If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon Anyone who has ever misplaced their car keys can sympathize with the US military, which has reportedly lost one of its F-35 stealth fighters after the pilot ejected but the aircraft continued flying, and is now seeking public help to find it. The plane in question, a US Marine Corps F-35B said to belong to one of the Marine …
I reckon it was aliens. More specifically, First Contact is about to be from their lawyers on the subject of patent infringement.
It's an interesting design challenge though. Make an aircraft that's as stealthy as possible. So unlike civilian aircraft, probably don't want transponders or black boxes squawking it's location, even if it has crashed. I guess there's a lot of risks that that could be detected, spoofed to turn it on, the intelligence value from an intact black box recorder, or even just the potential extra noise from having something like that plumbed in.
The F-104 was notorious for crashes, but in the vast majority of cases bird strikes were the principal cause.
The F-35 does not even have that excuse to fall back on. Over-complicated and badly designed, it was a failure since the drawing board.
The F-104 was the Widowmaker. The F-35 is the Blue Scream of Death.
Eh, the number of aircraft branded "widow-maker", "flying coffin", etc over the years is a mile long at this point. Most of them earn that reputation with test pilots who's job involves bravely finding and pointing out such flaws while hopefully surviving.
The F-35 is trash, but most of the recent gen small airframes have had potentially lethal teething problems, most of which got resolved. I'd love to have a military where both the F-22 and F-35 didn't have defective cabin air supplies at launch. That's not the world we live in sadly.
But how many Osprey crews have we lost? How many Blackhawks? The F-104 was a handful, but while it was unforgiving it wasn't defective. The truly defective aircraft are the ones that deserve the monikers. Time will tell if the F-35 is likely to kill it's crews or just our bank accounts.
my old man was an RAF loadmaster and armorer, he had a few postings but got on with pilots who flew lightnings. Those were notorious for being cramped, very fast and thirsty, the pilots on intercept were often flying back on fumes and none of them wanted to ever eject due to the cramped cockpit shape. The pilots loved to fly them though and even with one engine failure they were still fast. They were known as flying coffins more for the lack of space.
Mishak,
Did the rolling landing for the 'C' variant (used by the Brits) solve the issue of maybe having to dump munitions before landing on the carrier in hot climates?P
Not sure, but almost certainly yes. Although it's the B (STOVL) variant by the way. I've seen film of it done on a TV program - so it's obviously been done by test pilots. But the program to make sure it's viable in actual operations is only starting now. Prince of Wales is in the US for trials of this (SRVL), as well as various drone testing.
The F35 can I believe already carry more munitions back to the carrier than the Harrier, and at greater ranges - but it makes sense to learn the limits of what's possible. I'm sure you can always carry more. And of course if you're providing top-cover for troops on the ground, you need to be able to carry a wingload of bombs - but you might not have a target to drop them on, and it's a waste to chuck them into the sea. The more you carry, the more air-support you can give at short notice.
F35 is also a weird design. It can only carry a small weapons payload (in its internal weapons bay) and remain stealthy. Physical size is the limit here, not weight. So it's designed to be dropping small amounts of precision ordnance on the enemy's air defence network for the first part of any peer-level conflict. And only carry the big stick once that threat is dealt with. I'd imagine peer naval warfare is similar, given that everything I've read suggests that the best air defence kit available is deployed on warships.
People keep saying the F-35 is a failure, which is a bit weird, given that almost all the information on its performance is classified, so the only people able to make that call should be working at the Pentagon...
The US is fairly open about this stuff sometimes. So there's been a couple of lengthy reports from the GAO on the F-35. Being the GAO, they're mostly from a cost perspective, but highlight a lot of the issues over it's lifetime. Many of those seem to be down to being designed by committee, creating problems that resulted in delays or rework or if there's been a lot of scope-creep and bloat that have made the aircraft(s) less useful. Then there have been a few reported incidents and groundings, but AFAIK that's pretty normal, ie something went wrong, so ground the fleet until you've figured out why.
