's interests in the future.  The US MIC is going to target you either way, and erase your current capabilities so they can sell you US-made gear in the end.

All of those 4th Gen fighters will bleed energy in a turn faster than an F-35, because the F-35 is slick.  And we're talking about WVR again.  You don't want to get WVR of HMS + ASRAAM or AMRAAM even.  If an F-35 is getting WVR of Su-30, that means all the Raptors are dead, all the F-15C's are dead, or all the F/A-18E/F are dead.

Not even in Vietnam early years where pilots weren't trained on dissimilar A/C did it ever come to that, and they were flying a lot of F-105's and F-100's then, most of which were lost to SAM's because they didn't have RWR or training.

Eurofighter and Su-30 isn't getting WVR of a pack of Raptors and JSF.  Su-30 pilots lose sleep at night dreaming about encountering the F-22.  For the few professional fighter pilot squadrons out there, they have yet to come up with a tactical solution for dealing with F-22, and many years have been spent table-topping and modeling this, with no real answers other than, "Iz need Stealthski now!"

We've been working on the ATF since 1980, and it has been operational since 2005.  Pilots that fly against it describe it as flying along one moment, dead the next without any indicator they were even being looked at.  That's bad if you're in a Su-27/30.  If you want to talk about the Hollywood WVR fight, which is barely WVR in reality since the 1970's, the F-22 still has no peer.  The parameters of WVR are such that an F-35 isn't going to be that different, and again, it is clean.  All the 4th Gen fighters fly very dirty, with a lot of stores, limiting maneuverability and retained energy in the turn.

Maybe so, but he's not ARFCOM 1 MOA ALL DAY.  So there's that.

I watched it in its entirely, and filled in a lot of blanks he isn't going to go into detail on in an open presentation.

What I realized is that even if the F-35 is a dog like all 4th Gen fighters when laden, it is part of a 5th Gen network that is unmatched.

The most striking thing he said is that even he, who has been a fighter pilot longer than new F-35 drivers have been alive, got smoked for 6 months by them with him flying the F-22.

The training they are getting, going straight to 5th Gen approaches, makes a uniquely experienced 20yr+ 4th Gen fighter pilot into Raptor fodder, even when he's flying a Raptor.  This guy has freaking 2000hrs in Hornets, a year of exchange with USAF in F-16C's, was a Top Gun Instructor for who knows how many years flying aggressor F-16N's and F/A-18's, and was the first USMC pilot to transition to F-22A in preparation for USMC JSF-B IOC.

When he said that even with the F-22 being the fastest, most maneuverable fighter in existence, that those characteristics are the least significant to its lethality, that sends home the experience of being flying one moment, dead the next, without knowing why or even seeing it coming.  He said F-35 takes those aspects even further than the F-22, and is even more of a game-changer, to the extent that it eliminates the lines between strategic and tactical.

What enemy pilots want to get airborne, knowing there is this capability already targeting them before they leave the ground?  F-15A pilots of the Israeli Air Force were already doing this against Syria in the 1980's, using old school technology.  Imagine modern imaging technology across several platforms that aren't being discussed, data-linked with a 5th Generation net-centric armada.

Your salad is going to get tossed before you leave or as you leave the hangar.  Interceptors are going to get hosed like beating blind baby seals in a barrel with a pick axe in the hands of a major league player amped up on steroids and go pills, while his buddies vaporize your IADS from beyond parameters range with an array of other platforms nobody is talking about.  It's the next level of shock and awe.

That was kind of my point. Thanks for the expert perspective.

So basically 4th Gen integrated with 5th Gen support vs. 4th gen, is like having a few invisible 350 pound gorillas with you in a bar fight.  

Very interesting.

Yeah, I meant to put the F-18 sustained g example in that post, but got distracted.  While the F-18 is surpassed by many fighters in terms of sustained turn rates, the F-18 holds it's own in ACM because of its excellent command of AOA - and the F-35 should be able to match or exceed that AOA in a very departure-resistant manner.

And these sustained turn rates are often plotted out for very Hollywood configurations - no external tanks, no unused pylons, 2 to 4 A2A missiles on the lowest drag stations, etc.  The F-18, however, is a little more conservative than most, quoting sustained turns with a centerline tank (empty), maybe two wing tanks (empty) - I guess the reasoning is that jettisoning tanks is just bad form when trying to sustain combat ops from a ship.  But even if these tanks are jettisoned, the turn rate doesn't improve as much as one might expect because the drag of a bare pylon is significant.  If you have to jettison the tank, however, go for it - that's one area where 4th gen is nice

I've been told by more than one Rhino driver that the nose authority in that aircraft is better than just about anything else out there -- and I believe it's limited to 7g, and it can't even get there unless it's basically empty and carrying little to nothing.  People put a whole lot more stock in those hollywood numbers than they actually mean.

