The F-35A has the highest Mission Capability rates of any fighter in the entire USAF service, jumping ahead of them all in 2020. The JSF Program is the most successful multi-variant program in US combat aviation history.
Ellen Lord, out going Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustaiment as reported to Congress 19 Jan this year. Reported by defence news dot com. She stated that they were currently at 36% commission capable. Target was 80%. ...for years. It has been reported by multiple sources for years that the F35, A,B and C all have serious maintenance problems causing very poor combat mission capability.Retired Naval Aviator. The statement was made to Congress by the very person responsible to know that information.
@@raywhitehead730 F-35A currently has a higher MC rate than any other USAF fighter. There’s no such thing as “commission capable”. Here are the latest fleet MC rate reports comparing 2019 to 2020: www.airforcemag.com/usaf-fighter-mission-capable-rates-fiscal-2020/
The AF loves to report MC rates because it gives you the highest possible and easiest to obtain number, makes you look better. But it is Not a fully Operational reflecting number, and it does nothing to tell you what mission they are reporting on. Is the mission, AA? Is it AG? Or is it another mission or function or job the airplane is Supposed to do. It's an old ploy:, look here not there. As a part of my job in the Navy i used to report out Squadron MC rates to the Wing. Don't be fooled,, wise up. Fly Navy.
@@raywhitehead730 I know the difference between FMC and MC rates. An MC F-35A is drastically more capable than an FMC [insert any other fighter]. You can have 1 out of 4 F-35s with failed sensors (you would have to have the AESA, 12+ RF antennae, 7 IR sensors all fail), and they still have the same picture as everyone else in the flight. That’s part of the genius behind JSF systems high transfer-rate/bandwidth MADL data link and sensor layering across bandwidths. F-35s aren’t limited to AA vs AG. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. They add EW, AEW&C, ISR, Anti-Ship, ASW for the F-35C, TBM detection and tracking, and networked nodal connectivity for the overall net-centric force web. I can slice off multiple mission sets from an F-35 and still have a far more capable platform than a full-up F-14D, Super Hornet, A-6E, Harrier, or F-16C Block 50 even with all the bells and whistles.
"Not looking good" *laughs in highest mission capable and readiness rates in the USAF fighter fleet in 2020* seriously, you all seem to forget how bad the teething problems were for 4th generation fighters in the 70s and 80s. F-16s were plagued with a high accident rate, the F100 engine that powered both the F-15 and F-16 had issues that wouldn't be rectified until a decade after the F-15 entered service, including uncontained turbine blade failures that ruptured fuel cells and resulted in hull losses and fatalities in some cases. The F-35 is a cakewalk compared to its predecessors and only gets the amount of bad press it does because the internet exists.
Today on Dutch news channels, the f 35 has damage in the fuel tanks that makes the plane vulnerable to lightning. The plane might explode when struck. Our Dutch pilots must fly around thunder clouds. There's also computer problems witch make me thinking, does the plane run on Windows 10 ?
What if I told you that every NOTAM tells all pilots of all airframes to avoid thunderstorms like the plague? Have you ever flown through a thunderstorm? I have. It’s really fun if you don’t think about the dangers. You basically have barely any control and get whipped around, up, down, and about based on very violent and massive air currents eddying unpredictably.
Funny you mention that, because it has the highest Mission Capable and readiness rates of any fighter in the entire USAF inventory, even better than the F-16C and A-10C as of 2020. www.airforcemag.com/usaf-fighter-mission-capable-rates-fiscal-2020/
And this does not include the fact that the aircraft was designed 3 decades ago when the future battlefield need was not well understood. So much has happened since then. Also stealth is not a magic bullet. When stealth was first used it was a significant advantage but that is almost four decades ago, so the potential enemies have worked hard to limit the effectiveness of stealth. In addition, you basically give yourself away if you turn on the radar, so you can either fly basically blind and hope the enemy does not know were you are, or turn on radar and thus defeat the benefit of stealth. You also defeat stealth if you have any external pods. You are limited to what can be carried inboard, and this inboard limitation has made the aircraft bigger and heavier. Basically stealth can be useful, but it should not be an overwhelming criteria lit is is for US planes. Radar has been very limited threat to US planes in any of its conflicts because whenever the enemy turns on a radar, it will be targeted by HARM missiles. And the planes do have countermeasures. The plane has been around for 3 decades, how can it still have problems. Stupid argument. And it is failed because the plane was designed for a mission that does not make sense. It sucks as a dogfighter. It was basically designed to fire weapons from a distance, and what is the point with cruise missiles. If you are going to use it for bomber missions you will not want to limit it to internal mansions, so you have all the cost of maintaining that delicate expensive stealth coating, and also have to deal with how much harder it is to maintain because access hatches reduce stealth. And if it does get some damage, it is very expensive and difficult to maintain the stealth. Better off with the older planes. Another issue is that the basic design of the plane basically sucks from an engineering point of view. There is a central bulkhead that is very complex, and very difficult to produce. If production ever had to be accelerated, this is a bad design. It will be limited by the production of this bulkhead.
Don't ever research how many TCTOs and mandated maintenance orders there are right now on the F-16C/D, F-15C/D, F-15E, B-1B, A-10C, C-17A, F/A-18E/F, etc. Those of us who have watched the evolution of military aircraft since the 1970s have seen much, much worse than this before. It would be more accurate to say we've never seen anything this good. The JSF program 3 variants are astonishingly-free of the kinds of major problems we've seen in the teen fighters and AV-8B. The huge difference was how many total losses, Calss A mishaps, and fatalities we had in the 4th Gen. Between the F-14, AV-8, A-10, F-15, F-16, & F/A-18, we had at least 473 total airframe losses and 125 fatalities....WITHIN THEIR FIRST 10 YEARS OF SERVICE. Let those numbers sink in a bit before you're misinformed by any of the DOT&E reports talking about 800 bean counter deficiencies. They've flown over 360,000 flight hours across all 3 JSF variants now, with 620 airframes delivered. At this time in the combined careers of the aircraft being superceded by 3 different JSF variants, tens of billions of dollars had been destroyed, with hundreds of families losing their loved ones. In the entire flight history of all 3 JSF variants, we have 1 fatality, a senior Japanese F-35A pilot who became spatially disoriented and flew into the water. We have 4 crashes out of 620 aircraft in 14 years of production. Keep this in mind as the new wave of anti-JSF articles get broadcast all over the internet, now that Russia and China have a puppet in the WH.
No, you don't give yourself away with an LPI AESA radar. That's incorrect. No, the AESA doesn't even need to be your primary detection system. Depending on the threat matrix, JSF pilots can manage their signature however they need to, but there are a lot of passive RF and IR sensors embedded all over the JSF airframes. The pilot doesn't need to manage individual sensors. He or she simply selects what type of signature emissions are appropriate for the area/mission set, and collects data with passive sensors constantly anyway. Passive RF sensors see hits at almost twice the distance of the AESA, and immediately share this data with other JSF in the web. Why generate hot RF when you've already gained TGT detection and tracking with fused and interleaved passive sensors? Within a multi-ship, you have a ton of options to manipulate LPI AESAs to get tracks without compromising the flight. Dogfighting: "Anytime you hear someone talk about dogfighting, you know the conversation is in the wrong place." - LTC Chip Berke, TOPGUN Instructor, F/A-18, F-16, F-22 exchange, and F-35B pilot. Dogfighting pretty much ended once most air forces adopted helmet-cued HOBS missiles. Nobody wants to fly into a WVR merge because you'll already have incoming IR missiles at high aspect before you get anywhere near each other's 3-9 line. That said, combat-configured F-35As regularly dominate F-16s in relatively clean configurations (no ECM, FLIR, HTR pods, bombs, missiles) in BFM. If you try to acquire the F-35 in visual range with helmet-HOBS, neither of them will work because of IR stealth technologies, which are substantial on the JSF series. Meanwhile, the F-35s have the best helmet ever put in a fighter, fused with all the RF and IR sensors and weapons. Even if they chose to enter a WVR fight with you for some reason, you are at layers of extremely unfair disadvantages. Production: Every fighter design from the 1970s to present has unique bulkhead manufacturing requirements. F-35 is the highest rate production fighter currently with over 11 per month rolling off the assembly lines. 620+ have been delivered. Most of the production of major subassemblies is automated.
@@LRRPFco52 It is Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) Radars, not No Probability, and you know for sure the Chinese and Russians already have increased sensitivity to detect these low emission radars. Obviously you do not know what radar is. If there is no emission it is not radar, it is a passive system. And of course you are going to be using the same sort of passive systems the Russians and Chinese are already using to detect the American stealth aircraft. LMAO. Those passive systems are used by Russians and Chinese in part so Americans do not detect that the enemy has found them. So effectively of stealth if the Russians and Chinese are not using radar is of limited value. Remember Radar avoiding and if radar is not being used. LMAO. The Russians and Chinese have had 40 years to counter stealth. They are not idiots like you must think.
@@cliffordnelson8454 Every single one of your assertions was factually incorrect, but now you’re making more declarative statements about things you clearly have no specific knowledge about. Instead of continuing to make incorrect, wildy-erroneous statements, maybe spend the next 3-5 years studying with oversight from qualified people to assess your ability to understand any of these topics before commenting on them again. It’s very clear you don’t have much of a clue what’s going on. The fact you mentioned carrying pods and dogfighting are big giveaways. There are no external pods carried by the F-35. The only stealth aircraft I’ve seen plans for carrying a FLIR pod on is the Su-57. The F-35 has that integrated into the nose with EOTS. There is zero reason to carry an external pod on a true 5th Gen system. You also said the engineering on the F-35 basically sucks because of some bulkhead. The JSF program has had the best engineers in the world working on it from the US and UK. From an engineering standpoint, it is revolutionary in multiple disciplines and integrated systems sciences. Only someone with zero engineering experience would look at the final product and see failure.
@@LRRPFco52 Guess what you put your foot in it again. What degree do you have...maybe a high school. Well guess what I have a Masters in engineering and have worked one quite a few military programs including ones for combat aircraft so I know what I am talking about. And factually incorrect. LMAO. So you bring up an interesting point. Why are there external stores. Obviously you lack knowledge to understand this. First of all having internal stores, and since you obviously know nothing about systems engineering, make the plane larger. And anything inside does not have external access, so if something is not designed into the aircraft, you carry it outside. So when there is an improvement in avionics, you have to rebuild the aircraft for the new sensors find space in the aircraft. Basically you are guaranteeing that is will have to remanufacture the aircraft for new sensor technology. If you just use a pod, just ship the pod to the airbase and mount it. And if you want your weapon system to lock on before you launch you either have to have a way to extend it, and that will even be worse than external stores, or mount it externally. In fact since you have so little knowlege, having external stores was a big advance in WW2. Basically depending exclusively on internal stores is what they did in WW2, but external stores gave a lot more flexibility. So take you BS and stuff. You know so little. I will not bother with all the other problems with the F-35, you can look those up. You obviously have absolutely not understanding of engineering since you do not even know the basic stuff.