Also curious how current events will change aircraft development. So there's been much news about the F-16s recently, which have a reputation for being a bit delicate and need a lot of logistics. The F-35 seems to be all that and more, so if simpler, more rugged designs like Saab's Gripen will be the future.
Jellied Eel,
The US GAO is very open about the problems with the F35 program. But that doesn't mean it's been a failure. It just means it's been even more expensive than originally planned, and delayed. And the software is extremely hard to update. But you can now buy an F35 for somewhere around $85m - which is about what the most up-to-date Typhoon would cost. Both aircraft are very similar in their avionics capabilities, including sneaky radars that can do electronic attack / electronic warfare at the same time as being very good radars. However the F35 is even better at "sensor fusion" than the Typhoon - that's collating lots of intelligence into integrated and easily readable information for the pilot - and it's noticeable that the F35 is now selling like hot cakes. So it can't be all bad. It's also got stealth, unlike any other plane you can buy - F22 isn't in production and B21 isn't for sale (even if anyone else could afford them). However the F35 costs several times as much per flight hour - some of which is because the tech isn't mature (it was supposed to be cheaper) and some of which is the downsides of stealth coatings.
Supposedly the B21 has a super stealth coating that won't need regular (and expensive) maintenance. I'll believe that when I see it.
Also curious how current events will change aircraft development. So there's been much news about the F-16s recently, which have a reputation for being a bit delicate and need a lot of logistics. The F-35 seems to be all that and more, so if simpler, more rugged designs like Saab's Gripen will be the future.
I'd say that the war in Ukraine has shown the value of stealth tech even more starkly. The Russian air force is over ten times the size of Ukraine's, and yet has entirely failed to be able to operate over Ukrainian air space - or knock out such a small, mostly obsolete, force. Admittedly Ukraine have suffered losses and also have probably doubled the size of their force with loads of spares and whole jets from Eastern European NATO members.
But the Russian air force has been mostly reduced to patrolling and lobbing missiles (mostly at civilian targets) from inside Russia. And that's against Ukraine's integrated air defence, which has inferior equipment to Russia's, and smaller numbers. If you want to fight an air war, and NATO do - being far more reliant on air power than the artillery-heavy Russians, then you need to be dealing with those air defences. Something NATO train for, and the Russians supposedly don't. Germany and Italy are even buying the ECR version of the Typhoon - specifically designed for suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD). As well as F35s - which are designed for the same job. The UK were already in the middle of updating our existing Typhoons to a similar standard and operate F35.
Gripen was designed by Sweden to operate in austere conditions (from under specially strenghened road bridges), with small crews of reservists where only a couple of the maintainers needed to be fully trained. And with just basic tools. And that's because they were expecting to be fighting the Soviets - and heavily outnumbered. So it would be the ideal plane for Ukraine. The reason they're getting F16 is not because it's best for them, but because there are loads of spare ones.
But what you need for defending yourself at home, is different to what you might need if you're defending an ally overseas. And I think the ideal is to have a mix. Lots of affordable 4th generation stuff, and enough stealth jets to allow them to take apart the enemy's air defence network, and make the fight against the enemy air force as unfair as possible.
> The reason they're getting F16 is not because it's best for them, but because there are loads of spare ones.
That, and the ones they're getting from The Netherlands and Belgium etc are older variants which are almost life-expired and were about to be replaced, so why not send them to a worthy cause?
However the F35 costs several times as much per flight hour - some of which is because the tech isn't mature (it was supposed to be cheaper) and some of which is the downsides of stealth coatings.
Yep, it depends what success looks like, and how you measure it.
But the Russian air force has been mostly reduced to patrolling and lobbing missiles (mostly at civilian targets) from inside Russia. And that's against Ukraine's integrated air defence, which has inferior equipment to Russia's, and smaller numbers. If you want to fight an air war, and NATO do - being far more reliant on air power than the artillery-heavy Russians, then you need to be dealing with those air defences. Something NATO train for, and the Russians supposedly don't.
