There was for a number of years a statutory prohibition on selling the F-22 to any other country (cough cough Japan cough). Japan has in fact bought ~40 F-35s, and there’s rumors of maybe more… and then there was a out-of-left-field idea recently to restart production of the F-22 airframe and jam it full of F-35 sensors etc. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it’s pretty clear that it is going nowhere.
I’ll also admit I can’t keep track of Japan’s incoherent efforts to pursue a domestically-sourced advanced fighter. It’s a saga I’ve vaguely tracked for quite some time, but it always seemed like a total mess.
Making one large enough to house a bunch of F-22s (44’ wingspan, 17’ tall) hurricane-proof is probably rather pricey. You can play around with this calculator to get a sense of the sort of wind loads this hangar might experience at hurricane-force winds (hint: it’s a lot), and then account for the fact that those 130mph wind gusts are going to flinging a lot of … well … shit against the walls / roof of your hangar in addition to the wind load.
In some places people make “hardened aircraft shelters” with a whole bunch of concrete. Those would probably stand up to a hurricane decently well, but they’re very expensive.
Back to the OP thread: Japan now plans to buy an additional 105 Lightning II jets. Deal has yet to be formally approved by the Diet and Trump administration, but if goes through, it would probably guarantee the F-35 program’s survival and longevity once and for all. A death spiral for the death spiral?
And the Japanese crash shows one of the U.S. Navy’s biggest worries: that a single-jet fighter, flying over the ocean, can’t get home if its solitary engine goes out.
(not that this was necessarily engine-related, but it was a huge deal in making the Navy balk over the F-35C for a while)
Two engines also mean roughly double the chances for engine problems, and (as I understand it) even single engine failures on double engine fighter aircraft are often unrecoverable due to speeds, loads, and complexity involved.
I think historically double engines were safer, but on more recent aircraft (i.e F-16 vs. F-15 over the last 20 years) its the reverse.
That’s quite true of some twin engine prop planes. Some modern small civil twins for example are difficult to handle on one engine, for some of their typical pilots, due to the asymmetry. Among modern combat a/c it was somewhat true of the F-14 because the engines were relatively far apart. It’s not particularly true AFAIK of current operational US twin fighters (F-15, F-18, F-22) with engines pretty close together.
See the sub-links on engine related mishaps single and twin. For F-16 and F-15 it varies considerably within each by sub type of F100/F110 engine and in some cases no version of both planes uses the exact same sub type, but the F-16 numbers are definitely higher in general.
The loss of the Japanese F-35, the second total loss of an F-35 in the program’s history, made me think from some press reaction: do they think F-16’s are never lost in normal peacetime operations? 337 a/c in the plane’s history in the USAF and it used to average in the teens per yr ca late 80’s to ca. 2000 though it has since dropped to a range of 0-6 per year, partly due to a smaller fleet but partly from real safety improvements.
In general, yes, but when you look specifically at the F100-229 (the most modern one common to both planes) engine mishaps, it paints a different picture (8 class A mishaps on the F-15 vs. 0 for the F-16, but the F-15 only has 3X the flight hours).
Maybe this is just statistical cherry picking, however.
Like the saying goes, you can always depend on twin engine aircraft. When the first engine quits the second will surely fly you to the scene of an accident.
I don’t think the Navy genuinely had concerns about that. The Navy would happily take an aircraft whose loss rate due to engine failures was 1% higher if it meant it was more capable in other areas. Losses due to engine failures are a relatively small fraction of operational losses generally. The link is for F-15s but won’t be hugely dissimilar from the numbers for Navy aircraft, except that the Navy numbers will have a lot more crashes on landing.
The Navy’s problem - and perhaps not an unreasonable one - was that it didn’t think a single-engined aircraft could carry a big enough payload. The Navy wants twin-engined aircraft because it is used to operating large, heavy missile sleds. The safety issue was probably a canard.
Which brings us to a much more sensible question than the one asked in this thread originally: was the decision to use a shared airframe for the U.S. services (and Royal Navy) a good one in the end?
I don’t think the answer to that is knowable. It would hinge on what the USAF, RAF, USN, RN, & USMC would have done if the JSF program didn’t exist. We don’t know what aircraft they would have if they’d run their own individual procurement programs, or how much they would cost, or what their performance / timeline / quantity would be.
I was going to say that the jury is still out, but it’s probably not knowable at this point, now. We did what we did and didn’t do what we didn’t do. It’s hard to say if things would be different had we gone the other route and just had everyone build their own. I will say that, from past history, advanced air frames often get cancelled when they are individual, vertical projects. Even this one, that had all of the hooks for multi-service and multi-state support has been pretty rocky wrt funding, cuts and even folks trying to pull the plug.
Personally, I think this air frame will be a winner in the end, and an air craft that will be with us for decades, but it’s certainly not been an easy project. Any time you push the technology you are going to have things like this happen, though. And I expect there to still be some serious teething problems going forward. But eventually, they will get worked out, IMHO anyway and FWIW.
I think XT’s point is fair, that it’s hard to see what the services would have done otherwise. But once more: the airframes aren’t actually the same between the three variants; it’s more like they are cousins of each other. The carrier variant has wings that are substantially larger; the STOVL has a big fucking hole in the middle where the lift fan goes, and the CTOL is what it is.
In my opinion, the Air Force pretty much is getting what it would have gotten if there had not been a joint program. The Marine Corps is getting something substantially better than otherwise, and the Navy wishes the whole thing never happened.
But I must also add that if the Air Force had pursued an F-35A in the absence of the other services’ involvement… things probably would not have changed that much from the way they played out. The software probably still would have been a mess, flight test would have taken the same amount of time, and so on. Those problems really had little to do with the jointness of the program. This is merely informed speculation, of course.
It has to be said that despite all its teething problems, the F-35 is looking like a success now. Pilots are reporting that it’s a dream to fly, and I think it’s been scoring something like 20-1 kill ratios against its competitors in wargames. Apparently the low observability is a huge asset, because it’s much harder for smaller, less powerful radars in planes and missiles to track the thing, even if powerful radars on the ground can find it.
If it comes down to $80 million per copy that’s in line with what other air superiority fighters have cost. For example, the last F-14’s cost $38 million per copy in 1998, which is right around $60 million in today’s dollars. The F-16E/F is $50 million per copy. The F-35 is much more advanced. There are now nine partner nations planning on buying about 3100 of them during the program.
I’d say that reports of a death spiral are greatly exaggerated.
Yes, while it was a huge program that seems to have been badly managed, the combination of stealth and IT will enable new tactics that just weren’t possible; Like a flight of F-35 destroying huge numbers of targets by flying over enemy territory, spotting targets, calling in off-board missiles and providing terminal guidance without ever firing a shot themselves. Networked warfare is going to be to 21st century warfare what combined arms warfare was to the 20th century and the F-35 will be a mainstay of it. Hopefully enough of an advantage that it never gets to shine by showing what it could do against a peer adversary.
But the Air Force and Navy wouldn’t have built a plane with space for a big fucking hole in the middle. The point about the program working out for the Marine Corps is well taken, although ISTM that the Marines field far smaller numbers of aircraft than the other branches anyway.