The easiest way for a non-aviation person or amateur AvGeek to sift through all the information and get a baseline reality-check about the JSF multi-variant program is to look at mishaps and compare them with the fighters from the previous generation. That will show you how much you’re being lied to and misinformed by almost the entirety of the media online. Between the teen fighters, Harrier, and A-10 in only their first 10 years of operational service, we lost 519 airframes mostly to crashes and fires, with 182 fatalities. The Hornet had 100 total airframe losses and 20 fatalities in its first 10 years of service. Same with the Harrier. The F-16A had a mishap rate of 671 Class A mishaps per 100,000 flight hours, scores of crashes and many fatalities. The F-15 was really the only teen fighter that was ready for production and we still lost 59 of them in the first 10 years, with 26 fatalities. What about the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C in their first 10 years? 6 total losses, 4 of which were crashes, 1 fatality in Japanese Defense Forces with a senior pilot who executed controlled flight into terrain (the water) after doing BFM with several other F-35As in JSDF. First crash was an F-35B with a faulty fuel tube that starved the engine, pilot ejected safely. Second was the Japanese F-35A. Third was a former F-15E pilot who left the speed hold on and tried to land at 202 knots, bounced it off the runway, crushed the gear, which told the FLCS it still had weight on wheels, causing Pilot Induced Oscillations where he couldn’t control it anymore, so he ejected. Fourth was a USMC F-35B that impacted a KC-130 tanker during aerial refueling, causing damage to both aircraft to the extent that the F-35B pilot ejected, and KC-130 conducted an emergency landing. I could pick any one of the aircraft the JSF series are replacing/superceding, and spend the next several hours writing a lengthy set of details about 80-100 different crashes and fatalities, but I won’t. The numbers are so stark in contrast. There are now 645+ F-35s delivered and in operation, training, or testing units all over the world with close to 400,000 flight hours, so the sample sizes are comparable to the early teen series production.
You're comparing crashes and losses. How would the other aircrafts that you mentioned compare to the F35 in terms of issues like what this video brings up? (Note: I do not know much about this subject, I'm just asking out of curiosity)
@@mikehawk4517 The F-14 had everything ranging from substantial to horrendous issues with acquisition, propulsion, hydraulics, avionics, weapons integration, landing gear, structures and aerodynamics, flight controls, stability augmentation, adverse yaw from its differential horizontal stabs, spin departure tendency at altitude, engine stalls, engine fires, engines quit working altogether which was one of the main contributing factors to several of the crashes while attempting to recover on the carrier with one engine, AWG-9 failed regularly, spoiler lock-out brackets failed, was a hangar queen that required round-the-clock dedicated maintenance crews who learned each others’ jobs to keep the Tomcats flying. There’s a late 1970s DoD report on the F-14 where they were still trying to get an appropriate engine for it, since the TF30 was only meant to be an interim motor on 17 LRIP birds, followed by the almost-unknown Pratt & Whitney F401-PW-400. This was basically a stretched F100 to fit the F-14’s engine bays, but because it too had stall and AB unstart problems, its excess thrust would have made the asymmetric thrust problem even worse, even though it would have improved the F-14’s performance 99.9% of the time with a massive boost in T/W ratio. Anyway, they spent an initial $398.1 million on the F-14B with $236 million of that for the engines, which they never got. That was 1970s dollars. That would be $1.96 billion today for a motor that was never produced. Imagine the headlines! With the F-15, the main problems were also with the original Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-100 motors, which proved to be stall prone, would shoot fire out both the nozzle and front of the intake, and was the prime contributor to crashes/total losses/fatalities. They also had generator failure/fire, mid-airs during BFM, but almost every total loss with F-15s in its first ten years of service was due to engine fires/stalls, and aggressive BFM exercises resulting in mid-air collisions or loss of control and ejection. They eventually solved the engine problems with the F100-PW-220, but with a reduced thrust/performance trade-off. The F-16 was nowhere near ready for production, and yet they cranked them out by the hundreds. The F-16A/B Blocks 1-10 had all sorts of issues from the factory, including the same engine problems as the F-15, only they had one engine, so chance of recovering was a lot less. Engine stalls, hydraulics, flight control system wire harness chaffing due to a major departure from the technical drawings ordered by a manager at Fort Worth, Leading Edge Flap bracket failure, APU, EPU, instrument failures, and GLOC led to the loss of 143 F-16s in its first 10 years of service, 71 fatalities. If the internet had been around then for widespread use, imagine the headlines. F/A-18 was also nowhere near ready for production, but they cranked them out by the hundreds. The landing gear was faulty, to the extent that an alignment bar came loose on touchdown, cranking the wheel out and sending the whole aircraft cartwheeling down the runway or slamming into parked aircraft on the carrier deck. It had significant aerodynamic and structural problems with the LERXs buffeting the vertical stabs, and folding wing tips joints experiencing harmonic nodes that causes unacceptable buffeting at certain speeds. The radar was not working correctly, and maintenance took much longer than advertised. 100 total losses and 20 fatalities in its first 10 years. It had a more reliable propulsion system though, which was great. Harrier is just an inherently-unstable aircraft in the VTOL mode when trying to land, resulting in quite regular crashes. As the pilot tries to manage the variable nozzle vectoring and thrust through the wings for roll stability, ground-effect can cause a positive-loop feedback where hot air is ingested into the massive intakes, disrupting airflow through the powerful Pegasus engine. Pilot corrections into this feedback loop often cause the aircraft to violently roll over and impact the ground. If they don’t eject within a split second while it’s still within 90˚ of the surface, the ejection will fire towards the ground at a high rate of speed and kill the pilot instantly. Maintenance on the Harrier is almost comical, except for the lads that have to actually do it. To service or replace the engine, you have to remove the whole uni-wing. It’s an all-day affair, making the Harrier a hangar queen. It always has been one. I was surprised when I looked up its FMC and MC rates, as well as MMHPFH. The A-10, even as simple as you would think it is, experienced a pretty high loss rate and high mishap rates for 3 years, 1977, 78, and 79. Its mishap rate really dropped after that. Main problems were the gun causing gas ingestion into the engines, followed by dual motor stalls. The engineering solutions to deal with the gun problem are nothing short of Teutonic. They tried muzzle devices, flash suppressant in the cartridges, wing slat diverters, and an engine starter feature synchronized with the trigger so when the motors inevitably ingest gun exhaust, they starts kick in to make sure they stay running. There were also major vibrational effect problems caused when they went with muzzle gas diverters, because they placed so much off-axis force on the barrel under-fire (only one barrel fires at a time), that it was pulling the gun away from its mounts and causing structural issues. The F-35 is a cakewalk compared to what was experienced in terms of program challenges with any 3 of the 1970s fighter designs I just covered. It has the world’s most powerful, most reliable engine. The world’s best fighter Digital Flight Control System. The best pilot interface of any fighter in existence. It has the best power generation IPP design of any fighter, with 270V DC available outside of engine power, which is unprecedented. All the “bugs” the click-baiters are yapping about are typical growth paths with avionics, or problems from the initial 6 LRIP birds that never got mass-produced. At least 1/3 of the “800-plus” deficiencies are actually opportunities for growth outside of the contracted KPPs or SDDs, where the system maturity is pushing itself into areas that weren’t anticipated for increased capabilities.
@@LRRPFco52 I don't know if you copy-pasted this from somewhere but if you really wrote it I want to thank you sir for that, it was an interesting read.
@@mikehawk4517 I definitely didn't copy-paste it, because it's based on my own research over many years. The 670th F-35 was delivered last month. We'll be at 675 delivered by August 31st given the current production rate. They've cumulatively flown over 435,000 hours now. Just looking at the teen fighters, we lost $35 billion in airframes and weapons/ancillary systems in their first 10 years of service, adjusted for 2021 dollars. That doesn't include damage to the surface structures or account for pilot training and fatalities.
To be honest there should only be 1 version of the F-35 the F-35C. Simplify production, reduce cost. It would not be the 1st time the USAF and USMC flew a Navy bird.
@@TheDrummingWarrior Ski jumps in place of Catapaults, or just operate helicopters as the F-35 squadron on those are not large enough to provide more than a tripwire defense.
@@pogo1140 defence? They're not Nimitz or Ford class, they're not for fleet defence, they're to replace Harriers and AV8s for strike missions at least for the UK and Italy
@@TheDrummingWarrior If you can't defend your base, you soon will not have a plane to fly. It's something UK use to be able to do back when it flew phantoms off their carriers which were not any larger than their current carriers.
13:24. "It is unrealistic to have a working system at this stage". The F35 has been in the air since 2006 and still has this many problems seems to be highly suspicious. If it were any other program it would have been abandoned by now. The Universal Camouflage Patter uniform was only given from 2005 to 2014 before it was abandoned. Similar time frame and concept of a next generation weapon but the uniform has fewer issues and was still abandoned while the f35 is still considered "a work in prpgress" I have also read that the f35 is underperforming when compared to the older generation aircraft it is meant to replace.
It’s never gonna replace the F-16 or the F-15 (and maybe the Harrier) but I’m pretty certain that it could replace the A-10, because that hunk of junk is so outdated that it’s basically only effective against an enemy who’s Air Force is nearly destroyed. And if you’re gonna replace the F-15 your best choice is more F-22s despite how ludicrously expensive they are
What makes you think the F-35 cannot replace the F-16? I can see why you would say it can't replace the Eagle, however new build F-22s probably aren't the best option. As good as the Raptor is, the tooling was destroyed, and considering the progress with NGAD, it will probably be ready for production by the time the F-22 is ready to reenter production. F-35s and F-15EXs are a more sensible stopgap measure. Besides, the Eagle is still an extremely versatile airframe.
@@TheGibusDemo I don't really think that would be a good idea. The F-35 is already performing phenomenally well in comparison to how our 4th gen aircraft were at the same time in their lives, the F-35 is intended to take over the F-16's CAS mission, and it is a more sensible upgrade, having a much higher useful load than the Viper. Designing a lightweight strike aircraft specifically to replace the Viper when the F-35 is shaping up to be the Air Force's bread and butter (as the Viper currently is) would be a waste of resources. If the F-35 is too costly for low intensity conflicts, new build F-16s specifically for low threat environment CAS and interdiction missions would be a better option than sinking resources into developing, testing, and setting up tooling for the production of a new aircraft.
@@roberts9095 I agree, the F-35 would be leagues better than the F-16 in CAS Roles, I’m just not sure that the F-35 alone can replace it as a pure fighter/interceptor, although it certainly has the ability to replace it as a fighter when facing slower opponents Edit: what I’m basically saying is that it may be a good idea to develop a mid range fighter between the F-35 and F-22 in performance and cost
@@TheGibusDemo I disagree, former Eagle drivers have been waxing F-15s in BFM with the F-35 and a Norwegian F-16 pilot who was involved in evaluating the F-35 for Norway explained how the F-35's nose authority allowed him to employ weapons earlier and fight more aggressively than in the F-16. BVR wise, there's no comparison, the F-35's situational awareness puts it leagues ahead of the F-15 and F-16. The F-35 is perfectly capable of performing the air superiority mission if it must.
Just a few remarks about the issues discussed in this video. As you stated near the end of video, most of the issue have fixes in place or are going to be resolved with updates. The ALIS maintenance system is being replaced with a Lockheed Martin system called ODIN. Supersonic flight above Mach 1.2 causing blistering of stealth coating on the on both the right and left sides of the horizontal tail and the tail boom were on test models in 2011. (By the way there is NO stealth coating on current models.) Lockheed Martin developed a new stealth material that fixed that issue. Stealth material is baked into the skin of the F35. Aircraft Yaw, Pitch and Roll issues were do to the limitations of early lot 2 software. Lot 3F software update have removed the limitations. All of the early air show's were with F35B models and you can see there were no handling problems. 2020 Air Force shows are now F35A's. Tires on aircraft do not "blow". The are made with reinforcement material to prevent a blowout. They will go flat but not blow-up. Green glow in helmet was fixed in 2016 with new software. The Navy wants to be able to scan a wider area when in sea-search mode. It’s unclear why the issue is listed as a deficiency. The system is working in accordance with design specifications, according to both the documents and a statement from a Lockheed Martin executive. “The F-35’s current radar sea search function meets the enterprises’ expressed required specification," said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin’s general manager of the company’s F-35 program." "When the F35B vertically lands on very hot days, OLDER engines may not be able to produce the required thrust to keep the aircraft airborne, resulting in a hard landing" First, there are no "OLDER" engines. P&W F135 engine with 43,000 lbs of thrust is the only engine even used. It has most thrust of any single engine ever put into a military aircraft. Hot days have never been a problem with this engine. Edwards AFB in California, where the F35 jets are tested, has 120 degrees days during summer. Availability issues in 2016 were 65%. Current jets produced have 70-75% in 2019 and Red Flag exercise, which is the only real test, had a 95% ready rate for the two week activity.