I think that's again one of those issues where you have to define success, and with a heavy dose of propaganda. There may also be some politics in a constutiional sense, ie Russia has limits on the forces it can use outside of a formal declaration of war. The 'mostly at civilian targets' is also a bit of a myth as we're expected to take it on trust that they were civilian targets. The NYT just posted an article on this-
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/world/europe/ukraine-missile-kostiantynivka-market.html
But evidence collected and analyzed by The New York Times, including missile fragments, satellite imagery, witness accounts and social media posts, strongly suggests the catastrophic strike was the result of an errant Ukrainian air defense missile fired by a Buk launch system.
This stuff happens and has undoubtedly happened before in Ukraine, and it's long been a known issue with GBAD. What goes up, must come down. It's also debateable if Ukraine has an inferior air defence network, after all, it's been given some of the latest and greatest NATO systems, but Ukraine is a huge country and despite media claims, the systems almost certainly aren't '97% successful'. Russia has now got experience in countering those systems, and it's own SEAD. This seems to be successful as Russia appears to be launching more attacks using it's FAB-500 and possibly FAB-1500 glide bombs. This is also part of measuring success. The media spins this as success or failure in capturing territory. Ukraine's much hyped counter-offensive has taken maybe 50km^2 and a couple of small villages, but at a very large cost. Russia hasn't launched strategic bombing raids and Groznyfied or Sarajevo'd Kiev, but maybe it doesn't want to.
It's interesting times though. Yesterday there were reports of Russia using a longer range drone to attack an airfield around 70km away from the front lines, supported by a recon drone. It's very much a drone war, so how that will play into NATO doctrine and future decisions. We've already demonstrated SEAD during the GW2's 'Shock and Awe' multi-media extravaganza with a lot of drones used to expose Iraq's air defences around Baghdad and other cities. Russia's followed the same doctrine with ancient Bears carrying modified Kelt and other long-range missiles acting as decoys to saturate air defences around carriers, and has been doing the same thing in Ukraine.
Which I think still goes back to whether the F-35 is the best aircraft. Sure, it's assumed stealthy, but maybe Russia can detect it. It's had some upgrades, but isn't stealthy if it's carrying external stores. Or it's more powerful radar might extend it's engagement envelop, but if it's radiating, it's no longer stealthy. What does seem clear is Ukraine seriously lacks CAS, and as the old saying goes, quantity has a quality all of it's own.
Well, the Pentagon appear to have commissioned a new build variant of the F-15 Eagle (a 50 year old design), the F-15EX, which is supposed to 'complement' the F-22 and F-35 aircraft, but sounds like a sticking-plaster to keep the number of front-line fighters within acceptable limits while the F-22s and F-35s are in maintenance and especially the latter, being 'upgraded' to give them the capabilities that were promised when they were built.
Apparently, the per-hour flight costs for the F-15EX are half of that of the F-22, and they will fly for 3-4 times as long before needing major maintenance, and the cost per aircraft is cheaper than the F-15C that will be withdrawn, let alone either of the F-22 or F-35, and it's been enhanced to be able to carry more and more diverse weapons than the newer aircraft.
And they don't tend to fall out of the sky!
Peter Gathercole,
The aim was never, so far as I was aware, to build an entire fleet of F35s. Stealth is more expensive, and imposes limitations on the physical design of the aircraft. Plus it's only needed in specific circumstances. Also the F35 is only stealthy with a light bomb load. Fill the wings with bombs and I'd imagine it's more stealthy than an F15E with a wingload of bombs, but probably not by enough to matter all that much. So for those ciircumstances, why not have the cheaper aircraft?
especially the latter, being 'upgraded' to give them the capabilities that were promised when they were built.
