Consider this your weekend assignment. I'm going to kill hogs and hopefully you'll be all over this when I get back.
Consider the A-12, X-32 and F-35.
They couldn't be more different yet they're all connected in a strange yet fascinating way. The A-12, slatted to be the US Navy's next strike fighter...stealthy, a flying wing and designed to penetrate the toughest defenses on the planet unscathed. But things went wrong. Between the Navy adding requirements and specifications...the contractor allowing costs to balloon and the obvious delays all this brought on, the plane was cancelled, the Navy and the contractor were at knifes edge and the entire dept was put on warning. DON'T DO IT THIS WAY EVER AGAIN.
Consider the X-32. Boeing played it straight. They didn't come in with "half" a plane, were well aware of the issues with the A-12..designed an airplane that met all the requirements including the DoD's supposedly number one priority of affordability...and they got beat when the DoD turned around and let Lockheed Martin enter a plane that didn't even have a bomb bay. Additionally my beloved Marine Corps was so infatuated with hot and high performance that they didn't consider a couple of issues...1. lift fans turn into empty weight for 99 percent of an airplane's flight profile and 2. even the Russians didn't succeed in making this work on production vehicles (the crashes etc...are legion on the internet).
Now consider the F-35. We've been dealing with this bullshit for 10 years. When is enough, enough? When do we finally say that we're done, it costs too much and we're not going to keep pumping good money after bad in an obviously failed program?
History tells the story. Lockheed Martin continuing to peddle this jacked up airplane AND still selling production rights to anyone who will build it is telling.
Sequestration will continue. The best thing the military can do is to cancel this program and fund other much needed projects....what say you?
Consider the A-12, X-32 and F-35.
They couldn't be more different yet they're all connected in a strange yet fascinating way. The A-12, slatted to be the US Navy's next strike fighter...stealthy, a flying wing and designed to penetrate the toughest defenses on the planet unscathed. But things went wrong. Between the Navy adding requirements and specifications...the contractor allowing costs to balloon and the obvious delays all this brought on, the plane was cancelled, the Navy and the contractor were at knifes edge and the entire dept was put on warning. DON'T DO IT THIS WAY EVER AGAIN.
Consider the X-32. Boeing played it straight. They didn't come in with "half" a plane, were well aware of the issues with the A-12..designed an airplane that met all the requirements including the DoD's supposedly number one priority of affordability...and they got beat when the DoD turned around and let Lockheed Martin enter a plane that didn't even have a bomb bay. Additionally my beloved Marine Corps was so infatuated with hot and high performance that they didn't consider a couple of issues...1. lift fans turn into empty weight for 99 percent of an airplane's flight profile and 2. even the Russians didn't succeed in making this work on production vehicles (the crashes etc...are legion on the internet).
Now consider the F-35. We've been dealing with this bullshit for 10 years. When is enough, enough? When do we finally say that we're done, it costs too much and we're not going to keep pumping good money after bad in an obviously failed program?
History tells the story. Lockheed Martin continuing to peddle this jacked up airplane AND still selling production rights to anyone who will build it is telling.
Sequestration will continue. The best thing the military can do is to cancel this program and fund other much needed projects....what say you?
The F-35 more and more, both in the U.S. and overseas, has become a jobs program.
ReplyDeleteBob Delaney, an executive at Lockheed Martin, said there are already more than 1,000 jobs associated with the jet in Utah, creating an $80 million economic impact. Nationwide, Delaney said, more than 125,000 jobs are associated with the F-35.
U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch was among those who officially welcomed the first F-35A Lightning II to the base on Friday. The aircraft "will receive a series of structural and systems modifications at Ogden to enhance critical capabilities needed during OT&E testing."
-- Gotta love that "to enhance critical capabilities" IOW to try to make it work well enough to at least pass the watered-down tests, with a thousand people to do it.
