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Bash the F-35 thred.


Belesarius

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It comes from a person who as his very first reply to me made a bigoted insult. As a second reply, he instead insulted me directly. As for forum, I had read few threads and I can see what kind of forum this is. It is mostly concerned about posting random pieces of information or pictures all day long. In very few threads where I had posted, I had liven up a debate. There are people here who obviously know more about military than posting memes all day and calling that a quality post. It was a pleasure to discuss with them in a past. 

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Perhaps to contribute some personal experience, and place the F-35 in context with other US platforms from your POGO link. (Who, I should add, are an organization with the dubious mandate of finding problems and complaining about them, they're an institutional chicken little.) 

The F-15C fleet is currently limited to ~7g's for the simple reason that the airframes are literally falling apart if the pilots pull higher g's. The F-18E fleet still has OBOGs issues, meaning the airplane will occasionally decide that today is not the pilot's day, and give them the warm comforting blanket of Oxygen Deprivation. (Leading to at least one fatal crash in the past few years, and doubtless contributing to others.)  F-22s are a massive pile of software jank flying in close formation, with neither the budget nor the expertise to overhaul their badly dated avionics. Vipers have their own host of technical issues related to being old fighters that haven't gotten as much love as they should. I can go on for any platform basically ad nausea. 

The point is to say that all military fighters have issues like this, some of them long lasting and incredibly severe. The reason you're hearing about the F-35's issues is that it is a very expensive program with a lot of detractors, and not because it has more teething issues than can be expected from a rapidly maturing gen 5. 

This gets back to the earlier statement wrt POGO - their institutional mandate (to be as charitable as possible) prevents them from placing these issues into context and producing an overall measurement of the effectiveness of a platform. If all you ever do is rattle off flaws and to-dos, any piece of military equipment is going to look like junk. If you actually want to speak meaningfully on the subject, you've got to weigh those inevitable downsides against the very real and very potent capabilities that F-35 brings to the fight.

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28 minutes ago, Calicifer said:

It comes from a person who as his very first reply to me made a bigoted insult. As a second reply, he instead insulted me directly. As for forum, I had read few threads and I can see what kind of forum this is. It is mostly concerned about posting random pieces of information or pictures all day long. In very few threads where I had posted, I had liven up a debate. There are people here who obviously know more about military than posting memes all day and calling that a quality post. It was a pleasure to discuss with them in a past. 

 

Known idiot wanders in from another forum, spews decade-debunked bullshit, and then whines about being treated poorly. News at 11.

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I'm not sure that problems which are found within legacy fighters are as severe or as many. Could you provide information which equally scolds F-16 or any other well established aircraft as they do F-35? 

 

Furthermore, I would not doubt reliability of said sources, because they do have extremely solid primary sources over which they critique said airplanes. It uses official sources released by the government and then you have to either go full conspiracy theorist route saying that either government is lying or just accept that an article is true over what it is saying. A good example is how publicly revealed price for F-35 is just a sham. When you investigate official Pentagon expenditure for said aircraft, it is quoted as a lot higher. When whom I should trust? Isn't it true that various public statements, countless press articles and uncritical reports from pilots might not be saying how things truly are? What they form public opinion to be a lot more positive of an aircraft than it deserves to be? I'm well familiar with realities of this world, being overly critical over something as important as this can cost you your career, so most people remain silent. Pentagon Wars is a good documentary and a comedy which proves that saving lives, doing your job and actually caring for quality of military equipment will cost your career.

 

In the end, said source does not comment on what we should do, at least I did not read it. It asks for a very simple thing, to fix the damn thing before starting production or developing new features. What we do now with F-35 is sinking resources into platform which has nearly a thousand officially registered defects and grand total of 9 critical defects within F-35 production model which can cause destruction of an aircraft or death of its pilot or at very least cause serious damage to its systems. This creates a massive technological debt which we would have later to fix or to suffer through as we do with F-22 bloated software. The only difference in my eyes that F-35 is widely known to have an extremely big technological debt which we allow to pile on. While aircraft like F-22 could be excused for its very high costs or bloated software as being unrivaled aircraft of its era. All of these aircrafts also had a lot less problems when they were introduced than F-35 five years ago.

 

 This is my view, I do believe that political interest groups are painting F-35 with unboundless optimism and are "lying" in some cases. Like with its newest cost which does not include a lot of critical support elements required to actually flyaway with it. I also however believe that F-35 is most modern aircraft on the market which is available for procurement. I'm negative over F-35, because I believe it is a lemon of an aircraft, but that does not mean that we should not procure it. It is simply too big of a project to fail now and there are no other real alternatives on market. 4'th Gen ++ aircraft are getting quickly outdated with development of newest fighter jets and introduction of newest anti air weaponary and it would be unwise now to start procurement of those aircraft as they will have to remain viable for at least few decades to come. When we start to look for investing into newest platform available, we sadly have no alternative available and have to go with F-35. This is why despite my harsh criticism and dislike for this airplane, I would still hypothetically proccure F-35 for my nation.  I just want to make sure you understand my stance on this plane correctly. It is not that I consider it worthless piece of junk, I would just go with literally any other fifth gen aircraft if I would have anything to choose from. 