This is just a basic misunderstanding or military purchasing. Almost nothing is bought nowadays with its final abilities installed. Or even exisiting. Everything is designed with development in mind.
The Block 4 upgrade for F35 involved a new radar that was in development and had a requirement for new higher power levels, which required an engine upgrade. This meant it was late - should have come in a bit before 2020 I think - now isn't due until next year. Or the year after. The fact that it was called Block 4 should be a clue that it wasn't meant to be included in the original aircraft purchased.
This is the same thing that happened with Typhoon. The Tranche 1s were to be air-to-air only, with an "austere" air-to-ground capability. We're now up to Tranche 4, which Italy and Germany have just ordered a bunch of. Which has a new all-singing-all-dancing radar and all sorts of electronic warfare goodies.
I believe they call it spiral development. You keep improving the tech, and often are able to retrofit the new tech into at least some of the older models. For something like Typhoon, or F35, that are expected to have a 50 year service life, this is entirely unsurprising.
When the first F15s came along we were replacing whole classes of combat aircraft after 10-20 years. Nowadays we're building airframes that last a lot longer, and we're designing in space for upgrades, with plans to keep individual planes around for at least 20-30 years. Or if you're a B52 model H, built in the 70s, we're replacing your engines with the plan to keep you flying for the next 40 years.
I take issue with this!
iI have not looked up references, but I remember the F-35 being 'introduced' into service with almost no working weapons. Some of the weapons were ready, but the integration with the flight systems was not complete, and several of the software updates necessary to get them to work were very late. I believe the same was true with some modes of the radar.
It took 6 years to get from Block 2B to Block 3F (the first fully capable release according to the Wikipedia) being installed in all F-35s previously delivered. This really meant that the F-35 was delivered without all of the features that had been promised.
OK, I understand that new capabilities are always added to aircraft as the design matures, but it seems to me that the F-35 has taken a long time to mature.
Again, as I understand it, delivery problems for the F-35 has meant that the numbers in service are less than planned, and the F-22 (which is no longer being built) has had service restrictions imposed on it. The upgraded F-15SE, which had previously been proposed by Boeing looks like it was cut down and rushed through, dare I say it, as an emergency measure, having previously been turned down by US DoD. Although the F-15X and EX are not the fully featured and stealthy F-15SE, the fact that Boeing was ready to ramp up production of the X and EX variants meant that the US Air Force could rapidly procure a fair number of them so that the limited number of flying F-22s and F-35s could be deployed where they were of most use, with the new F15s replacing both older F15 and F16s as they are retired.
The expected front-line role of the F-15X and EX s as a flying weapons platform, able to carry and launch large amounts of ordnance as part of an integrated flying wing in conjunction with other aircraft. The fact that is is also able to take part in close up action with still impressive capabilities means that it is still useful in that role against all but the most advanced aircraft from other countries.
It is a stopgap. But it looks like it is one the USAF desperately needs.
The F35 has been in operational service for almost ten years. There have been 7 crashes to date, out of 965 aircraft built.
Admittedly that's only from a quick Google, but seems about right from stuff I've read. And at least a couple of those crashes were test flights.
The problem with the F35 is cost and delays. The idea that it's either dangerous or crap is ridiculous.
One of the problems with both the F-22 and the F-35 is that the oxygen generator which keeps the pilot breathing appears to be flawed. This has put quite low operational ceilings on both of these aircraft for the safety of the pilot.
This has caused a number of crashes (mainly F-22s), and a much larger number of near-misses. This is what makes these aircraft less safe, and seriously compromises the usefulness of both aircraft.
That joke dates from February 1974 and was written by Robert Calvert. The track was 'Bier Garten' on the LP 'Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters'.
The album was written as a tribute to the dead airmen and Bob didn't hold back his contempt for the German Defence Ministry and Lockheed. With music by Hawkwind and friends some songs from the album became popular but if you listen to the lyrics and understand what's going on ........
Reminds me of how Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe met in North Africa.