That's civilian jobs -- it'll be the reverse in the ranks. news report--
ReplyDeleteA force of 174,000: Corps will cut Marines to save readiness
On the operational side, emerging communities like special operations and cyber also will be spared, said Brig. Gen. William Mullen, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate in Quantico, Va. . .Big-ticket procurement. --Despite the fiscal austerity, the Marine Corps is staking its future readiness on the procurement of a number of big-ticket items, even if that means deeper manpower cuts, Mullen said. By absorbing reductions there, the service can protect projects like the next-generation Amphibious Combat Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. . .Aviation. Likewise, in the aviation community, the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter and CH-53K heavy lift helicopter remain priorities. -- Roll-out is on schedule with 16 F-35s to be stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., by the end of September, he said. Elsewhere, construction projects to support the new aircraft are on schedule. Next year, Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501, which operates the F-35, will relocate from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, S.C. //
Marine depot maintenance, similar to the operation at Hill AFB in my first comment above, will occur at Cherry Point.
Great revisionist history... "Boeing played it straight"
ReplyDeleteX-32 delta wing F-32 proposal 4-tail design is about as different as it gets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32
The you have the compressor stalls in hover. I mean who cares if a few Marines get hurt when the motor flames out in hover to land.
"Boeing demonstrated STOVL and supersonic flight in separate configurations, with the STOVL configuration requiring that some parts be removed from the fighter. " PBS-Nova
"even the Russians didn't succeed in making this work on production vehicles" When did the Russians make an aircraft with a lift FAN?
The A-12 was politics, it was to replace the F-111 for the USAF, as well as the A-6. The USAF had one requirement: 100 mn supersonic dash. The Navy built a stealth subsonic bomber that could carry 5k lbs of bombs. The USAF already had that with the F-117. When the Navy turned to the USAF for assistance they did not get it. Caused some bad blood, I was at Langley in 1988-1990, heard some shouting matches over this. Gen McPeak the Commander of TAC would not support it.
X-35 didn't have to demonstrate internal weapons bays, thus it did not arrive with that weight penalty. "Holes are heavy", stated an LM test pilot (talking about weapons bays. Pretty amazing fraud. X-32 had weight issues with STOVL.... it had weapons bays... surprise.
DeleteEric,
DeleteThe X-32B didn't have an internal weapons bay either.
You can accuse Lockheed Martin of making X-35 much smaller than the real F-35 and make a misleading STOVL demonstration based on a weight assumption much less than the real thing, but neither the X-32B nor the X-35B had weapons bays.
X-32B made weight, what killed it was the hot gas reingestion caused by the removal of the non-production inlet and the disruption of the lift screen than this caused.
DeleteA couple of those blowouts over the hover pit very nearly ruined the -614 engine.
The F119-PW-614 had something like 54,000lbst in burner and 36 or so in mil, it was a monster engine and the results showed in up and away performance where the X-32 was clearly superior in everything but SFC to the F-35.
When you have to fan an engine to create STOVL thrust as cold forward post air, you create a massive core load issue in terms of spinning it. More air in also equals more fuel in to maintain stochiometrics as best operational temp for the pressure ratio.
On a jet which is weight critical for STOVL ops, burning more gas is not practical because more fuel in EFT ruins the stealth and the bringback.
If there is a lesson to be learned here it is that the Marine justification for STOVL is a complete fraud.
1. Because 6-8 jets (standard deckload with helos) cannot hold a beach nor protect a ship.
2. Because 'Guadalcanal II' would see the USN pulling an 850ft Harrier Carrier just as readly as they pulled the CVAs the first time.
3. The USMC would never be committed to a fight with a major land combatant (see: Inchon and the withdrawal from Chosin) without full support from a Carrier battlegroup which brings 40 jets to the fight.