 

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Known idiot wanders in from another forum, spews decade-debunked bullshit, and then whines about being treated poorly. News at 11.

 

If you say so.

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I like how OSC already explained it to you and you ignored him.

 

You're accusing your opponents of being "conspiracy theorists" while you struggle to maintain an argument about the "defectiveness" of an OPERATIONAL aircraft in active use with eleven countries. It boggles.

 

And you wonder why I'm being dismissive and insulting to you. You're a completely unserious person.

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I did no such thing. On the contrary, I had asked to know more about what he had said. I also had argued that no other aircraft had as many defects and problems as F-35. I'm awaiting now for his response on that. Furthermore, I had discussed about reliability of those sources and had said that if you question official budget reports and tell me that it is unreliable or false information, then you are going into conspiratorial territory. I did not stated nor suggested that he does that nor anybody here. I'm defending legitimacy of sources which I had quoted and I try to show why they must be accepted as legitimate. Cherry picking information is most typical form of delusion where person just accepts positive information about something and ignores everything negative. This makes person's view on something extremely bias. Person becomes incapable of looking at things critically. I do not imply nor accuse anyone of doing cherry picking here specifically right now. However, I do say that if you want to be honest about F-35 you have to accept all sources, good or bad. So far I get a vibe that people prefer to ignore any information which is negative. I will be glad to defend information which I had presented if someone would want to take a crack at it. POGO's source would be a good start and I will be glad if OSC could prove me wrong on this. This would be especially easy as POGO had provided very precise information on amount of defects existing even in current model of F-35 and we could compare the number of defects on any other serial production legacy fighter. 

 

Also, if you would bother reading my comments properly, you would know that I had explained and admitted that F-35 is the best aircraft on the market three times already and you still did not catched that. Could you please behave more professionally, because to me you are just tiring and annoying. 

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Unfortunately I won't be able to respond at length, since I need to head into work in just a few minutes. Broadly, most of the issues I outlined with the "Legacy" fleet are publicly available, including from POGO.

https://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/05/pilots-arent-guinea-pigs-ground-the-f-22-until-dangerous-oxygen-problem-resolved.html

and

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2018/03/pentagons-21st-century-icarus/

"Breathing problems aboard the Navy’s main fighter, the F-18, spiked from 57 in 2012 to 125 in 2016. The breathing gear on the Navy’s F-18s and T-45s “is inadequate to consistently provide high quality breathing air,” the Navy itself concluded last June. “The net result is contaminants can enter aircrew breathing air provided by OBOGS and potentially induce hypoxia.” The Navy flubbed its probe into a series of F-18 oxygen-related crashes that killed four pilots, a Navy-commissioned NASA report, ordered by Congress, concluded in September." And, yes, the 2nd article includes the fact that F-35As are also having platforms - but this is exactly my point; all platforms are dealing with problems like this. I'm sure you can find sources from your NGO of choice for the structural problems with the Eagle or any of the other problems I've listed.

Regarding the Viper stuff, the F-16 is a very mature and relatively simple platform, so I wouldn't say the issues are as severe as the F-35A's, which isn't surprising. They're mostly to do with the fact that the majority of the Blk 30 fleet is using mech-array radars as far as I'm aware, which is about as useful as a knife in a gunfight. 

I won't really dispute that there is a technological debt on F-35 - the fact that it was developed prior to massive advances in computing power and metallurgy means it's avionics and engine need some love, for example. I instead dispute that it's severe or unusual - the fighters as they stand are the best multirole in the sky, bar none, and the level of rework and continuing development they're receiving isn't so much a sign of malfeasance or incompetence as it is a normal and frankly healthy part of keeping fighters on the bleeding edge of performance.

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42 minutes ago, Calicifer said:

Also, if you would bother reading my comments properly, you would know that I had explained and admitted that F-35 is the best aircraft on the market three times already and you still did not catched that. Could you please behave more professionally, because to me you are just tiring and annoying. 

 

What do you expect? What value, even if only entertainment value, do you think you've added? All you've done is trot out "arguments" from nearly a decade ago, or more, and slapped some CYA language over them lest someone hold you to the implications of advocating for those positions. Are you even aware of the rebuttals to the Kopp/Sprey drivel? I suggest you take a week or two to catch up on the Chip Burke debates/testimonials and the wealth of information and context here before getting back to us with a comparative analysis informed by a modicum of understanding of the compromises inherent in fighter aircraft design and the trajectory of air combat. 

