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The photographer is not in a great position to capture the crazy manuvers.

In the late 1990s, I was learning rock climbing in tbe eastern sierra. At that time Navy, Air Force, and Marine pilots would cross the crest of the sierras, and attempt to enter China Lake air space, without getting detected by the radar array in our north range.

To do this they flew up the San Juaquin river valley (through Kings Canyon NP) rolled inverted and barely cleared the pass, then pulled down while inverted in either Whitney or Onion Valley. We were watching this from the mountain peaks several hundred feet above the planes.

Prior to the fall of the Soviets and the Berlin wall, we were all expecting a war with Russia, and this very dangerous training was actually encouraged.
 
It was tacitly encouraged during WW2 training. Lot's of pilot stories about "rat-racing" at low level. D.i.ck. Bong once looped the Golden Gate bridge in a P-38, and he wasn't the only one. He was also disciplined for blowing a woman's laundry off her clothesline. Yeager told some good stories, too.

Ever see a Herc do a full vertical wingover? I once did while I was TDY at the Fort Worth Lockheed plant in 2007. Just a Reserve pilot having some fun, I guess. If a Herc can do that, I suppose it can do a full loop, too.
 
Just saw that the F-35 has a towed device that can jam radar and decoy missiles.





Plus some kind of radio frequency countermeasure that can be dispensed. like flares and Chaff.



Gonna be real hard pulling a Whifferdill or doing any Jinking with that big trailer hanging back there.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk
 
True, but if it's using datalink from drones to paint targets then active sensors need not be used. It has a few different ways to skin a cat.
Those data links are likely going to get fried/jammed/spoofed/hacked by any near peer opponents.

Remember when that 1 Russian plane shut down all the electronics on the Donald Duck?
 
Gonna be real hard pulling a Whifferdill or doing any Jinking with that big trailer hanging back there.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk
Designed by committee. It has one of everything on it.
Vertical lift fan, Towed arrays. "Float the bouy" :)

https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/b49681be-f8c6-4f26-b130-bcca25db1114

A gun with 50 bullets. That sort of might go in the general direction intended.

That video sounds like it was narrated by the builder of that experimental crappy sailboat I bought. He would explain away all the design flaws like they were features.

Yeah, remember that Stealth feature this was supposed to have? Well, forget it, they can see you. But just deploy this $50 transmitter on a wire, and you are safe.
 
I still hold the view that we spent way too much money on a F117 replacement.
The US Navy gets a stealth attack plane, but with limited range. I believe the deep strike role will be covered by a drone (Weaponized x-47b). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B
The US Marines get a AV8B replacement, a stealth attack plane to justify their light carriers (LHAs).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_helicopter_assault
The Air Force gets screwed. They would be better investing in a long range interceptor based on the F22.
The US Army also gets screwed, because none of the F35 varients is a replacement for the A10 warthog.

So instead of devolping aircraft that actually meet the top three procurement priorities, we blew our entire defense budget on this turkey.
 
F-35s are such a joke, it’s embarrassing.
Why the change of heart? I thought you loved this plane? Wins every dogfight from BVR, pilots love them, etc.
Recently flew in theater with them. Not going to get into the specifics. They’re good at one thing and one thing only. They’re donkeys.
 
Recently flew in theater with them. Not going to get into the specifics. They’re good at one thing and one thing only. They’re donkeys.
Thanks. I wasn't sure if you were just joking.

Thanks for the feedback. I know it is risky to express any opinion on that plane if you are in the service.

What concerns me more, is that we might be in an air / sea war with China before much longer, and they copied our F-22 and F-35 technology, and made their own variant, which might surpass the F-35 at least assuming they were able to manage quality and so forth.

J-20







Longer range,
Larger plane.
Larger payload.
Stealth.
2 engines, improves survivability.
No helicopter fan ruining the shape.
Canards and extra wing surface, larger control surfaces give more maneuverability.

Needs stronger engines, but wait a few months and they will steal some more plans or buy them from Biden.