As for the F-35, it had the potential to be a sufficient aircraft for the task, without the accoutrements of the STOVL encumbrance but this would have only been shown up in a program which saw TWO stages of flying prototype. One to prove basic aerodynamic handling qualities and RAMless basic signature values and the other to show the rest of the systems installation to include operational weapons, AMAD and EHAs. The X-35 showed none of this (stuffing them all in the empty weapons bay volume) and got away with further murder by using a non-production standard landing gear which was at least 2,000lbs lighter in direct and carrythru weight because it was short and rigidly mounted to the fuselage sides rather than the flexing wingroots.
DeleteThe F-32 PWSC would have been a sweet looking ship in the sense of power over grace as a Wildcat or Thunderbolt III and it would have shown a far more integrated approach to design point engineering because it changed only the outer panel on the wings for the STOVL variant. All the rest was common.
We should never again run a program that doesn't provide a 'two option honest' approach to design validation and directly competed (head to head) combat mission flyoffs. The F-32 PWSC would have waxed the F-35 here: left, right and center.
Finally, the A-12 was a program which was denied the chance to demonstrate it's qualities after an onerous and illegal USN development effort drove the contractors to the brink of madness as bankruptcy on the program.
It was approximately 1.5 billion dollars short of completely FSD to a prototype level and compared to the massive, RICO level, fraud of the JSF program, that was chickenfeed.
Much of what happened was based on nothing more than USN green and political pants wearing and this cost the USN, not an attack fighter but an A-6 interdictor replacement, par excellance.
It is the number one proof of why we need a separate R&D command without the bias as lack of engineering or management knowledge in designing weapons systems for the Armed Forces.
To conclude a program just on the edge of creating prototype tooling and then say it was 'for cause' without a flying demonstration to show how, is the height of hypocrisy and also the start of 'everything bad' (B-2 cancelled early, F-22 cancelled early, idiot F/A-18E/F program, abandonment of A/X and AFX in development) that has happened since.
In essence, if the F-35 program succeeds in stealing 16 billion a year (20 for the USAF) for the next decade and a half, it will be because the A-12 was allowed to fail for a miserly 1.5 billion after 5 billion in sunk investment.
When I think of that, I don't think litigation, I think firing squad. The USN malfeasance in the FAR/DFAR and SAR process of 'regulations exist for a purpose' Fixed Price contracting was absolutely treasonous.
While the X-35 was already becoming a project management disaster even during the JSF contest with delays and cost overruns, Boeing too wasn't totally free of errors either, namely the decision to place the whole engine in front of the center of gravity in order to simplify the vertical lift nozzle mechanism. This was obviously done to minimize STOVL cost, but it exerted too much aerodynamic performance penalty on the Air Force and Navy versions. What Boing should have done was to adopt a Harrier Pegasus style engine, or even a YAK-38-like configuration of a main engine sitting just behind the center of gravity and a vertical lift engine in the forward section, preferably in front of the cockpit to be far away from the center of gravity as possible. Such a vertical lift engine would have added minimal weight(~1,000 lbs) to the X-32B while keeping a slim fuselage profile for all variants.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, the F-35 is like an asteroid strike that wipes out all other US fighter jet vendors to make room for other nation's fighter jet vendors, just like how the asteroid strike wiped out dinosaurs to give the rise of mammals, and this isn't necessaraily a bad thing. This is because the other nations working on 5th gen fighter jets are willing to offer much lower RCS ratings to export customers than the 0.15m2 RCS rating that the Pentagon is offering to F-35 export custmers, so better and more capable jets become available to the free world customers. If Boeing's X-32 won and the combat-ready F-32A is selling for $65 million a copy today as expected, then there wouldn't be any other fighter vendors left to compete and the free world must battle the PAK-FA and the J-20 with the F-32A, the last US fighter jet survivor. $120 million a copy F-35A gives a breathing room for other nation's fighter vendors to come up with better 5th gen A2A jets for a lot less money, and diversify fighter jet choices.
From what I have read neither Boeing or Lockheed played it straight with the JSF fighters. Both sides stated they would need a much more powerful engine, one that did not exist yet, to make their planes flyable in a production configuration. Thus both programs were allowed to cheat in the "fly off."
ReplyDelete