After an artillery piece which Milligan's gun crew was fired, it went rolling off down the sand dune for want of being properly emplaced.
Followed by Milligan, who, running down the hill after it, asked the first potential witnesses in Eccles voice, "Anybody seen a gun?"
> for want of being proplerly emplaced.
By Secombe's unit I believe.
The retelling I've heard was that Secombe's unit was at the bottom of a cliff and the gun was at the top and came over the cliff missing them sitting in their lorry by a few feet. Milligan then appeared round the rear loading flaps saying "has anyone seen a gun?"
Secombe then replied with "I don't know, what colour was it?"
"it would be the ideal aircraft for Blofeld/Dr Evil type character to take control of and fly in to their lair."
Or stringfellow hawke.
Can't those fancy surveillance satellites see it, or are they still looking for balloons?
Still, at least they know the stealth works, I guess.
"Stealthiness" is really a trick that relies on how radar works, and relies (or has relied, depending on the aircraft) on making the airframe a poor reflector of the radar frequencies that "the enemy" use, and shaping the body so that any reflected energy is directed away from the radar that's trying to find it.
The use of highly-sensitive, bi-static radar (where a network on transmitters and receivers are used) can be used to track them (not easy, as all the nodes need to be synchronised to very, very small time margins). I've never found a trust-worthy source to cite, but it has been claimed that the mobile phone network was used one year to track an F-117 at the Farnborough Airshow, which didn't go down well with the military.
I've found a couple of links that may be of interest. Pretty dodgy website though, read with caution:
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/20/stealth_detection_system_disappears/
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/21/readers_turn_searchlight_on_stealth/
@ Mishak Slight correction to your post (from the articles I've linked) - it was a B2 tracked at Farnborough, an F117 was shot down after allegedly / possibly being spotted by a similar, unnamed tech.
icon? Pint for Lester. RIP
Way back, when the RAF were just starting to get F35, there was a write up in one of the aeroplane magazines (so fully public information, and thus not necessarily the entire story) from the view point of the RAF typhoons that had been playing tag against F35.
It was stated that the F35 was very difficult to detect from the front (or some such wording). The implication being that the stealthiness works fine from the front arc (Stealth = very difficult to detect, not impossible), but that the F35 is somewhat les stealthy if viewed from the sides or rear.
Stealth isn't magic. It doesn't work in all directions, and it doesn't make you radar invisible. Just harder to detect. And you have to design your flight profile carefully to avoid getting spotted.
But the idea of air tactics is to get your shot off at the enemy, before they can shoot at you. And then they're hopefully dead before you can accidentally end up in a fair fight. The same is true for SEAD/DEAD (suppression / destruction of enemy air defences). Can you get in missile range of that SAM battery before it can fire one of its missiles at you.
If you get careless, like that F117 over Serbia, where they apparently flew the same route for at least a week - then your magic stealth I-Win button stops working. And then your life becomes increasingly interesting.
I think it's a big clue that European countries are still buying F35. Given that their air forces have been excercising against F35 equipped forces for a few years now. So they must have an idea that it's worth it. Although admittedly the alternatives aren't much cheaper. Cheaper to operate, but the sticker price is similar. A quick Google suggests a new F16 is $65m whereas a Typhoon, Rafale or F35 is probably $80-90m. These being extremely unreliable approximations. I'd imagine an F15X is going to be similar too.
But there are enough independent people buying into stealth to suggest that it's real, and that talk of it being rubbish is inspired by deliberate controversialists or in some cases directly by Russia, who don't have it and therefore want to rubbish it. There were a remarkable number of so-called Western "experts" who used to go on Russia Today to tell us all how shit the F35 is.
"Any extinct volcanoes/large caves in the vicinity?"