Please show the source of your information because the Airforce has just admitted the F-35 is a failure source ruclips.net/video/RludHO1kDh4/видео.html
@@swatteam2002 We haven’t even spent the $400 billion on procurement, and we’re not even 1/3 of the way into acquisition. The estimates for total program cost over the entire life of the JSF series aren’t real. That money hasn’t been spent. There are 655+ JSF variants delivered as of June 2, 2021. Many of those are to international customers, not just USAF/USMC/USN. Whenever you see an article talking about a trillion dollars, you know it’s sensationalist click-bait.
Contractors don’t add or make requirements, the services do. In this case, the USMC, USAF, UK, and USN set the initial requirements for 3 different JSF variants decades ago. DoD held a competition between the final contractors, where Lockheed Martin, won the contract for JSF against Boeing. Boeing’s design was flawed in multiple areas, and failed to meet the JSF requirements. As the JSF program progressed, requirements driven by the services have continued to change, which is normal in any fighter program.
As of March 2021 Air Force Generals have decided the F35 is Not cost effective. And they are seeking to buy fewer. Also, engines are failing inspections and new engines can't be mAde fast enough to replace them. Front line F35 squadrons are reporting very low availability, operationally.
F-35A has higher Mission Capable rates than any other fighter in USAF inventory. Frontline fighter units have enjoyed very high MC rates operationally in PACOM, CONUS, EUCOM, and CENTCOM, including combat operations for years now. That includes USMC and USAF JSF variants. Wherever you got your information, it’s simple inaccurate.
I am lightly going to touch on that point in the near future when I look at defense spending vs our defense strategy and how both political parties have stated that other priorities come before defense spending and why that also makes programs like the F-35 look bad. Good call out there as that is a common and I'll agree, valid argument to discuss. Thanks for watching!
Speaking cynically (let’s be real because 3.2%US GDP is ridiculous) if I’m the US or a partner nation why not put this funding into other military spending though? I get the US wanting their “adversaries” to have to spend more to keep up but if I was a “rival” why not just put funding into a space program or decent Navy at this point and hit NATO with other force projection? It’s not like Russia / China can or even want to project power against their biggest customers at this point
@@user-si3gu8pm6j disclaimer: this is coming from a Leftist (scary, I know. It's insane to think that someone might have a different perspective on how to keep America intact) I think at this point, military funding has reached a threshold where it's now distrupting the stability of the interior. If you play strategy games, you know that when you branch out too far and too quickly, you start to get little pop-ups telling you that shit is falling apart back home. That's the problem with empire if it continues to always expand. Considering that China is really our only major threat in a non-nuclear confrontation (and maybe Iran but only if WE are dumb enough to provoke it), I think that our defense budget should be largely reduced and reallocated inwards. We didn't have enough firemen to protect cities this summer, we didn't have enough hospitals or equipment to deal with COVID, and our math/reading scores continue to fall compared to almost every developed country. I'm not anti-military. I just think it's only sane to assess the state of our country's structural integrity from an honest standpoint. Obviously I'm all for funding upkeep, international training exercises, and paying to employ people in the military, etc. Even if we were to defeat China in the sea or sky, they would have already won by default in terms of the superglue with which they hold their country together. We've traded out superglue for scotch tape in order to keep funding the Department of Defense and it's beginning to show
The entire American military industrial complex has been entirely captured by putting the shareholders ahead of the mission and the leadership in the pentagon has become a revolving door for lobbyists and officers looking to land high paying jobs when they retire. The new defence sec was being paid 1.7 million dollars A MONTH by raytheon and now under his short leadership a 200 million dollar contract was approved for raytheon. It’s a total joke, these companies are selling fancy tech to congress that everyone knows openly doesn’t work, but sounds nice enough to make it into the budget. The entire US military is collapsing under miss management and corruption, with the USN moral so low from over-deployment people are going to start snapping. The days of skunk works, competing manufacturers and actual innovation is dead.
The plane is pathetic Trying to build a Swiss pocket knife airplane is doomed to failure . It would have been cheaper and faster to build 3 different aircraft that shared the network tech. That would have been far more successful. Then you would have had 3 advanced aircraft each a decade ahead of it's nearest rival. 1. air superiority, 2 naval carrier and 3 jump jet. of the three , the F35 B is the game changer because it adds a supersonic network capable airplane of turning any ship with a flight deck into an aircraft carrier with out the necessity of a catapult. This is a game changer by itself. The intent to have commonality of parts was a failure. Only 25% of the parts share any commonality.
Said people who have no clue about what real issues look like. Go study the accident history of the teen series, AV-8, and A-10 before commenting about issues. JSF is so trouble-free, it is preposterous to see all these stories running sensationalist headlines about tiny little things that are fixed before the DOT&E report comes out.
In the case of the F-35, it does meat cleaver, finger nail file, toothpick, corkscrew, file, tweezers, and things a Swiss Army knife can’t do if you want to use that comparison. Not only does it do all of those things, but it does each of them better than a singular dedicated knife or tool would in its own specialty. Compare it with every legacy platform it replaces to understand: F-16C: F-35A does all the mission profiles of the F-16C much better, with greater combat radius, greater payload if needed, with better raw performance, lethality, and survivability. F-15C: The F-35A was never meant to replace the F-15C, but it out-classes the F-15C in BVR A2A engagements using a new generation of tactics that the F-15C is incapable of performing, and will never be able to conduct. New F-35A pilots have humiliated seasoned F-15C squadrons in A2A. F-15E: The F-35A was never meant to replace the F-15E, but it exceeds the F-15E’s mission radius, conducts precision strikes, and multiple ground TGT engagement with one pilot whereas the F-15E requires 2 crew members. F-35A can penetrate into the Missile Employment Zones of modern IADS, whereas the F-15E must avoid them. AV-8B Harrier II: The F-35B exceeds the capabilities of the AV-8B across the board, is far easier to maintain, is supersonic, has a much farther combat radius, much larger payload, and adds A2A capabilities that the Harrier never had. F/A-18A-D: The F-35C exceeds the capabilities of the legacy Hornet across the board, especially in mission radius, penetration/strike, anti-ship, D-SEAD, A2A, and even exceeds the combat radius of the F-14D by 100nm with a far superior sensor suite than any real or proposed F-14 had. AWACS: The JSF family enjoy far superior long range situational awareness than any AWACS is able to provide, and actually become feeders to AWACS in order to enhance their SA for the overall air component forces when airborne. The main advantage AWACS have is longer endurance for a constant early warning bird in the air. EF-111A: The F-35A or any F-35 provide perimeter defense radar penetration/jamming/offensive electronic warfare capabilities that match or exceed the Sparkvaark. It really is more than a master of all these mission sets because it provides air planners with the opportunity to tailor the force in real-time, or the actual pilots to tailor the force in-flight adaptively without confusing directions from rear echelon types away from the fight. It is an Omnirole/Swing-role platform with immense capabilities.
It was never required to supercruise. If you take an F-35A up to Mach 1.6 and then go into Mil power, it takes a very long time to decelerate down to the Mach.
Hey, I personally love your videos and I would like to know your opinion on this. Do you believe the US will be embroiled in a new military conflict in the 2020s? If so what would it be?
That's a good question. Of the current major threats that are listed in the national defense strategy, Iran I think would be the most likely. I did research on how experts would think it would play out and one of the most common discussion points is how easily the countries could escalate an incident into full-blown conflict. The red lines set by each country would be easy to cross and hard to back down from. Plus, I think with every other nation listed in the NDS, especially with near-peer adversaries, the consequences of a conflict on both sides are much higher. Therefore, I think both sides would escalate a lot more restraint and would work to avoid a conflict. Outside of the NDS, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw something in Africa. A lot of the great powers are trying to increase their influence on the continent and a hotspot could flare up there in the 2020s.
@@LearningMilitary I sincerely doubt the US could "win" a war with Iran. It's bigger, wealthier, and better governed than Iraq and Afghanistan (neither of which we could "defeat", btw.) No air force has ever won a war. It takes boots on the ground for that and, to be blunt, the US ain't got the boots any more, and barely has the logistical capability to get them to Iran. (The US has military personnel in ~ 170 countries - that's spread pretty thin, like the last days of the Roman Empire.) This last point applies double or triple for China, Russia, and India. If India invaded Australia, the US would have to go nuclear to stop them.
Canada and Finland should buy Gripen 👍🏻 What an airforce needs is a cost effective system. Most people do not understand this. F35 export success is due to political pressure from the US to buy it. Norway will spend half its total defence budget on this aircraft for a long time, that is insane. I know that the piloted in Norway and Denmark wanted Gripen and it met their specifications. Flight hour cost: Gripen - 6500$ F35 - 40.000$
I not mad because its was expensive, im mad because the technology we perfected over the years with our money got stolen by the enemy ( because of bad cybersecurity )
USAF 2020 Fleet Mission Capability rates show that.....the F-35A has the highest MC rate of any fighter in the inventory. Unit price is lower than any Western fighter on the market, minus the Super Hornet, which put in its last orders for US Navy last year. Even the Gripen E and Su-35 cost more than the F-35A.
The fix made to the helmet by changing the main liquid screen added 450 grams to the device, resulting in a very over-weigh helmet : 3 kilograms plus (6 lbs) added on the pilot's neck during high G maneuvers....!!!!
a fighter nearly as heavy as F15 with an engine outputting nearly the same power as twin F15 engines, this big elephant always in lots of stress.... and for a fighter to fly above Mach 1 for only a minute is a joke
More interesting, is the concept correct? Stealth means lower availability + lower payload = much much fewer missiles delivered per dollar. True, an increase in capability with stealth and all. Furthermore, this amazing computer power and sensor systems. These could be put on any aircraft, no? They seem a bit like a crutch.
Whyyyyyyyy do they keep trying to retire the A-10! That beast spits thousands of rounds of freedom, retiring it is like kicking a bald eagle and this is coming from a Canadian lmao.
To replace F-16? Fail, it's to maintence intensive to do that. To replace A-10? Fail. No internal AIM 9X sidewinder. Already making Close Air Support difficult. Gun doesn't work at the moment. Poor targeting.(2020 report may have been improved.) Also not an long loiter time. USAF has been considering A-29 Super Tucano or AT 6 Wolverine. Weakness. Forward facing radar may give it away. B-2 has downward facing radar.
No it will not. They will make hundreds if not thousands of F35s whereas Russia will only ever have a tiny fleet of SU-57s without the engines they were designed with. The SU57 is a weak attempt at countering the Raptor which is what would be used to fight aircraft like that anyways
F-35 will always have first-look/first-shoot vs the Su-57 due to signature and sensors. SU-57 RCS is pathetic in comparison, and there’s a huge ? as to what Russia’s actual capabilities are in fielding AESA radars for the Su-57 or any fighter.