But it's doubtful it'll ever make it there.

wouldn't be the first time.

It's been flying for years.  It's been doing sea trials onboard the Wasp most recently, but the A and C models have been flying all over Nevada for a couple of years now.

i floated this possibility several years ago, and got smacked down by pretty much all of GD.

If we're talking about sustained turn and instantaneous turn rates, I think we're missing the point.  That has been my problem looking at the F-35 with a lot of the hit pieces that are dominant in the media.

I think it's important to consider where a lot of the hit pieces are coming from:

* Boeing and the foreign military sales they are looking at losing with F/A-18 sales

* Guys whose mindset is stuck in the 1970's-1990's, drove F-16's

There is a lot of money to be lost by other contractors if the F-35 is successful, so a lot of the technical critiques have been leveled from that angle, which the leftist media picks up on, then butchers in their ignorance about all matters technical.

Here's an example of the CAS mission profile, and how the F-35 changes things, with them not even showing most of the capabilities:

F-35B HMD in CAS

So your hypothesis was proven?  

 

every time i see something about the HMS, it makes me wonder how far we are from actual sensor fusion with the data being interfaced directly with the optic nerve.  something like this...

it's safe to say that R0N has a bit more authority on these matters, so i'm just self-congratulating a little.

It's something to talk about, I guess.  And, I think it's worthwhile to try to put things into context, where possible.

Mission system stuff is just harder to describe.  How to describe it?  Your average McMansion has insufficient electrical and HVAC to power and cool 5th gen mission systems.  Maybe that helps to put things into some perspective.  Maybe not.

That fact that all of GD hated the idea was proof enough.  

 

The Mk1 eyeball is only a force multiplyer when the head its in can out run, shoot, and maneuver its adversareies.  Otherwise its just an organic piece of material that tells you your fucked when you cant see behind yourself and something is targeting you.

"you are old, and you will lose"

They can still out perform most of their current adversareis currently.  And as others have already pointed out in this thread, it cant turn and fight just fine.  Network centric warfare is here to stay, but to say it should be the focal point of all future planning is ignoring the fact that our enemies know we rely on our networks.  If that wasnt true, we wouldnt be worried about This

China knows they cant currently compete with in terms of technology.  However they do realize that we are dependent on it.  Look at much of the theorized discussions regarding how they view a conflict with us over Taiwan.  Newsflash, it starts with shooting our satelights and jamming our radios.  They know what we rely on and are working to counter it until they can develop the technology of their own.

Communism set them back almost a century.  While the Western nations advanced, they stagnated for 50 years.  They are just now catching up.  Now that they can capitalize on the largest consumer economy and an industry that is very cozy with the state, they are going to make significant gains rapidly.  They have been since the 90s and are going to until we can figure out how to counter them both militarily and economically.  

We arent betting on the Predator to usher us into the next generation of our air superiority.  UAVs are currently a useful and unique tool, perfect for counter insurgency.  But they arent what we will be fighting our next peer to peer fight with.  The F35 is, and its progress is concerning to say the least.

Right up until you need to look behind yourself.

ETA- I wish I was old.  It would explain why things on me are falling apart so fast

So... we won?

Give me 13,500lbs of gas for a heat sink, with a F-135 PW turbofan, and I'll power the neighborhood, and cool down two McMansions, and that's the STOVL model.

There definitely is unprecedented power and thermal management going on inside these things, which is one of the most overlooked aspects of the F-22 and F-35.  A lot of lessons have been learned with the F-22 that transferred over to F-35, and F-22 is way ahead of the 4th Gen power curve.

One of the best thread/discussions in a while.  Thanks guys.

I had a chance to chat briefly with one of the avionics control engineers for the F-35 at ACC last year.  They're supposedly using dynamic inversion as part of the control law design, which is a bit of a radical departure from traditional LTI (PID loops or LQR/LQG) or adaptive methods.  It has the potential to greatly improve the responsiveness of the aircraft.

I would be interested to see how this is being done, as dynamic inversion tends to demonstrate nice properties in theory, but proves extremely fragile in practice.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about existing and emerging technologies, TTP's, and capabilities that you might consider looking into more.

For starters, net-centric links aren't reliant on RF signal.  They are multi-spectral, with many of the mediums not susceptible to interference from countermeasures.  

The US has anti-satellite capabilities that are deployable even from the F-15 dating back to the 1980's, let alone others that aren't talked about.  The last thing any nation wants to do is to start an anti-satellite war with the US.  Not going to work out as planned.