 

42 minutes ago, Calicifer said:

I also had argued that no other aircraft had as many defects and problems as F-35. I'm awaiting now for his response on that.

 

Try googling "F-16 GAO."

 

Try googling "F-15 GAO."

 

Try googling "F-18 GAO."

 

FYI, POGO was only established in 1981.

 

As OSC said, I think you'll be shocked to find that agencies tasked with finding problems to justify their existence end up finding them.

 

Oh, and don't forget to role in all the problems with legacy, podded sensors and systems that are integral to the F-35.

 

Have fun! 

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Thank you for your sources. I will read them and maybe write something tomorrow. I'm also busy now working, but I just can't focus and try to do anything than the work I'm supposed to do. :)

 

But just to be clear what I'm saying in order not to talk past each other:

1) I claim that F-35 is a lemon. To me it means that this platform is overly delayed, has mediocre performance which you would expect from fifth generation plane and possesses more than usual flaws which will need to be fixed in a future. This is to comparison of what you would expect compared  to other similar projects.

2) I claim that F-35 has more inherent problems than it should at this point. (This is the point which we are discussing)

3) I agree that F-35 is currently the best plane available on the market. However, to me F-35 is the best simply, because it is the only readily available fifth generation fighter which can be readily purchased. You can't proccure F-22 or Su-57 and those planes are a lot more specialized. F-35 is a lot more flexible aircraft which can do a lot of roles, but it does not excel at any of those roles. It also falls short in performance as fifth generation aircraft. In my eyes, such aircraft is perfect for export. I do not disagree with you on this point and I want to make my position clear to avoid any further misunderstandings. 

 

Quote

What do you expect? What value, even if only entertainment value, do you think you've added? All you've done is trot out "arguments" from nearly a decade ago, or more, and slapped some CYA language over them lest someone hold you to the implications of advocating for those positions. Are you even aware of the rebuttals to the Kopp/Sprey drivel? I suggest you take a week or two to catch up on the Chip Burke debates/testimonials and the wealth of information and context here before getting back to us with a comparative analysis informed by a modicum of understanding of the compromises inherent in fighter aircraft design and the trajectory of air combat. 

 

I highly doubt that those people have anything relevant to say in regards to my initial critique of said aircraft. You should had taken a look to what I had quoted as many of those things are relevant even today. Furthermore, I had revitalised this thread and an actual discussion might start out of it. That is a lot more valuable than posting memes or pictures of an aircraft. 

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I had investigated that claim and it seems to be a rumor which was started by that site. 

 

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4373897

 

As far as I could find they are referring to wing AESA system.

 

https://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2009-06.html

https://thaimilitaryandasianregion.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/sukhoi-su-35/

 

Though, picture does not state if a radar is AESA or PESA. 

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On 7/28/2020 at 2:09 AM, Calicifer said:

Though source is a little bit older and F-35 might became little less shit during two decades of development, but it still highlights why I dislike this aircraft. It is just so limited when compared to more specialized aircraft.

 

I was just thinking this felt like I took a time machine back to 2012-2014. Just for future reference, expect people to treat you like an idiot when the first thing you do is shit on the carpet with ancient debunked misinfo.

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35 minutes ago, Ramlaen said:

 

I was just thinking this felt like I took a time machine back to 2012-2014. Just for future reference, expect people to treat you like an idiot when the first thing you do is shit on the carpet with ancient debunked misinfo.

 

I'm yet to see how said information is debunked. Even official sources in 2020 say that aircraft is crap. I will look into deeper if there is a an equal comparison between troubles which previous aircrafts can they be compared in terms of scale and severity. So far from an overwhelmingly emotional response I received, I feel that this is solely emotional matter of touching piece of engineering to which people are emotionally attached. Otherwise, flaws within F-35 would not had been a surprise for people here and they would know that this aircraft constantly receives harsh criticism. 

 

I'm also reading information which other members had provided and so far it is inaccurate. I read about F-18A prototypes and developing woes it had. There are a lot of various problems there, but a lot of them being about aircraft not performing up to scratch. Some entries are particularly curious as minor modification fixes for example F-18A acceleration problem quite easily despite officials responsible for commenting on it were baffled and made up pathetic excuses like "it will barely ever need to do that anyways". I had found that to be hilarious.

 

It would be more difficult however to track down how many of those problems persisted after aircraft had entered serial production. Then another part is unrelated information about missiles not performing as they should. Then there are some downright questionable entries about missiles having to be guided by plane's radar and that is supposed to be design flaw within an aircraft. I knew that all prototypes have plenty of small little problems which need to be fixed before vehicle or aircraft enters serial production and quite often, not all of those flaws are fixed. The hardest part is comparing scale and severity of those flaws and how smooth development and introduction of previous generation of aircraft were compared to F-35.