@@abram730 Rust and Carbon. C++ and C still function fine and helped with how quickly the software could be developed due to the availability of c and c++ engineers.
The top of the line aircraft in the 1940’s was the Spitfire which costs British sterling pound 9,500 and now the 5th generation fighters costs $100 million + per copy. I think armaments manufacturers taking dumb taxpayers for a ride as the 7th generation fighter in another 20 years will cost $ 1 billion for each plane .
Basic economics and inflation should be taken into account. A lightweight F-5 has a heavier payload than a B-17 bomber of that era. A single F-35A could have won the European Theater war in less time than it took for tens of thousands of aircraft to bomb, kill people by the tens of thousands, and shoot each other down. Economy of scale + capability of scale need to be factored to make sense of what you’re looking at in this case. The comparison with a Spitfire is a false equivalency argument with no real merit.
This video at several times mentions that the program is still early in it's lifecycle so its good that they are finding the issues now. They fail to mention that the first flight of the plane is over 15 years ago ... The plane is only capable of mach 1.1 without developing damage that will require heavy maintenance.,. How is that not a fundamental failure? How could everyone involved in the program both at Lockheed and in the government not be fired?? A mistake that ridiculous at any job would result in you being fired. It's just a staggering drop in expectations and accountability for how a government contract should be treated.
The Pentagon has put a decision on approving full-rate production of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 on indefinite hold, as officials remain unable to say when the fighter jet will be ready for combat testing that’s been delayed repeatedly since 2017.
F-16 has over 1000 deficiencies, many of which are TCTOs (Time Compliant Technical Orders), at least one of which resulted in a fatality recently. JSF’s supposed 800+ “deficiencies” are broken down over 3 different airframe types, most of which are combat software desires, not anything even remotely safety-related, and many being wish-list items from the services that never existed in the contracts. Everything you read about JSF in the inept media brothels is click-bait written by abject ignoramuses who don’t know an APU from a Radar, and have no business commenting on anything aviation-related.
@@raywhitehead730 Not a game pilot. Been in aerospace and defense since the 1970s, specific to fighters, their weapons systems, air planning, RDT&E, with many family members in the same lines of work dating back to F-86. If you're interested, read: "F-35 From Concept to Cockpit, 871pgs" written by all the subsystems engineering program leads and test pilots. You will see brilliant solution after solution in that book, meant for other AeroEs to study. Anytime someone talks about problems with JSF, I point them to mishap rates. All 3 variants are the safest fighter designs ever built. The numbers are brutally unfair in this respect.
More reliable than anything else. Notice that when they publish reliability rates for other fighters, they don't include their necessary attached combat systems like ECM, FLIR, Recce, or other pods that are bolted-on to the aircraft. All these types of systems are integrated into the JSF avionics and airframe. Even with that, they generate twice the availability of the AV-8B, and 72-95% rates in operational USAF squadrons with the F-35A. DOT&E report includes all fleet data, which lumps in test, training, and development aircraft that either have constant additional work being performed on them, or don't need all the combat systems to be 100% if they're never leaving the US. There are fighter training and conversion or RAG squadrons where new pilots learn to fly F-35s before they get assigned to operational squadrons. Nobody cares if a training bird has 100% RAM up-to-date, or if it has all the latest weapons integration, radar modes, new IR sensors, all its weapon pylons, fully up-to-date Technical Orders (that aren't safety related), etc. Every single one of those things shows up as a deficiency in the DOT&E report.
@@MozTS They know all this better than anyone. They make a lot of the older generation pods for teen fighters, which don't get included with aircraft availability and maintenance rates in all the open-sources. Within a squadron, you can bet that they're always chasing full mission capability rates with their necessary combat systems. Take an F-16C Block 50/52 Squadron for example. If the HARM Targeting Pod doesn't work, their whole primary mission profile is compromised since they do S-DEAD. But in fleet availability rate reports, they'll only list whether the jet itself could fly, radar working, and other systems inside the jet.
One squadron of Rafales or Typhoons costs 1.7 billion in 2021, for far less capability. One squadron of F-35As costs $934.8 million. Going into an operational setting, you get the performance of multiple aircraft for less cost, with greater lethality and survivability, so JSF is the most affordable fighter option on the market right now, even the more expensive B and C models.
Air Forces Times July 1 2019, reported that the average MC rate for all F35A was less then 50% for the year 2018. Reported by Stephen Losey. For the Air Force Times. Since then...things have not gotten better.
F-35 is already old technology. It took way too long to develop and it's still not mature. You can't maintain this aircraft in remote places if you want to keep the stealth coating intact and that limits where it can be used if you can get it working in the first place just like the F-22 and B-2 stealth bomber. These are all a big waist of money and time. Upgrade the F-16 and re-engine the B-52.
Interesting. USAF and USMC have been doing disbursed basing operations and FARPs for years now. Maintainers say it’s so much easier to service than an F-16, and you basically can do it out of backpacks. The VLO coatings and RAM don’t need to be serviced every flight. There are former F-16 phase maintainers who complain that they don’t get their hands dirty anymore, and want to go back to the F-16 where they could actually do work sifting through thousands of feet of copper wiring harnesses. F-35 is mostly fiber optic and has compartmentalized ElectroHydrostatic Actuators (EHAs), so it’s much simpler in terms of control systems architecture, more robust, less failure-prone, and far superior to anything in the 4th Generation. They also integrated multiple electrical and starter subsystems from previous gen Environmental and Electrical systems into an Integrated Power Pack with 270 Volts DC available, split through several lines. It’s a revolutionary approach to just basic flight and electrical systems compared with legacy designs.
Did you know that the F-35 cannot land vertically with a payload? The bounce of the landing can damage the weapons attached under the plane and so is unable to do so! Either you use all your weapons or you land like a normal plane. This subject was discussed in a documentary on the UK forces training to land the plane on their aircraft carrier and unable to do so vertically because of that issue🤦🏻
Opposite is true. The F-35B can land with more payload than fixed wing conventional landing fighters on carriers. It has impressive bring-back capability than neither the AV-8B nor F/A-18C had. If a documentary claimed that, you can write that program off as a source of factual information and refrain from watching their garbage again in the future.
My comment is specific to vertical landing. Due to the bounce created by the weight of the plane when landing vertically, it is recommended not to do so with full weapons payload. I'm sure you are right about the conventional landing!
@@xaviera.7441 The only way to bring-back to an LHD is to land vertically. They did extensive weapons configuration testing in all conditions, and the early handful of F-35Bs were overweight, so they had increased descent rate in hot weather. They put all 3 variants on an emergency weight loss program and got the empty weights down to where they needed to be 640 F-35s ago. The B model generates insane amounts of thrust once the top doors open to feed the engine more air, which can generate 40,000lb of thrust in STOVL mode (no AB). On final, the internal fuel is depleted to a certain minimum of maybe 2000lbs, which leaves you 6000lbs for weapons. They don't even take off with 6000lbs of weapons most of the time. B Model can carry 2 internal GBU-12s or 8 SDBs, 2x AIM-120s at 335lb each, and USMC will often load up 4x GBU-12s externally. If you didn't drop any bombs for some reason, and it was a really hot day, you could still bring back.
13 Cat 1 across 3 different variants, none of which have threatened life or safety, already fixed before the report was filed. Welcome to Pentagon accounting, where offices get paid millions to find problems that have already been fixed.
@@tysonminlo4938 The DOT&E office should be shut down. It's the most counter-productive thing associated with the JSF program. Engineers, technicians, and maintenance personnel waste up to 25% of their time filling out reports on what they could be fixing instead of fixing it. When you scale it, you start to see how it slows progress. Even with that said, the F-35A now has the highest readiness rates of any USAF fighter.
@@LRRPFco52 wow, i'm sure this dept.will survive all budget reviews or cuts. I hope someone can intervene and help the program reach its true potential.
This thing never looked promising in real life, only the insane sales pitches made. The problems were clear from the start and are still there, the further it gets in development the more arrise instead of getting solved. This is a technology testbed not a real life war enviorment fighter. I hate that my country as many others got bullied, pressured, bribed or just bamboozeled into buying this flying brick. They are loosing an ocean on money on this thing and the US is using its power to bully other countries to buy it to spread the loss.
Everything is actually opposite of what you portray. Other counties asked for JSF and the UK was one of the early parents before it even materialized into JSF. When Air Force chiefs of foreign nations see the F-35 capes brief and hear from their own pilots who have been exposed to it, they order them immediately if they can.
Blockchain. It stands out in the area of compartmentalization. Blockchain adoption can fix most of those software and logistics issues. But that means another 10 years to rewrite the code.
The main problem with f-35 is super high maintenance cost.... That is 1st thing that needs to taken care
It has become the thing it has set out to counter, cheap and low cost of maintenance
How can you do that when you made a flying machine based on the moto jack of all trades but master of nothing
Not to mention that it cant do the thing it was meant to do replace 33 of the other jets
I am no "expert" but as far I can see the main "issue" with the F-35 program is the F-35-program.
The F-35A has the highest Mission Capability rates of any fighter in the entire USAF service, jumping ahead of them all in 2020. The JSF Program is the most successful multi-variant program in US combat aviation history.
Ellen Lord, out going Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustaiment as reported to Congress 19 Jan this year. Reported by defence news dot com. She stated that they were currently at 36% commission capable. Target was 80%. ...for years. It has been reported by multiple sources for years that the F35, A,B and C all have serious maintenance problems causing very poor combat mission capability.Retired Naval Aviator. The statement was made to Congress by the very person responsible to know that information.
@@raywhitehead730 F-35A currently has a higher MC rate than any other USAF fighter. There’s no such thing as “commission capable”. Here are the latest fleet MC rate reports comparing 2019 to 2020: www.airforcemag.com/usaf-fighter-mission-capable-rates-fiscal-2020/
The AF loves to report MC rates because it gives you the highest possible and easiest to obtain number, makes you look better. But it is Not a fully Operational reflecting number, and it does nothing to tell you what mission they are reporting on. Is the mission, AA? Is it AG? Or is it another mission or function or job the airplane is Supposed to do. It's an old ploy:, look here not there. As a part of my job in the Navy i used to report out Squadron MC rates to the Wing. Don't be fooled,, wise up. Fly Navy.
@@raywhitehead730 I know the difference between FMC and MC rates. An MC F-35A is drastically more capable than an FMC [insert any other fighter].
You can have 1 out of 4 F-35s with failed sensors (you would have to have the AESA, 12+ RF antennae, 7 IR sensors all fail), and they still have the same picture as everyone else in the flight. That’s part of the genius behind JSF systems high transfer-rate/bandwidth MADL data link and sensor layering across bandwidths.
F-35s aren’t limited to AA vs AG. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. They add EW, AEW&C, ISR, Anti-Ship, ASW for the F-35C, TBM detection and tracking, and networked nodal connectivity for the overall net-centric force web.
I can slice off multiple mission sets from an F-35 and still have a far more capable platform than a full-up F-14D, Super Hornet, A-6E, Harrier, or F-16C Block 50 even with all the bells and whistles.
Looks like the Canadians made the right decision to delay any decisions to buy the F-35. Not looking good.
UK has filled their new HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier all with F35-B s :')
@@idiotickidful because there is not another fixed wing aircraft that can takeoff and land on it?
@@idiotickidful same as Japanese Navy
@@idiotickidful
Right..one American Marine Sqn, and a couple of RAF No.617 Sqn.