Everyone is dependent on technology to some degree, and the big 3 (Russia, China, and Iran) are struggling to try to keep up with the US in this regard.  Notice that the main effort of their aspirations relies on stealing US technology once it's already RDT&E'd?  That's not a good position to be in, as it places you about 15 years behind at best after the US has already gone into production.

Russia will never recover from the Soviet times and the Yeltsin years, and China is not the techno super giant people think it is.  Their air force is a diabolical morass of 1950's-era garbage, with Russian copies of 1970's US designs, combined with open-sourced electronics and US tech shared with them during the Clinton years.  They're still working through composites and trying to mature that aspect of their industry, which we have been doing since no later than the early 1970's.

This all coincided with a massive leap in US military aviation with ATF and JSF, where we have set the stage for overmatch on top of an existing overmatch that significantly broke away in the 1970's with the teen fighters, and 1980's with F-117 and ATB/B-2 as the ATF was being developed in darkness.

The Chinese stealth mock-ups/prototypes are still at a stage were a successful intelligence operation can tank the program if we really wanted to.  F-22 has been flying for a decade operationally, after prototypes first flew in 1990.  Thousands upon thousands of instrumented test flights have been logged, to include airframe, propulsion, avionics, and weapons testing since that time.  It's been ruining any air threat in Red Flag for a decade now as well.

That's 25 years of catch-up that everyone else has to do in order to reach a fraction of us yesterday in 2015.  Russia and China are in the prototype stages still, back where the US was in 1990-1991, only without the vast geographic, industrial, and scientific advantages the US has.  Russia lost most of her aerospace engineers and scientists in the 1990's, because they were some of few smart enough people to exit that disaster of a nation when the going was good, and haven't looked back.  You don't just crap out engineers and scientists like a goose lays eggs.

China is still trying to figure out how to reverse-engineer Russian Su-27's and 30's, to include sifting through all the bugs still in them left over from Russia's broken aerospace industry (like engines and auto-ejection seats for sad examples), and they still can't make a 4th Gen engine that compares with what the US was doing at Pratt & Whitney or GE in the 1980's and 1990's.  Not even Sweden or Dornier of Germany can match what 1990's PW and GE were doing, and the Germans and Swiss have top-notch aerospace scientists and engineers.

The F-119 and F-135 PW engines are a full generation ahead of US 1990's AB turbofans, with insane amounts of dry thrust, efficiency, operational thrust-vectoring, and integrated DFLCS with DEEC.  By the way, we already started work on dark programs before ATF went IOC that augment the ATF/JSF/ATB force, and they are additional layers of overmatch that make places like Russia, Iran, and China fidget and fret over what to do about them.  Who do they look to?  Russia? a failing state with an aerospace industry that had the bottom pulled out from it, whose MIG and Sukhoi products before the Soviet collapse have been Tomcat, Eagle, and Falcon fodder for decades in every conflict where teen fighters faced them.

25 years, and we're still innovating things more advanced than ATF and JSF, while Russia and China play catch-up like stumbling clowns out of a circus car.  Russia IADS are horrendous failures, and they still haven't matured the Su-27/30 MLU program with any kind of testing that would compare with what we do at the various flight and weapons test centers in the US.  All they have is posturing and claimed super capabilities with their radars and SAMs, when at the end of the day, the electronics and critical components are made in Russia.  Have you ever see Russian products before?  Now imagine Chinese copying Russian electronics and weapons....

Talk about technological leap over your opponents. This has it.

The political implications of ATB/ATF/JSF/****/*******/****** combined are monumental.  When the next President finds out what we are capable of, the temptation to make an example out of someone will probably be too alluring.

read Russian guy, listened to Marine aviator. I don't know if the F35 will be the best ever, or dog shit. I do know two things:

1) In general, large American aircraft projects are routinely slashed in size. I don't believe the 2,500 planes number any further than I can throw it. Congress right now might be 100% on board. 5 years from now? 10 years from now? Historically, the numbers ALWAYS get slashed. They were gonna buy 132 B2s...we got 21. So let's just go ahead and pretend that number is at LEAST double what reality is...and that the cost per aircraft is going to go through the roof as a result.