And like in WWII, The advantage goes to the country with the strongest manufacturing capacity.
Once China works out the bugs in their initial designs, I would expect them to produce numbers of planes and ships that outnumber us 10 to 1.

Germany had the superior tank technology, and even started making jet planes and missiles, but could not keep up with the manufacturing might of the US.

Today, China has that advantage.
 
Recently flew in theater with them. Not going to get into the specifics. They’re good at one thing and one thing only. They’re donkeys.
Thanks. I wasn't sure if you were just joking.

Thanks for the feedback. I know it is risky to express any opinion on that plane if you are in the service.

What concerns me more, is that we might be in an air / sea war with China before much longer, and they copied our F-22 and F-35 technology, and made their own variant, which might surpass the F-35 at least assuming they were able to manage quality and so forth.

J-20







Longer range,
Larger plane.
Larger payload.
Stealth.
2 engines, improves survivability.
No helicopter fan ruining the shape.
Canards and extra wing surface, larger control surfaces give more maneuverability.

Needs stronger engines, but wait a few months and they will steal some more plans or buy them from Biden.
Yeah, China is pretty scary. We’re the best pilots in the world though, and that is more important than the airframe. That’s how we slayed in Korea when the MiG far surpassed our aircraft in capabilities. The F-22 is still the best A/A fighter in the world and their pilots are **** hot.
 
I never really liked the Fat kid much. Mainly because its price tag and years spent in development hell represent everything wrong with the modern military industrial complex.

But committee built aircraft are not new. The F-4 was a boondoggle in and of itself, and it turned out to be a beast eventually. The F-111 as well to a lesser extent.

That said, the F-35 in all its flavors is a pretty good aircraft as long as you don't pretend it can do everything. The gun software and ammunition problems are really one of weight- because it's completely unneeded.

The EA-18 had its gun removed because it's in no way meant to be used air to air except in self defense; and the weight was realocated elsewhere. Its meant to jam RF, snoop on RF, and kill things that use RF.

The F-35 also has a strong snooping feature with its airframe distributed array and distributed aperture system. It can haul some ordnance internally (bit more now that its bay doors have been cleared IIRC up to 550lb of ordnance) and more externally but it's really best thought of as a flying computer and data node.

Once the Skyborg and XQ-58 systems come online, the F-35 will be something of a control system for a small fleet of UCAVs.

Personally I don't care for this level of integration with technology reliant on data links, but unlike the MQ-4 and MQ-9, at least the link is only as long as the distance to the mothership F-35; not all the way the hell back to Indian Springs.

Also, amazingly enough, I learned that thanks to the new orders, the F-35 is now cheaper than the F-35EX per copy, and even the F-18E/F and EA-18G based on the offers to Finland last week. 12.5 Billion for 64 F-35A copies plus engines, weapons and all the trimmings, versus 14.7 billion for 50 super hornets and 14 Growlers plus engines, weapons and all the trimmings.
 
I was watching "Air Warriors" show about the F35. They were suggesting the Lightning 2 would be replacing the F16 and the A10 Warthog for close air support. Not very damn likely in my opinion.

I remember when the Air Force tried to retire the A10 in 2016. This should have resulted in stripping the AF of the close air support role (the responsibility, the funding, and our fleet of A10s and AC130s) and transfering it to the US Marine Corps.

The A10s are still old and worn down, and they still have primitive avionics and communications. So the USMC should take the AF funding and buy a bunch of brand new A10s with modern ground attack radar and avionics.
 
Within visual range, it's 90% pilot and 10% aircraft anyway. As master fighter pilots such as Yeager and Boyd have conclusively proven.

When the US acquired its' first Mig 15, it was mock-combat tested against our F-86. Yeager flew both planes, and regardless which plane he was in, he always came out on top. Even in the MIG, which had notorious instability problems, and usually couldn't recover from a spin.

BTW read the development history of the B-29. The airplane that prevented the invasion of Japan. Ir was still being debugged when the war ended.
Yeager had a good retelling of that story in his autobiography. Fascinating read.

And its kind of odd but nobody talks about how buggy the B-29 was even by the end of the war.
 
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