"Not looking good"
*laughs in highest mission capable and readiness rates in the USAF fighter fleet in 2020* seriously, you all seem to forget how bad the teething problems were for 4th generation fighters in the 70s and 80s. F-16s were plagued with a high accident rate, the F100 engine that powered both the F-15 and F-16 had issues that wouldn't be rectified until a decade after the F-15 entered service, including uncontained turbine blade failures that ruptured fuel cells and resulted in hull losses and fatalities in some cases. The F-35 is a cakewalk compared to its predecessors and only gets the amount of bad press it does because the internet exists.
Today on Dutch news channels, the f 35 has damage in the fuel tanks that makes the plane vulnerable to lightning. The plane might explode when struck. Our Dutch pilots must fly around thunder clouds. There's also computer problems witch make me thinking, does the plane run on Windows 10 ?
nos.nl/artikel/2348890-nieuw-defect-aan-f-35-s-aan-het-licht-gekomen.html
windows 10 beta version
Welcome to 2006. Sounds like your news is full of idiots.
Windows Vista why ?
What if I told you that every NOTAM tells all pilots of all airframes to avoid thunderstorms like the plague? Have you ever flown through a thunderstorm? I have. It’s really fun if you don’t think about the dangers. You basically have barely any control and get whipped around, up, down, and about based on very violent and massive air currents eddying unpredictably.
the F35 is the stealthiest aircraft in the world ... because it is well hidden in the back of the maintenance workshop
Funny you mention that, because it has the highest Mission Capable and readiness rates of any fighter in the entire USAF inventory, even better than the F-16C and A-10C as of 2020. www.airforcemag.com/usaf-fighter-mission-capable-rates-fiscal-2020/
And this does not include the fact that the aircraft was designed 3 decades ago when the future battlefield need was not well understood. So much has happened since then. Also stealth is not a magic bullet. When stealth was first used it was a significant advantage but that is almost four decades ago, so the potential enemies have worked hard to limit the effectiveness of stealth. In addition, you basically give yourself away if you turn on the radar, so you can either fly basically blind and hope the enemy does not know were you are, or turn on radar and thus defeat the benefit of stealth. You also defeat stealth if you have any external pods. You are limited to what can be carried inboard, and this inboard limitation has made the aircraft bigger and heavier. Basically stealth can be useful, but it should not be an overwhelming criteria lit is is for US planes. Radar has been very limited threat to US planes in any of its conflicts because whenever the enemy turns on a radar, it will be targeted by HARM missiles. And the planes do have countermeasures.
The plane has been around for 3 decades, how can it still have problems. Stupid argument. And it is failed because the plane was designed for a mission that does not make sense. It sucks as a dogfighter. It was basically designed to fire weapons from a distance, and what is the point with cruise missiles. If you are going to use it for bomber missions you will not want to limit it to internal mansions, so you have all the cost of maintaining that delicate expensive stealth coating, and also have to deal with how much harder it is to maintain because access hatches reduce stealth. And if it does get some damage, it is very expensive and difficult to maintain the stealth. Better off with the older planes.
Another issue is that the basic design of the plane basically sucks from an engineering point of view. There is a central bulkhead that is very complex, and very difficult to produce. If production ever had to be accelerated, this is a bad design. It will be limited by the production of this bulkhead.
Don't ever research how many TCTOs and mandated maintenance orders there are right now on the F-16C/D, F-15C/D, F-15E, B-1B, A-10C, C-17A, F/A-18E/F, etc. Those of us who have watched the evolution of military aircraft since the 1970s have seen much, much worse than this before. It would be more accurate to say we've never seen anything this good.
The JSF program 3 variants are astonishingly-free of the kinds of major problems we've seen in the teen fighters and AV-8B.
The huge difference was how many total losses, Calss A mishaps, and fatalities we had in the 4th Gen.
Between the F-14, AV-8, A-10, F-15, F-16, & F/A-18, we had at least 473 total airframe losses and 125 fatalities....WITHIN THEIR FIRST 10 YEARS OF SERVICE.
Let those numbers sink in a bit before you're misinformed by any of the DOT&E reports talking about 800 bean counter deficiencies. They've flown over 360,000 flight hours across all 3 JSF variants now, with 620 airframes delivered.
At this time in the combined careers of the aircraft being superceded by 3 different JSF variants, tens of billions of dollars had been destroyed, with hundreds of families losing their loved ones.
In the entire flight history of all 3 JSF variants, we have 1 fatality, a senior Japanese F-35A pilot who became spatially disoriented and flew into the water.
We have 4 crashes out of 620 aircraft in 14 years of production.
Keep this in mind as the new wave of anti-JSF articles get broadcast all over the internet, now that Russia and China have a puppet in the WH.
No, you don't give yourself away with an LPI AESA radar. That's incorrect. No, the AESA doesn't even need to be your primary detection system. Depending on the threat matrix, JSF pilots can manage their signature however they need to, but there are a lot of passive RF and IR sensors embedded all over the JSF airframes.
The pilot doesn't need to manage individual sensors. He or she simply selects what type of signature emissions are appropriate for the area/mission set, and collects data with passive sensors constantly anyway.
Passive RF sensors see hits at almost twice the distance of the AESA, and immediately share this data with other JSF in the web. Why generate hot RF when you've already gained TGT detection and tracking with fused and interleaved passive sensors?
Within a multi-ship, you have a ton of options to manipulate LPI AESAs to get tracks without compromising the flight.
Dogfighting: "Anytime you hear someone talk about dogfighting, you know the conversation is in the wrong place." - LTC Chip Berke, TOPGUN Instructor, F/A-18, F-16, F-22 exchange, and F-35B pilot.
Dogfighting pretty much ended once most air forces adopted helmet-cued HOBS missiles. Nobody wants to fly into a WVR merge because you'll already have incoming IR missiles at high aspect before you get anywhere near each other's 3-9 line.
That said, combat-configured F-35As regularly dominate F-16s in relatively clean configurations (no ECM, FLIR, HTR pods, bombs, missiles) in BFM.
If you try to acquire the F-35 in visual range with helmet-HOBS, neither of them will work because of IR stealth technologies, which are substantial on the JSF series. Meanwhile, the F-35s have the best helmet ever put in a fighter, fused with all the RF and IR sensors and weapons. Even if they chose to enter a WVR fight with you for some reason, you are at layers of extremely unfair disadvantages.
Production: Every fighter design from the 1970s to present has unique bulkhead manufacturing requirements. F-35 is the highest rate production fighter currently with over 11 per month rolling off the assembly lines.
620+ have been delivered. Most of the production of major subassemblies is automated.
@@LRRPFco52 It is Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) Radars, not No Probability, and you know for sure the Chinese and Russians already have increased sensitivity to detect these low emission radars. Obviously you do not know what radar is. If there is no emission it is not radar, it is a passive system. And of course you are going to be using the same sort of passive systems the Russians and Chinese are already using to detect the American stealth aircraft. LMAO. Those passive systems are used by Russians and Chinese in part so Americans do not detect that the enemy has found them. So effectively of stealth if the Russians and Chinese are not using radar is of limited value. Remember Radar avoiding and if radar is not being used. LMAO. The Russians and Chinese have had 40 years to counter stealth. They are not idiots like you must think.
@@cliffordnelson8454 Every single one of your assertions was factually incorrect, but now you’re making more declarative statements about things you clearly have no specific knowledge about. Instead of continuing to make incorrect, wildy-erroneous statements, maybe spend the next 3-5 years studying with oversight from qualified people to assess your ability to understand any of these topics before commenting on them again. It’s very clear you don’t have much of a clue what’s going on.
The fact you mentioned carrying pods and dogfighting are big giveaways. There are no external pods carried by the F-35. The only stealth aircraft I’ve seen plans for carrying a FLIR pod on is the Su-57. The F-35 has that integrated into the nose with EOTS. There is zero reason to carry an external pod on a true 5th Gen system.
You also said the engineering on the F-35 basically sucks because of some bulkhead. The JSF program has had the best engineers in the world working on it from the US and UK. From an engineering standpoint, it is revolutionary in multiple disciplines and integrated systems sciences. Only someone with zero engineering experience would look at the final product and see failure.
@@LRRPFco52 Guess what you put your foot in it again. What degree do you have...maybe a high school. Well guess what I have a Masters in engineering and have worked one quite a few military programs including ones for combat aircraft so I know what I am talking about. And factually incorrect. LMAO. So you bring up an interesting point. Why are there external stores. Obviously you lack knowledge to understand this. First of all having internal stores, and since you obviously know nothing about systems engineering, make the plane larger. And anything inside does not have external access, so if something is not designed into the aircraft, you carry it outside. So when there is an improvement in avionics, you have to rebuild the aircraft for the new sensors find space in the aircraft. Basically you are guaranteeing that is will have to remanufacture the aircraft for new sensor technology. If you just use a pod, just ship the pod to the airbase and mount it. And if you want your weapon system to lock on before you launch you either have to have a way to extend it, and that will even be worse than external stores, or mount it externally. In fact since you have so little knowlege, having external stores was a big advance in WW2. Basically depending exclusively on internal stores is what they did in WW2, but external stores gave a lot more flexibility. So take you BS and stuff. You know so little. I will not bother with all the other problems with the F-35, you can look those up. You obviously have absolutely not understanding of engineering since you do not even know the basic stuff.
The easiest way for a non-aviation person or amateur AvGeek to sift through all the information and get a baseline reality-check about the JSF multi-variant program is to look at mishaps and compare them with the fighters from the previous generation. That will show you how much you’re being lied to and misinformed by almost the entirety of the media online.
Between the teen fighters, Harrier, and A-10 in only their first 10 years of operational service, we lost 519 airframes mostly to crashes and fires, with 182 fatalities.
The Hornet had 100 total airframe losses and 20 fatalities in its first 10 years of service. Same with the Harrier. The F-16A had a mishap rate of 671 Class A mishaps per 100,000 flight hours, scores of crashes and many fatalities.
The F-15 was really the only teen fighter that was ready for production and we still lost 59 of them in the first 10 years, with 26 fatalities.
What about the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C in their first 10 years?
6 total losses, 4 of which were crashes, 1 fatality in Japanese Defense Forces with a senior pilot who executed controlled flight into terrain (the water) after doing BFM with several other F-35As in JSDF.
First crash was an F-35B with a faulty fuel tube that starved the engine, pilot ejected safely.
Second was the Japanese F-35A.
Third was a former F-15E pilot who left the speed hold on and tried to land at 202 knots, bounced it off the runway, crushed the gear, which told the FLCS it still had weight on wheels, causing Pilot Induced Oscillations where he couldn’t control it anymore, so he ejected.
Fourth was a USMC F-35B that impacted a KC-130 tanker during aerial refueling, causing damage to both aircraft to the extent that the F-35B pilot ejected, and KC-130 conducted an emergency landing.
I could pick any one of the aircraft the JSF series are replacing/superceding, and spend the next several hours writing a lengthy set of details about 80-100 different crashes and fatalities, but I won’t. The numbers are so stark in contrast. There are now 645+ F-35s delivered and in operation, training, or testing units all over the world with close to 400,000 flight hours, so the sample sizes are comparable to the early teen series production.
Nobody will listen, they would rather get their information from news channels or Pierre sprey than the actual pilots that fly it.
You're comparing crashes and losses. How would the other aircrafts that you mentioned compare to the F35 in terms of issues like what this video brings up?