2) I'm down with the integration of information as a way to leverage assets. Business has been doing it forever, it makes sense for the mil to do it also. Here's the problem: if you're slapping around terrorists in the desert, it's all good. When you're dealing with Russia or China in the future, it might not work as well as you'd like...and becoming ULTRA dependent on the sharing of information in order to be combat effective could be problematic. Both of those countries have large militarized hacking organizations with (obviously) state sponsorship / protection that gives the professional hacker a lot of power. Russia/China knows that we are moving towards being more/more reliant on information/sharing in the military space. They've been watching during the last 10 years. They know how we control drones, both from observation and by stealing our secrets the old fashioned way. How useful does 5th gen tech become when the umbilical to 'the net" (mil version comm, whatever) is severed / interfered with / taken over by a hostile force? IMO, the 5th gen will be the last generation of manned combat aircraft on Earth. It will be the best...and it will also be surpassed by cheaper, mass-produced, highly efficient drones....probably well before it's now-predicted demise. Who can make the most drones and protect their mil-net the best will be the dominant force on the planet. 2,500 planes? No chance against a network-controlled drone fleet of 250,000 vehicles. The new tech doesn't need to be better, it just needs to be more efficient and to able to work together. That's what concerns me about a country like China. Their tech isn't the absolute top of the line, but they have massive manufacturing capability that is MUCH more agile and robust than ours is. IMO it won't be very long at all before they are able to field a massive drone fleet. They know the biggest conventional threat to their domination is American air power. Best defense? Drone power. Lots and lots and lots and lots of them. It's the perfect solution to fit their needs and economy. China doesn't need thousands of F-35 clones...they need hundreds of thousands of less expensive (collectively) drones and a control system. With their skies safe they are in a MUCH better strategic position.

other than the b-2 and f-22, to which projects are you referring specifically?  the reason i ask is that it's easy to have a short memory.  both of those projects were initiated during the cold war, and the buys were likely affected by the collapse of the USSR.  that's a very unique set of circumstances, so it's dangerous to generalize based on those precedents alone.  what about earlier programs, like the b-1, teen series, or earlier?

If only our boomer fleet could decimate China without using networked missiles. . Oh, wait.

There have been over 4500 F-16's produced, over 3500 of them at Fort Worth Texas.  

There have been over 1500 F-15's produced.

1480 F/A-18A-D models
500 and counting F/A-18E/F
712 F-14's

Here are some things people without a lot of insight into the tactical fighter industry overlook when comparing the F-35 to legacy teen fighters:

The majority of the aircraft above perform strike missions.  With the advent of SAM's, Laser Guided Bombs (LGB's prefixed as GBU's), Own The Night configurations, JDAMs, and the new wave of precision guided munitions, ancillary systems costs for the F-15E, F-16C/D and E/F, and F/A-18 series are substantial, and I mean tens of millions of equipment in addition to the base airframe.

Things like LANTIRN, SNIPER, HMS/HMD, ECM, and weapon interface upgrades cost millions per bird.  What they did with the F-35 is say, "Let's integrate these capabilities and more into the thing from the start, with open architecture, and reduce ancillary costs from the get go."  There is no need to attach a targeting pod and its complimentary avionics upgrades to the F-35, because that capability is integrated into the aircraft, and in more comprehensive ways than any other aircraft in existence.

When you add up all the 4th Gen ancillary systems to the airframes and engines, you exceed the unit cost of the F-35 with engines, yet the F-35 has more capabilities in overmatch to any of the 4th Gen.  No US service is going to send F-16's and F/A-18's into a strike package without precision guidance support, so the ancillary targeting systems have to be accounted for, as do the ECM and avionics upgrades for pilot SA, like Helmet-Mounted Sights and Displays, along with the integration software, testing and evaluation, which is ongoing with these aircraft, even in operational use.

The F-35 starts with all these systems and more as a baseline to grow from, all of which exceed legacy systems capabilities.

Conventional Target/Nav pods can cost as $4M and add significant drag to an airframe, on par with adding something like 4 1000 pound class bombs - the good news is the pods don't weigh as much!

There is a measurable performance benefit to internalizing these EOTS systems into 4th gen airframes - but it does add cost - something that needs to be normalized when comparing across platforms.

Some goes for ECM.

These systems can add 10-20% to the cost of a conventional airframe.


Ok, so why not just buy a larger number of less capable platforms and win with superior numbers?  More planes means more pilots, more ground crew, larger footprint, larger deployments, fuel, logistics, people,et cetera - so much so that the long term cost savings of reducing the number of aircraft outweigh the higher short term costs of buying fewer aircraft and incurring the fixed-price contract penalty (halve the number, double the price - roughly).

Those were also very revolutionary technologies, and they got bit in the ass by idiot .gov accounting.  Because the R&D costs were so high, a lot of political grief on the cost per plane.  But spending all that R&D and then only doing a limited run is the worst of all worlds.  F-35 is more evolutionary in a lot of respects, and so shouldn't have the same degree of sticker shock.