Thanks for the article NICO!
via Aviation Week.
Started development after the F-35, made it to the carrier before the F-35, has a higher degree of stealth than the F-35 (this is my layman's view .... I read somewhere that tail-less designs are more stealthy) and for a Marine Corps view of things can set up orbit over a squad of Marines in contact and provide support until no longer needed or relieved (assuming that they integrate aerial refueling for these planes...really a no brainer...if you can land on a carrier then refueling in air shouldn't be difficult).
Now tell me why the Navy needs the F-35 again,
NOTE: Follow the link to check out some of the vids that Amy "Wonder Woman" Butler posted.
via Aviation Week.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt returned to port last week after hosting the X-47B for more at-sea trials.A robotic attack airplane.
The goal was to test the aircraft's interaction wiht the ship in off-nominal wind conditions. Nominal conditions are winds up to 25 kt. right down the runway on deck. Testers were looking for 35 kt. of relative winds and crosswinds up to 7kt.
Here are a few statistics from the tests:
26 total deck touchdowns
21 of those were touch and gos
five catapult launchs and five trap landings
five wave offs (two planned and three owing to software logic the automatically conducted a wave off owing to extreme wind conditions).
Started development after the F-35, made it to the carrier before the F-35, has a higher degree of stealth than the F-35 (this is my layman's view .... I read somewhere that tail-less designs are more stealthy) and for a Marine Corps view of things can set up orbit over a squad of Marines in contact and provide support until no longer needed or relieved (assuming that they integrate aerial refueling for these planes...really a no brainer...if you can land on a carrier then refueling in air shouldn't be difficult).
Now tell me why the Navy needs the F-35 again,
NOTE: Follow the link to check out some of the vids that Amy "Wonder Woman" Butler posted.
"Now tell me why the Navy needs the F-35 again"
ReplyDeleteIt is not common for Admiral Greenert, CNO, nor any other admiral, praise the F-35 or say why Navy needs it. This is the closest that Greenert has come to explaining why Navy needs the F-35.
“We need the F-35C,” he said at the Credit Suisse conference. “It has to be integrated into the air wing.” He said the Navy has not yet decided how many it will buy, however. And he recognized that the Navy ultimately has no choice but to buy the F-35C. “If we bought no C's, it would be very detrimental to the overall program” and to international partners, he said.
The F-35 was supposed to be an inexpensive all-purpose 5th-gen fighter plane. As late as 2010 Lockheed claimed “F-35C mid-$60 million”. Now it's three times that, or more. The Navy in FY2014 budgeted $236 each for seven aircraft, plus over a billion dollars for development, for an aircraft that won't see a carrier before late summer next year, if ever.
According to range and payload the X-47 would also be an excellent tanker aircraft for an aircraft carrier wing. I guess a retractable refueling pod in the bomb bay would do it.
ReplyDeleteIt is not only the radar cross section where the F-35 is no match for X-47. Also the IR-signature is far better for X-47.
Its all fun and games until the EW gets real, GPS goes and then all the sudden this baby is locked flying a circle or worse doing the lost puppy trying to find its way back to a moving carrier while not knowing were itself is.
ReplyDeleteComputers are great they do math real good, they do routine mundane things really good. But a computer runs a program that is a yellow brick road if just one brick disappears or is destroyed it freezes or gets caught in a endless loop. Fighting Alibaba and the 3rd world buckets whos high tech EW came from Wallyworld or Spy.com this baby is a cheep master. But if we end up in a peer fight with some real kit these drones will be very limited. We are making progress with gyros so eventually GPS will not be critical but even then drones in the big fight will be nothing but recon & reusable cruise missiles running predetermined tracks without deviations. That means CAS will remain man in the loop its just to fluid something a computer cannot do without phone home ability.
The trouble is, even manned modern fighters are dependent upon their computers and GPS to fly, navigate, even launch bombs - let alone missiles...
DeleteSome of them are designed so that they are unstable to give them super manoeuvrability, and without computers are completely un-flyable...
If you want guaranteed CAS even when GPS ect goes down your looking at a two seat supertocano and hoping you have some observers trained to act like navigator.
But the thing about the X-47 is it's mainly going to be a deep strike, reconnaissance and prompt strike/surveillance asset; although I agree it could well be buddied up to do air to air refuelling...possibly of each other which could have a really interesting effect on carrier strike as they would in theory be able to provide global strike on pretty much anywhere from anywhere - ok in reality it would be more limited, but it would be very, very over the horizon.
No offense but Apples and Oranges.
DeleteYou are talking about internal electronics that if the enemy can get that puzzle nothing will work, we will be back to line of sight/paper geometry ole school WW1. I am talking about signals that communicate via the air or bounce off Sats. Jamming, spoofing, is very doable for a peer competitor, the internal computers will be fine and like I said if someone figures out that we are back to WW1.
I like the Drone concept but you must not let future possible cloud your expectations of today now. What I really like about drones is they are a guaranteed value. By that I mean look at our desert air storage billions of dollars worth of aircraft that we would never send into harms way with a human sacrifice but if they were all drones who cares if its 70's tech we retired and will take 80% attrition to hit the target. I see them as a way to balance the fact we only have 20% of the worlds population, I see in a few decades were we will have the numbers and the tech.
The Drones will be good if you use properly. 3rd world they can do anything. In a major war were the phone home is gone it is penetration fixed or at best identifiable target in X box pre-planned cruise missile type missions and of course recon. Maybe a s wingman type setup they could be used in more options considering we can do the phone home to the man in other wing depending on level of EW. Maybe one day laser communications (possible) or true AI (doubtful) could change that balance at least until the scales shifted back the other way. But then even with that in mind your signal bouncers have to be survivable.
The F-35, for full combat capability, requires 24 million lines of code, ten million on the plane itself. General Bogdan, April 2013: “I see more risk to the delivery of Block 3F, our full warfighting capability, by 2017.”
DeleteRobotic weapons is the answer for demographic weapons of mass destruction deployed by arabic countries.
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Apparently SOL thinks the X-47B can do air defense. If it were ever bought. Which it won't be. Swing and a miss again Solomon. But that's to be expected.
ReplyDeleteThe X-47B or similar drones will rule the Skyes pretty soon. All they need are some stand off missiles and weapons, EO/IR sensors and a Growler detecting all the electromagnetic emissions to controll them at safe distance.
ReplyDeletewww.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhd-FfObyEU&feature=youtube_gdata_player