(Note: I do not know much about this subject, I'm just asking out of curiosity)
@@mikehawk4517 The F-14 had everything ranging from substantial to horrendous issues with acquisition, propulsion, hydraulics, avionics, weapons integration, landing gear, structures and aerodynamics, flight controls, stability augmentation, adverse yaw from its differential horizontal stabs, spin departure tendency at altitude, engine stalls, engine fires, engines quit working altogether which was one of the main contributing factors to several of the crashes while attempting to recover on the carrier with one engine, AWG-9 failed regularly, spoiler lock-out brackets failed, was a hangar queen that required round-the-clock dedicated maintenance crews who learned each others’ jobs to keep the Tomcats flying.
There’s a late 1970s DoD report on the F-14 where they were still trying to get an appropriate engine for it, since the TF30 was only meant to be an interim motor on 17 LRIP birds, followed by the almost-unknown Pratt & Whitney F401-PW-400. This was basically a stretched F100 to fit the F-14’s engine bays, but because it too had stall and AB unstart problems, its excess thrust would have made the asymmetric thrust problem even worse, even though it would have improved the F-14’s performance 99.9% of the time with a massive boost in T/W ratio. Anyway, they spent an initial $398.1 million on the F-14B with $236 million of that for the engines, which they never got. That was 1970s dollars. That would be $1.96 billion today for a motor that was never produced. Imagine the headlines!
With the F-15, the main problems were also with the original Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-100 motors, which proved to be stall prone, would shoot fire out both the nozzle and front of the intake, and was the prime contributor to crashes/total losses/fatalities. They also had generator failure/fire, mid-airs during BFM, but almost every total loss with F-15s in its first ten years of service was due to engine fires/stalls, and aggressive BFM exercises resulting in mid-air collisions or loss of control and ejection. They eventually solved the engine problems with the F100-PW-220, but with a reduced thrust/performance trade-off.
The F-16 was nowhere near ready for production, and yet they cranked them out by the hundreds. The F-16A/B Blocks 1-10 had all sorts of issues from the factory, including the same engine problems as the F-15, only they had one engine, so chance of recovering was a lot less. Engine stalls, hydraulics, flight control system wire harness chaffing due to a major departure from the technical drawings ordered by a manager at Fort Worth, Leading Edge Flap bracket failure, APU, EPU, instrument failures, and GLOC led to the loss of 143 F-16s in its first 10 years of service, 71 fatalities. If the internet had been around then for widespread use, imagine the headlines.
F/A-18 was also nowhere near ready for production, but they cranked them out by the hundreds. The landing gear was faulty, to the extent that an alignment bar came loose on touchdown, cranking the wheel out and sending the whole aircraft cartwheeling down the runway or slamming into parked aircraft on the carrier deck. It had significant aerodynamic and structural problems with the LERXs buffeting the vertical stabs, and folding wing tips joints experiencing harmonic nodes that causes unacceptable buffeting at certain speeds. The radar was not working correctly, and maintenance took much longer than advertised. 100 total losses and 20 fatalities in its first 10 years. It had a more reliable propulsion system though, which was great.
Harrier is just an inherently-unstable aircraft in the VTOL mode when trying to land, resulting in quite regular crashes. As the pilot tries to manage the variable nozzle vectoring and thrust through the wings for roll stability, ground-effect can cause a positive-loop feedback where hot air is ingested into the massive intakes, disrupting airflow through the powerful Pegasus engine. Pilot corrections into this feedback loop often cause the aircraft to violently roll over and impact the ground. If they don’t eject within a split second while it’s still within 90˚ of the surface, the ejection will fire towards the ground at a high rate of speed and kill the pilot instantly. Maintenance on the Harrier is almost comical, except for the lads that have to actually do it. To service or replace the engine, you have to remove the whole uni-wing. It’s an all-day affair, making the Harrier a hangar queen. It always has been one. I was surprised when I looked up its FMC and MC rates, as well as MMHPFH.
The A-10, even as simple as you would think it is, experienced a pretty high loss rate and high mishap rates for 3 years, 1977, 78, and 79. Its mishap rate really dropped after that. Main problems were the gun causing gas ingestion into the engines, followed by dual motor stalls. The engineering solutions to deal with the gun problem are nothing short of Teutonic. They tried muzzle devices, flash suppressant in the cartridges, wing slat diverters, and an engine starter feature synchronized with the trigger so when the motors inevitably ingest gun exhaust, they starts kick in to make sure they stay running. There were also major vibrational effect problems caused when they went with muzzle gas diverters, because they placed so much off-axis force on the barrel under-fire (only one barrel fires at a time), that it was pulling the gun away from its mounts and causing structural issues.
The F-35 is a cakewalk compared to what was experienced in terms of program challenges with any 3 of the 1970s fighter designs I just covered. It has the world’s most powerful, most reliable engine. The world’s best fighter Digital Flight Control System. The best pilot interface of any fighter in existence. It has the best power generation IPP design of any fighter, with 270V DC available outside of engine power, which is unprecedented. All the “bugs” the click-baiters are yapping about are typical growth paths with avionics, or problems from the initial 6 LRIP birds that never got mass-produced. At least 1/3 of the “800-plus” deficiencies are actually opportunities for growth outside of the contracted KPPs or SDDs, where the system maturity is pushing itself into areas that weren’t anticipated for increased capabilities.
@@LRRPFco52 I don't know if you copy-pasted this from somewhere but if you really wrote it I want to thank you sir for that, it was an interesting read.
@@mikehawk4517 I definitely didn't copy-paste it, because it's based on my own research over many years. The 670th F-35 was delivered last month. We'll be at 675 delivered by August 31st given the current production rate.
They've cumulatively flown over 435,000 hours now.
Just looking at the teen fighters, we lost $35 billion in airframes and weapons/ancillary systems in their first 10 years of service, adjusted for 2021 dollars. That doesn't include damage to the surface structures or account for pilot training and fatalities.
To be honest there should only be 1 version of the F-35 the F-35C. Simplify production, reduce cost. It would not be the 1st time the USAF and USMC flew a Navy bird.
Since weight growth seems to always happen, the extra wing area might help.
So I guess Japan, South Korea, Italy and the UK should just buy F35Cs for their carriers that can only operate B variants?
@@TheDrummingWarrior Ski jumps in place of Catapaults, or just operate helicopters as the F-35 squadron on those are not large enough to provide more than a tripwire defense.
@@pogo1140 defence? They're not Nimitz or Ford class, they're not for fleet defence, they're to replace Harriers and AV8s for strike missions at least for the UK and Italy
@@TheDrummingWarrior If you can't defend your base, you soon will not have a plane to fly. It's something UK use to be able to do back when it flew phantoms off their carriers which were not any larger than their current carriers.
SU-57: Ohhh Look at that Little Bird seems very weak
13:24. "It is unrealistic to have a working system at this stage".
The F35 has been in the air since 2006 and still has this many problems seems to be highly suspicious. If it were any other program it would have been abandoned by now. The Universal Camouflage Patter uniform was only given from 2005 to 2014 before it was abandoned. Similar time frame and concept of a next generation weapon but the uniform has fewer issues and was still abandoned while the f35 is still considered "a work in prpgress"
I have also read that the f35 is underperforming when compared to the older generation aircraft it is meant to replace.
It’s never gonna replace the F-16 or the F-15 (and maybe the Harrier) but I’m pretty certain that it could replace the A-10, because that hunk of junk is so outdated that it’s basically only effective against an enemy who’s Air Force is nearly destroyed. And if you’re gonna replace the F-15 your best choice is more F-22s despite how ludicrously expensive they are
What makes you think the F-35 cannot replace the F-16? I can see why you would say it can't replace the Eagle, however new build F-22s probably aren't the best option. As good as the Raptor is, the tooling was destroyed, and considering the progress with NGAD, it will probably be ready for production by the time the F-22 is ready to reenter production. F-35s and F-15EXs are a more sensible stopgap measure. Besides, the Eagle is still an extremely versatile airframe.
@@roberts9095 I think it has the potential to partially replace the F-16 but I think another smaller fighter will fill in the gap
@@TheGibusDemo I don't really think that would be a good idea. The F-35 is already performing phenomenally well in comparison to how our 4th gen aircraft were at the same time in their lives, the F-35 is intended to take over the F-16's CAS mission, and it is a more sensible upgrade, having a much higher useful load than the Viper. Designing a lightweight strike aircraft specifically to replace the Viper when the F-35 is shaping up to be the Air Force's bread and butter (as the Viper currently is) would be a waste of resources. If the F-35 is too costly for low intensity conflicts, new build F-16s specifically for low threat environment CAS and interdiction missions would be a better option than sinking resources into developing, testing, and setting up tooling for the production of a new aircraft.
@@roberts9095 I agree, the F-35 would be leagues better than the F-16 in CAS Roles, I’m just not sure that the F-35 alone can replace it as a pure fighter/interceptor, although it certainly has the ability to replace it as a fighter when facing slower opponents
Edit: what I’m basically saying is that it may be a good idea to develop a mid range fighter between the F-35 and F-22 in performance and cost
@@TheGibusDemo I disagree, former Eagle drivers have been waxing F-15s in BFM with the F-35 and a Norwegian F-16 pilot who was involved in evaluating the F-35 for Norway explained how the F-35's nose authority allowed him to employ weapons earlier and fight more aggressively than in the F-16. BVR wise, there's no comparison, the F-35's situational awareness puts it leagues ahead of the F-15 and F-16. The F-35 is perfectly capable of performing the air superiority mission if it must.
Just a few remarks about the issues discussed in this video. As you stated near the end of video, most of the issue have fixes in place or are going to be resolved with updates. The ALIS maintenance system is being replaced with a Lockheed Martin system called ODIN. Supersonic flight above Mach 1.2 causing blistering of stealth coating on the on both the right and left sides of the horizontal tail and the tail boom were on test models in 2011. (By the way there is NO stealth coating on current models.) Lockheed Martin developed a new stealth material that fixed that issue. Stealth material is baked into the skin of the F35. Aircraft Yaw, Pitch and Roll issues were do to the limitations of early lot 2 software. Lot 3F software update have removed the limitations. All of the early air show's were with F35B models and you can see there were no handling problems. 2020 Air Force shows are now F35A's. Tires on aircraft do not "blow". The are made with reinforcement material to prevent a blowout. They will go flat but not blow-up. Green glow in helmet was fixed in 2016 with new software. The Navy wants to be able to scan a wider area when in sea-search mode. It’s unclear why the issue is listed as a deficiency. The system is working in accordance with design specifications, according to both the documents and a statement from a Lockheed Martin executive. “The F-35’s current radar sea search function meets the enterprises’ expressed required specification," said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin’s general manager of the company’s F-35 program."
"When the F35B vertically lands on very hot days, OLDER engines may not be able to produce the required thrust to keep the aircraft airborne, resulting in a hard landing" First, there are no "OLDER" engines. P&W F135 engine with 43,000 lbs of thrust is the only engine even used. It has most thrust of any single engine ever put into a military aircraft. Hot days have never been a problem with this engine. Edwards AFB in California, where the F35 jets are tested, has 120 degrees days during summer. Availability issues in 2016 were 65%. Current jets produced have 70-75% in 2019 and Red Flag exercise, which is the only real test, had a 95% ready rate for the two week activity.
Excellent work.
Please show the source of your information because the Airforce has just admitted the F-35 is a failure
source ruclips.net/video/RludHO1kDh4/видео.html
@@Karl-Benny That is not an admittance of failure.
March 4 2021, US House Armed Forces Committee states they don't. Want to purchase any more F35s.
hurray for common sense
@@tysonminlo4938 After what ?? after spending trillions ??
They never said any such thing.