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On 7/28/2020 at 2:09 AM, Calicifer said:

Hey guys, this is F-35 bash "thred". I think you had lost your way on your way to 31 page. So I will add some good old fashioned hatred back into this thread!

 


This guy’s reading comprehension and grasp of irony, sarcasm, and the nuances of the English language are almost as good as his knowledge of aerospace and weapons procurement.

Does he not know why this is called the “Bash the F-35 Thred” with “Thred” intentionally misspelled?

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2 hours ago, Calicifer said:

I knew that all prototypes have plenty of small little problems which need to be fixed before vehicle or aircraft enters serial production and quite often, not all of those flaws are fixed. The hardest part is comparing scale and severity of those flaws and how smooth development and introduction of previous generation of aircraft were compared to F-35.

 

So in your clearly learned opinion how would you rate the F-14? Yeah, you might say sticking TF30s in the A-model birds was a "small problem."  Only something like 375 or so TF30 A models made into the sky to try and kill their crews for staring at the throttle the wrong way. 

 

Every single Super Bug that will likely ever fly has gigantic, toed-out pylons because of unanticipated store separation issues. 

 

It's not even clear if your criticism is with issues due to specific engineering decisions that are liable to occur in any new aircraft program, let alone three as with the F35s, or with the general configuration of the aircraft. To the latter possibility, why is it even useful to compare the F-35 to the F-22, Su-57, or J-20? They all have very different design criteria, different missions, and fight in different organizations. I bet you're fun discussing WWII armor too. 

 

And like, dude, Kopp was trying get F-22s for Australia. Have you noticed that APA stopped trying to stir shit up after F-22 production ended in 2012? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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12 hours ago, Ramlaen said:

 

Feel free to show you are just pretending to be retarded and actually cite these 'official' sources.

 

I already did previously in this thread. 

 

Quote

So in your clearly learned opinion how would you rate the F-14? Yeah, you might say sticking TF30s in the A-model birds was a "small problem."  Only something like 375 or so TF30 A models made into the sky to try and kill their crews for staring at the throttle the wrong way. 

 

Every single Super Bug that will likely ever fly has gigantic, toed-out pylons because of unanticipated store separation issues. 

 

It's not even clear if your criticism is with issues due to specific engineering decisions that are liable to occur in any new aircraft program, let alone three as with the F35s, or with the general configuration of the aircraft. To the latter possibility, why is it even useful to compare the F-35 to the F-22, Su-57, or J-20? They all have very different design criteria, different missions, and fight in different organizations. I bet you're fun discussing WWII armor too. 

 

And like, dude, Kopp was trying get F-22s for Australia. Have you noticed that APA stopped trying to stir shit up after F-22 production ended in 2012? 

 

 

I can't comment on F-14. I knew it had a lot of issues in the past, but how they do compare with F-35, I'm not sure. I have critique in both aspects, from design of an aircraft to its engineering problems. Aircraft does not excel at any role and it is painfully mediocre for fifth generation aircraft in any niche. From technical standpoint, endless delays, cost overruns, critical errors and countless smaller issues with F-35. My point isn't that this does not happen with other aircraft, but that the scale of those things in F-35 is way out of proportion compared to previous projects. A good example, people do mention that there were some issues in the past and with other aircraft. For example, you had mentioned few of them yourself, but by comparison, F-35 currently has 9 such issues which can cause loss of an aircraft. It is well into aircraft's lifespan and serial production. Considering that it had 5 whole years to work out those issues after its official finish line, that is little bit unfair to compare problems which this aircraft has to prototypes of previous aircrafts which you had directed me to read.

 

Btw: I'm still reading sources which you had provided. You said to google a lot of things, but I obviously can read only one of all sources you had offered me. They are bloody big and for the most part, they have little correlation to what I'm saying. If there is any particular piece of information which you feel I should read, I will be glad to read it.

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3 hours ago, Calicifer said:

F-35 currently has 9 such issues which can cause loss of an aircraft.


No it doesn’t. No F-35 model has any CAT 1A deficiencies at present. Are you surprised to learn that POGO and the media either don’t bother to differentiate CAT 1A from 1B deficiencies (the program office’s metrics) or use the Air Force’s definition of CAT 1 that is a lot broader and includes less serious deficiencies than those that represent a serious risk to the aircraft? 

 

Are you purposefully trying to conduct an impossible analysis to justify your preconceived notion that the F-35 is crap? Can you go back in time and apply today’s level of oversight and risk averseness to legacy programs?
 

I’ve already given you more of my time than you appear to deserve. You don’t seem to have realistic expectations or a realistic frame of reference. So rather than submit a few hundred FOIA request hoping to get that nugget of releasable info that will surely, surely change your mind, I’m going to enjoy the rest of my day. 

 

 

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