The nearest extinct volcano is probably Mole Hill in Virginia (a couple miles West of Harrisberg), which is about 400 miles NNE of the plane going missing, making it well within range ... Not that it would do any good, seeing as your typical Basalt isn't all that likely to be eroded into caves of the super-villain variety. Even any potential lava tubes would have collapsed or become filled in since the last eruption, about 48 million years ago.
What you want for a super-villian cave is a karst landscape, which fortunately for your scenario, exists fairly locally to the crash site[0]. And yes, there are large caves available. However, seeing as the East Coast is heavily populated, these large caves are all tourist-traps, and hardly conducive to white Persian cat stroking.
[0] And of course, now that we know there was indeed a crash, and where, all this babble is pointless
There was this incident in October 1987 of a Harrier on a pre-delivery flight, where the pilot got pulled out through the canopy by the firing of the parachute deployment rocket - the aircraft continued to fly until it crashed into the Irish Sea on fuel exhaustion. The body of the pilot, Taylor Scott was found several days later in Wiltshire.
I think there have been quite a few cases of pilots ejecting - only for the ejection to cause the plane to recover from the "unrecoverable" spin that caused them to pull the handle - and so the plane has merrily flown off into the distance as they float down on their parachutes feeling a bit silly.
> but not before he put the aircraft on autopilot.
So he switches over to autopilot and is promptly ejected by the aircraft?
Was there anything else going wrong shortly beforehand, such as, ooooh, problems with the AE35 unit?
If not, one is left to assume that it was external interference, indicating that SkyNet has started making its first moves, collecting together materiel.
If found, please call DoD...
https://www.pprune.org/military-aviation/654847-usmc-f-35b-crash-17-sep-23-a-2.html#post11504801
> intake blank, designed to plug the air inlet to the aircraft's jet engine when it is not in flight,
A colleague has a very visible strip of red fabric marked "Remove Before Flight" adorning their keyring.
Perhaps larger versions could be attached to such parts on an aircraft ?
They normally are bright orange.
I think this was a tired deck crew on the run back from a 9 month long deployment, where they'd had almost no shore leave because of Covid. And so the way to deal with it will be better procedures. Or robot ground crew I suppose...
The Chinese high sea fishing fleet has been seen to deploy boats into Lake Moultrie and Marion in large numbers. How they arrived at the land-locked bodies of water is not yet clear.
When asked, the commanding officer stated "Chairman Xi is a huge fan of Lake Marion trout, that's all!"
"How they arrived at the land-locked bodies of water is not yet clear."
may be, this way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo
As for any (rainbow) trout that they may catch whilst there, they can sell as Salmon, back in China
Officials with Joint Base Charleston confirmed that debris from the jet had been located in the Indiantown area of Williamsburg County, reported TV station WCBD.
https://www.newsweek.com/missing-f-35-update-plane-debris-located-1827974
The pilot kept putting it to sleep instead of turning off every night because it took so long to start in the morning. On the next flight the wifi wouldn't work, then explorer seized up, and then it opened the canopy, ejected him, and set autopilot on itself before whizzing off into the distance.
Some American gov't person was moaning on (according to the Times) about how someone should've been able to track it. Well, stealth plane, durrrr.
Dear El Reg,
You have made a major error in this article.
You stated that the F35 was worth $80m. Might I suggest that this is unlikely to be true anymore. And that after it comes to rest, either in the lake or on the ground, that the repair bill is going to be a considerable fraction of (if not more than) the original value.
babylonbee.com /cleanArticle/zelensky-upset-to-hear-one-of-his-jets-ruined
Babylon Bee - Zelensky Upset To Hear One Of His Jets Ruined
NEW YORK, NY — As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in the U.S. to petition the U.N. for additional funds for the ongoing war with Russia, he was angered to learn one of his F-35s had been carelessly ruined by the American military.
"I mean…what gives, you guys?" Zelensky asked American military leaders. "That was one of your - I mean my - best planes! You owe me 80 million dollars now. Pay up, and add an additional 33 trillion for the inconvenience. For the war, you know?"[...]
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