@@swatteam2002 We haven’t even spent the $400 billion on procurement, and we’re not even 1/3 of the way into acquisition. The estimates for total program cost over the entire life of the JSF series aren’t real. That money hasn’t been spent. There are 655+ JSF variants delivered as of June 2, 2021. Many of those are to international customers, not just USAF/USMC/USN. Whenever you see an article talking about a trillion dollars, you know it’s sensationalist click-bait.
the main problem with the F35 is that Lockheed keep adding more than the initial requirements
Initial requirements must grow though, 2006 is far different than today
Contractors don’t add or make requirements, the services do. In this case, the USMC, USAF, UK, and USN set the initial requirements for 3 different JSF variants decades ago. DoD held a competition between the final contractors, where Lockheed Martin, won the contract for JSF against Boeing. Boeing’s design was flawed in multiple areas, and failed to meet the JSF requirements. As the JSF program progressed, requirements driven by the services have continued to change, which is normal in any fighter program.
The only test that matters for a warplane is combat.
As of March 2021 Air Force Generals have decided the F35 is Not cost effective. And they are seeking to buy fewer. Also, engines are failing inspections and new engines can't be mAde fast enough to replace them. Front line F35 squadrons are reporting very low availability, operationally.
F-35A has higher Mission Capable rates than any other fighter in USAF inventory. Frontline fighter units have enjoyed very high MC rates operationally in PACOM, CONUS, EUCOM, and CENTCOM, including combat operations for years now. That includes USMC and USAF JSF variants. Wherever you got your information, it’s simple inaccurate.
There are better uses for the ridiculous amount of money involved? (One of many, many issues?)
I am lightly going to touch on that point in the near future when I look at defense spending vs our defense strategy and how both political parties have stated that other priorities come before defense spending and why that also makes programs like the F-35 look bad. Good call out there as that is a common and I'll agree, valid argument to discuss. Thanks for watching!
It may seem like a lot of money, but, it is only (2019) 3.2 % of GNP.
Speaking cynically (let’s be real because 3.2%US GDP is ridiculous) if I’m the US or a partner nation why not put this funding into other military spending though? I get the US wanting their “adversaries” to have to spend more to keep up but if I was a “rival” why not just put funding into a space program or decent Navy at this point and hit NATO with other force projection? It’s not like Russia / China can or even want to project power against their biggest customers at this point
@@user-si3gu8pm6j disclaimer: this is coming from a Leftist (scary, I know. It's insane to think that someone might have a different perspective on how to keep America intact)
I think at this point, military funding has reached a threshold where it's now distrupting the stability of the interior. If you play strategy games, you know that when you branch out too far and too quickly, you start to get little pop-ups telling you that shit is falling apart back home. That's the problem with empire if it continues to always expand.
Considering that China is really our only major threat in a non-nuclear confrontation (and maybe Iran but only if WE are dumb enough to provoke it), I think that our defense budget should be largely reduced and reallocated inwards. We didn't have enough firemen to protect cities this summer, we didn't have enough hospitals or equipment to deal with COVID, and our math/reading scores continue to fall compared to almost every developed country.
I'm not anti-military. I just think it's only sane to assess the state of our country's structural integrity from an honest standpoint. Obviously I'm all for funding upkeep, international training exercises, and paying to employ people in the military, etc.
Even if we were to defeat China in the sea or sky, they would have already won by default in terms of the superglue with which they hold their country together. We've traded out superglue for scotch tape in order to keep funding the Department of Defense and it's beginning to show
The entire American military industrial complex has been entirely captured by putting the shareholders ahead of the mission and the leadership in the pentagon has become a revolving door for lobbyists and officers looking to land high paying jobs when they retire.
The new defence sec was being paid 1.7 million dollars A MONTH by raytheon and now under his short leadership a 200 million dollar contract was approved for raytheon. It’s a total joke, these companies are selling fancy tech to congress that everyone knows openly doesn’t work, but sounds nice enough to make it into the budget.
The entire US military is collapsing under miss management and corruption, with the USN moral so low from over-deployment people are going to start snapping.
The days of skunk works, competing manufacturers and actual innovation is dead.
The plane is pathetic Trying to build a Swiss pocket knife airplane is doomed to failure . It would have been cheaper and faster to build 3 different aircraft that shared the network tech. That would have been far more successful. Then you would have had 3 advanced aircraft each a decade ahead of it's nearest rival. 1. air superiority, 2 naval carrier and 3 jump jet. of the three , the F35 B is the game changer because it adds a supersonic network capable airplane of turning any ship with a flight deck into an aircraft carrier with out the necessity of a catapult. This is a game changer by itself. The intent to have commonality of parts was a failure. Only 25% of the parts share any commonality.
It’s all Congress fault
Congress asked for a swiss army knife and was handed an overblown swiss army chainsaw.
Absolute flawless GOOD OLD COMMON SENSE ... I couldn't agree more...
It will be better if they only build two , one stealth carrier with big missile compacity and one with straight take off and big amount of missiles
The case of the F-4 Phantom says otherwise. It was a multirole tri-service aircraft, and it was a wildly successful aircraft.
i going to be a engineering in army I don't want people say about my ideas but they still can't change my ideas at all.
"what are the issues" ?
"YES !
Said people who have no clue about what real issues look like. Go study the accident history of the teen series, AV-8, and A-10 before commenting about issues. JSF is so trouble-free, it is preposterous to see all these stories running sensationalist headlines about tiny little things that are fixed before the DOT&E report comes out.
@@LRRPFco52 NO COMMENT. .. www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39920/a-marine-f-35b-fighter-jet-accidentally-shot-itself-with-its-own-gun-pod
I suspect that the new ceramic stealth coding being tested on the F-22 and F-35 is going to eliminate the blistering in afterburn mode.
Swiss pocket knife is not the knife use by master chef, it is not even a nail clipper, come in handy but cannot replace any real knife.
In the case of the F-35, it does meat cleaver, finger nail file, toothpick, corkscrew, file, tweezers, and things a Swiss Army knife can’t do if you want to use that comparison. Not only does it do all of those things, but it does each of them better than a singular dedicated knife or tool would in its own specialty. Compare it with every legacy platform it replaces to understand:
F-16C: F-35A does all the mission profiles of the F-16C much better, with greater combat radius, greater payload if needed, with better raw performance, lethality, and survivability.
F-15C: The F-35A was never meant to replace the F-15C, but it out-classes the F-15C in BVR A2A engagements using a new generation of tactics that the F-15C is incapable of performing, and will never be able to conduct. New F-35A pilots have humiliated seasoned F-15C squadrons in A2A.
F-15E: The F-35A was never meant to replace the F-15E, but it exceeds the F-15E’s mission radius, conducts precision strikes, and multiple ground TGT engagement with one pilot whereas the F-15E requires 2 crew members. F-35A can penetrate into the Missile Employment Zones of modern IADS, whereas the F-15E must avoid them.
AV-8B Harrier II: The F-35B exceeds the capabilities of the AV-8B across the board, is far easier to maintain, is supersonic, has a much farther combat radius, much larger payload, and adds A2A capabilities that the Harrier never had.
F/A-18A-D: The F-35C exceeds the capabilities of the legacy Hornet across the board, especially in mission radius, penetration/strike, anti-ship, D-SEAD, A2A, and even exceeds the combat radius of the F-14D by 100nm with a far superior sensor suite than any real or proposed F-14 had.
AWACS: The JSF family enjoy far superior long range situational awareness than any AWACS is able to provide, and actually become feeders to AWACS in order to enhance their SA for the overall air component forces when airborne. The main advantage AWACS have is longer endurance for a constant early warning bird in the air.
EF-111A: The F-35A or any F-35 provide perimeter defense radar penetration/jamming/offensive electronic warfare capabilities that match or exceed the Sparkvaark.
It really is more than a master of all these mission sets because it provides air planners with the opportunity to tailor the force in real-time, or the actual pilots to tailor the force in-flight adaptively without confusing directions from rear echelon types away from the fight. It is an Omnirole/Swing-role platform with immense capabilities.
If f35 is ridden with problems then why is it selling in every other rich country
so its the paint that prevents supercruse not power to weight?
Haha
@@shenghan9385 to much expected from 1 fighter well attack there ya go
It was never required to supercruise. If you take an F-35A up to Mach 1.6 and then go into Mil power, it takes a very long time to decelerate down to the Mach.
Hey, I personally love your videos and I would like to know your opinion on this. Do you believe the US will be embroiled in a new military conflict in the 2020s? If so what would it be?
That's a good question. Of the current major threats that are listed in the national defense strategy, Iran I think would be the most likely. I did research on how experts would think it would play out and one of the most common discussion points is how easily the countries could escalate an incident into full-blown conflict. The red lines set by each country would be easy to cross and hard to back down from. Plus, I think with every other nation listed in the NDS, especially with near-peer adversaries, the consequences of a conflict on both sides are much higher. Therefore, I think both sides would escalate a lot more restraint and would work to avoid a conflict.
Outside of the NDS, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw something in Africa. A lot of the great powers are trying to increase their influence on the continent and a hotspot could flare up there in the 2020s.
@@LearningMilitary I could also see civil war within the US in the next 10-15 years if the path y'all are on doesn't change
@@LearningMilitary I sincerely doubt the US could "win" a war with Iran. It's bigger, wealthier, and better governed than Iraq and Afghanistan (neither of which we could "defeat", btw.) No air force has ever won a war. It takes boots on the ground for that and, to be blunt, the US ain't got the boots any more, and barely has the logistical capability to get them to Iran. (The US has military personnel in ~ 170 countries - that's spread pretty thin, like the last days of the Roman Empire.) This last point applies double or triple for China, Russia, and India. If India invaded Australia, the US would have to go nuclear to stop them.
Canada and Finland should buy Gripen 👍🏻
What an airforce needs is a cost effective system.
Most people do not understand this.
F35 export success is due to political pressure from the US to buy it.
Norway will spend half its total defence budget on this aircraft for a long time, that is insane.
I know that the piloted in Norway and Denmark wanted Gripen and it met their specifications.
Flight hour cost:
Gripen - 6500$
F35 - 40.000$
I not mad because its was expensive, im mad because the technology we perfected over the years with our money got stolen by the enemy ( because of bad cybersecurity )
The main "issue" with the F-35 is it's not reliable or affordable. Pierre was prophetic, but it did make a lot of people rich!
USAF 2020 Fleet Mission Capability rates show that.....the F-35A has the highest MC rate of any fighter in the inventory. Unit price is lower than any Western fighter on the market, minus the Super Hornet, which put in its last orders for US Navy last year. Even the Gripen E and Su-35 cost more than the F-35A.
Great vid! Thanks, it's a shame, it's such a sexy aircraft.
yup looks great on paper lol
The fix made to the helmet by changing the main liquid screen added 450 grams to the device, resulting in a very over-weigh helmet : 3 kilograms plus (6 lbs) added on the pilot's neck during high G maneuvers....!!!!
Jack of many trades, master of none. Dumb idea.
Pierre Osprey love your comment
Its the price the pilots helmet is an arm and a leg
a fighter nearly as heavy as F15 with an engine outputting nearly the same power as twin F15 engines, this big elephant always in lots of stress.... and for a fighter to fly above Mach 1 for only a minute is a joke
More interesting, is the concept correct? Stealth means lower availability + lower payload = much much fewer missiles delivered per dollar. True, an increase in capability with stealth and all.
Furthermore, this amazing computer power and sensor systems. These could be put on any aircraft, no? They seem a bit like a crutch.
F35 can carry more payload than f18 it doesn’t always need to be stealthy
@@GGG19872 Trying to have your cake and eat it.
@No Body ok and?
Whyyyyyyyy do they keep trying to retire the A-10! That beast spits thousands of rounds of freedom, retiring it is like kicking a bald eagle and this is coming from a Canadian lmao.
To replace F-16? Fail, it's to maintence intensive to do that.
To replace A-10? Fail. No internal AIM 9X sidewinder. Already making Close Air Support difficult. Gun doesn't work at the moment. Poor targeting.(2020 report may have been improved.) Also not an long loiter time. USAF has been considering A-29 Super Tucano or AT 6 Wolverine.
Weakness. Forward facing radar may give it away. B-2 has downward facing radar.
I knew it was a pos before they won the contract, the F-35 is going to be SU-57 food.
No it will not. They will make hundreds if not thousands of F35s whereas Russia will only ever have a tiny fleet of SU-57s without the engines they were designed with. The SU57 is a weak attempt at countering the Raptor which is what would be used to fight aircraft like that anyways
F-35 will always have first-look/first-shoot vs the Su-57 due to signature and sensors. SU-57 RCS is pathetic in comparison, and there’s a huge ? as to what Russia’s actual capabilities are in fielding AESA radars for the Su-57 or any fighter.
C++ is a cool programming language, but it is an expensive and error prone language.
Use java or C# ffs! Its the same thing
@@10000years There is only C++ and no competitors for performant systems.
@@abram730 the future is now old man
I agree, I used Visual C++ for RF synthesizer test and it was difficult upgrade change the code.
@@abram730 Rust and Carbon. C++ and C still function fine and helped with how quickly the software could be developed due to the availability of c and c++ engineers.
The top of the line aircraft in the 1940’s was the Spitfire which costs British sterling pound 9,500 and now the 5th generation fighters costs $100 million + per copy. I think armaments manufacturers taking dumb taxpayers for a ride as the 7th generation fighter in another 20 years will cost $ 1 billion for each plane .
Basic economics and inflation should be taken into account. A lightweight F-5 has a heavier payload than a B-17 bomber of that era. A single F-35A could have won the European Theater war in less time than it took for tens of thousands of aircraft to bomb, kill people by the tens of thousands, and shoot each other down. Economy of scale + capability of scale need to be factored to make sense of what you’re looking at in this case. The comparison with a Spitfire is a false equivalency argument with no real merit.
Israel seems to like the F35. No one else does.
Pilots love it.
Uk pilots love it
What a waste of money.
That thing is a death trap
Have you not looked at the mishap rates? It’s literally the safest multi-variant fighter program in the world.
This video at several times mentions that the program is still early in it's lifecycle so its good that they are finding the issues now. They fail to mention that the first flight of the plane is over 15 years ago ... The plane is only capable of mach 1.1 without developing damage that will require heavy maintenance.,. How is that not a fundamental failure? How could everyone involved in the program both at Lockheed and in the government not be fired?? A mistake that ridiculous at any job would result in you being fired.
It's just a staggering drop in expectations and accountability for how a government contract should be treated.
The Pentagon has put a decision on approving full-rate production of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 on indefinite hold, as officials remain unable to say when the fighter jet will be ready for combat testing that’s been delayed repeatedly since 2017.
The F35A maiden flight was in 2006, far more then enough time to have matured out as as a program: it's problems are still many.
F-16 has over 1000 deficiencies, many of which are TCTOs (Time Compliant Technical Orders), at least one of which resulted in a fatality recently.
JSF’s supposed 800+ “deficiencies” are broken down over 3 different airframe types, most of which are combat software desires, not anything even remotely safety-related, and many being wish-list items from the services that never existed in the contracts. Everything you read about JSF in the inept media brothels is click-bait written by abject ignoramuses who don’t know an APU from a Radar, and have no business commenting on anything aviation-related.
Retired, Naval Aviator, masters in Electrical engineering, many hours combat, maintenance test....and you are a....game boy pilot???
@@raywhitehead730 Not a game pilot. Been in aerospace and defense since the 1970s, specific to fighters, their weapons systems, air planning, RDT&E, with many family members in the same lines of work dating back to F-86.
If you're interested, read: "F-35 From Concept to Cockpit, 871pgs" written by all the subsystems engineering program leads and test pilots.
You will see brilliant solution after solution in that book, meant for other AeroEs to study.
Anytime someone talks about problems with JSF, I point them to mishap rates. All 3 variants are the safest fighter designs ever built. The numbers are brutally unfair in this respect.
USAF should acquire a bunch of JAS 39 Gripen.
Contractors rip off the tax payers.
It’s massive dud aircraft expensive unreliable vulnerabilities will never go away
More reliable than anything else. Notice that when they publish reliability rates for other fighters, they don't include their necessary attached combat systems like ECM, FLIR, Recce, or other pods that are bolted-on to the aircraft.
All these types of systems are integrated into the JSF avionics and airframe. Even with that, they generate twice the availability of the AV-8B, and 72-95% rates in operational USAF squadrons with the F-35A.
DOT&E report includes all fleet data, which lumps in test, training, and development aircraft that either have constant additional work being performed on them, or don't need all the combat systems to be 100% if they're never leaving the US.
There are fighter training and conversion or RAG squadrons where new pilots learn to fly F-35s before they get assigned to operational squadrons.
Nobody cares if a training bird has 100% RAM up-to-date, or if it has all the latest weapons integration, radar modes, new IR sensors, all its weapon pylons, fully up-to-date Technical Orders (that aren't safety related), etc.
Every single one of those things shows up as a deficiency in the DOT&E report.
@@LRRPFco52 hope lockheed martin sees this bro
@@MozTS They know all this better than anyone. They make a lot of the older generation pods for teen fighters, which don't get included with aircraft availability and maintenance rates in all the open-sources.
Within a squadron, you can bet that they're always chasing full mission capability rates with their necessary combat systems.
Take an F-16C Block 50/52 Squadron for example. If the HARM Targeting Pod doesn't work, their whole primary mission profile is compromised since they do S-DEAD.
But in fleet availability rate reports, they'll only list whether the jet itself could fly, radar working, and other systems inside the jet.
Look at the wings on the f-35 compared to the body. There's no way those little wings can maneuver in a dog fight that fat of a plane.
One squadron of only ten F35c costs 1.2 BILLion Dollars in 2021. WTF.
One squadron of Rafales or Typhoons costs 1.7 billion in 2021, for far less capability. One squadron of F-35As costs $934.8 million.
Going into an operational setting, you get the performance of multiple aircraft for less cost, with greater lethality and survivability, so JSF is the most affordable fighter option on the market right now, even the more expensive B and C models.
I could summarize this video in about 10 seconds
I can do it in 1 second: Clickbait
why the channel subscribers this low?
Air Forces Times July 1
2019, reported that the average MC rate for all F35A was less then 50% for the year 2018. Reported by Stephen Losey. For the Air Force Times. Since then...things have not gotten better.
what a mess
F-35 is already old technology. It took way too long to develop and it's still not mature. You can't maintain this aircraft in remote places if you want to keep the stealth coating intact and that limits where it can be used if you can get it working in the first place just like the F-22 and B-2 stealth bomber. These are all a big waist of money and time. Upgrade the F-16 and re-engine the B-52.
F-35 has the most durable stealth coating of any stealth aircraft.
It's not old since no rival stealth technologies and it has OTA updates to avionics and hardware updates for optical sensors
Interesting. USAF and USMC have been doing disbursed basing operations and FARPs for years now. Maintainers say it’s so much easier to service than an F-16, and you basically can do it out of backpacks. The VLO coatings and RAM don’t need to be serviced every flight. There are former F-16 phase maintainers who complain that they don’t get their hands dirty anymore, and want to go back to the F-16 where they could actually do work sifting through thousands of feet of copper wiring harnesses. F-35 is mostly fiber optic and has compartmentalized ElectroHydrostatic Actuators (EHAs), so it’s much simpler in terms of control systems architecture, more robust, less failure-prone, and far superior to anything in the 4th Generation. They also integrated multiple electrical and starter subsystems from previous gen Environmental and Electrical systems into an Integrated Power Pack with 270 Volts DC available, split through several lines. It’s a revolutionary approach to just basic flight and electrical systems compared with legacy designs.
🇮🇹.OH..NO!! ERA MEGLIO L' F14 TOMCAT
Hippies came up with this plane....
Did you know that the F-35 cannot land vertically with a payload? The bounce of the landing can damage the weapons attached under the plane and so is unable to do so! Either you use all your weapons or you land like a normal plane. This subject was discussed in a documentary on the UK forces training to land the plane on their aircraft carrier and unable to do so vertically because of that issue🤦🏻
Opposite is true. The F-35B can land with more payload than fixed wing conventional landing fighters on carriers. It has impressive bring-back capability than neither the AV-8B nor F/A-18C had. If a documentary claimed that, you can write that program off as a source of factual information and refrain from watching their garbage again in the future.
My comment is specific to vertical landing. Due to the bounce created by the weight of the plane when landing vertically, it is recommended not to do so with full weapons payload. I'm sure you are right about the conventional landing!
@@xaviera.7441 The only way to bring-back to an LHD is to land vertically. They did extensive weapons configuration testing in all conditions, and the early handful of F-35Bs were overweight, so they had increased descent rate in hot weather.
They put all 3 variants on an emergency weight loss program and got the empty weights down to where they needed to be 640 F-35s ago.
The B model generates insane amounts of thrust once the top doors open to feed the engine more air, which can generate 40,000lb of thrust in STOVL mode (no AB).
On final, the internal fuel is depleted to a certain minimum of maybe 2000lbs, which leaves you 6000lbs for weapons. They don't even take off with 6000lbs of weapons most of the time.
B Model can carry 2 internal GBU-12s or 8 SDBs, 2x AIM-120s at 335lb each, and USMC will often load up 4x GBU-12s externally.
If you didn't drop any bombs for some reason, and it was a really hot day, you could still bring back.
Alice from wonderland
STILL WAR "virgin not proofen
A trillion to maintain, and having to fix these 13 category one deficiencies sound financially scary.
13 Cat 1 across 3 different variants, none of which have threatened life or safety, already fixed before the report was filed. Welcome to Pentagon accounting, where offices get paid millions to find problems that have already been fixed.
@@LRRPFco52 if we have multiple instance of this " problem finding" process the cost could be astronomical.
@@tysonminlo4938 The DOT&E office should be shut down. It's the most counter-productive thing associated with the JSF program.
Engineers, technicians, and maintenance personnel waste up to 25% of their time filling out reports on what they could be fixing instead of fixing it. When you scale it, you start to see how it slows progress.
Even with that said, the F-35A now has the highest readiness rates of any USAF fighter.
@@LRRPFco52 wow, i'm sure this dept.will survive all budget reviews or cuts. I hope someone can intervene and help the program reach its true potential.
4:32 let's abord mission and sanction Russia...
what news its propaganda
This thing never looked promising in real life, only the insane sales pitches made. The problems were clear from the start and are still there, the further it gets in development the more arrise instead of getting solved. This is a technology testbed not a real life war enviorment fighter. I hate that my country as many others got bullied, pressured, bribed or just bamboozeled into buying this flying brick. They are loosing an ocean on money on this thing and the US is using its power to bully other countries to buy it to spread the loss.
Everything is actually opposite of what you portray. Other counties asked for JSF and the UK was one of the early parents before it even materialized into JSF. When Air Force chiefs of foreign nations see the F-35 capes brief and hear from their own pilots who have been exposed to it, they order them immediately if they can.
Blockchain. It stands out in the area of compartmentalization. Blockchain adoption can fix most of those software and logistics issues.
But that means another 10 years to rewrite the code.
It's all fix now thee f35 is one bad ass weapon go USA
AmeriHELL