Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "CBC News"
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Bad Journalism #2: “He went on to design the A-10.” Pierre Sprey wasn’t a designer, aerospace engineer, or expert in those fields. He never designed any aircraft, not the YF-16, not the A-10, nothing. Alexander Kartveli with his team, designed the A-10, after the F-105, F-84, and P-47. He was the real brains behind the design elements of those aircraft. For someone to say Pierre Sprey designed the A-10, they simply don’t know what they are talking about. Pierre Sprey was an analyst who looked at numbers and helped contribute some data to these projects, but he was never a designer. His comments about the F-15, F-16, and Abrams have been thoroughly discredited. Guys like him do best when they do their jobs, crunch numbers, report those numbers, and have no opinion.
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@vinniechan There never was a requirement for a common airframe, and there is no common airframe. That’s one of the biggest hoaxes the media have pulled-off on this. There were 6 programs that became 3, the JSF-A, JSF-B, and JSF-C, each with a different airframe. The radar, electro-optical sensors, cockpit, and engine would all be common, with an additional lift fan system for the JSF-B. The JSF variants all are capable of faster flight than any of the aircraft they replace when combat configured, and they call cruise faster than any of the F-16s or Hornets, while also having 150-210nm more combat radius than any of them. Combat radius and persistence are what Canada should be focused on for the NORAD mission, along with the ability to accelerate through transonic for intercepts. The only aircraft that does better than the F-35A in that space is the F-22A, or an F-15 with no wing tanks (and F-15s always fly with wing tanks, otherwise they have limited radius/persistence).
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Just as soon as Russia gives up any claims to the Arctic Ocean and lucrative oil-drilling right off Canada’s borders, sure. The contractors never went to DoD and asked for the opportunity to build the JSF series. The US and UK communities were already planning replacements for their multirole fighters, some of which date back to the late 1960s (Harrier). As the services looked at emerging threats, they updated the requirements for these replacement programs, and all started going to Congress and Parliament for RDT&E money.
There were 6 programs in the US alone, and several in the UK, one of which was already working in research with the USMC, DARPA, and USAF. Congress said they aren’t going to fund 6 programs since so many of the requirements overlapped.
By going with 3 different JSF variants that share critical subsystem components like radar, DAS, EOTS, the Pratt & Whitney motor, E&E, Martin Baker ejection seats, etc., they were able to bring the overall costs way down. 6 airframes would have been far more expensive, because each of them would have ended up with similar systems and requirements, with lack of volume-buying power for the AESA and motors especially, let alone all the other sensors, cockpits, emergency escape systems, weapons bays, etc.
The JSF program specifications were and are set by real and emerging threats.
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Dogfighting has already ended in the 4th Generation. Nobody in the current fighter communities is thinking they will merge with other fighters into visual range, cross each other’s 3-9 lines, and start gaming for rear quadrant missile or guns shots on an opponent. They still train for it in BFM, but since everyone has helmet-cued HOBS missiles with pretty substantial range and No-Escape Zone (NEZ) parameters from frontal or high-aspect approaches, every one keeps away from those bubbles. With modern sensors, PID can be achieved right before entering visual range, so face-shots with HOBS missiles are the norm for the pilots that are dumb enough or amateurs at evading threat WEZ profiles in the older jets.
In 5th Gen fighters, the SA is so ominous, that they are already watching everything you do from hundreds of km away, scanning what weapons you have with multi-spectral fused sensors even in passive modes, sharing that data with each other, faster than it took me to type this sentence. They manage the space with vastly-superior knowledge about where threats are and what they are capable of, then employ weapons against them in ways that are almost impossible to deal with. Even if a 4.5 Gen +++ fighter is able to evade incoming weapons with its countermeasures somehow, its next course of action is to attempt to leave wherever it though the weapons were coming from, which could mean flying into even more unfair NEZ profiles. These are the rules of the new road, and why China and Russia are doing everything in their power to try to develop and produce similar systems.
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The YF-23 had too many design risks, many of which needed to be corrected for the proposed F-23A to work. Each actuator in the wings for control surfaces was 4 smaller hydraulic actuators so that the wings could remain super-thin for supercrusie performance. There was a complex dual-reservoir hydraulic actuator system for each of the tailplane stabilators.
It never demonstrated weapons bay storage or separation because there wasn’t a functional design to deal with the narrow fuselage and the required weapons count for AAMs. At least 2 of the wind screens cracked during supersonic tests, so that needed to be re-designed.
The intakes did not manage the boundary layer air well enough to allow it to go past Mach 1.81, so the F-23A was going to need totally new intakes and flight testing on the basic airframe and propulsion combination.
For these reasons, the USAF saw a lot of risk in costs with the F-23A proposal, and awarded the ATF contract to the F-22A proposal by Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics. The YF-22 had none of those problems. It had simpler actuators, PAV1 YF-22 flew faster than any of the other 3 ATF PAVs and was the only one to exceed Mach 2.
It demonstrated weapons release from both weapons bays, with the AIM-9 and AIM-120. None of the bowless canopies cracked at even higher speeds that the YF-23, and its intakes perfectly separated boundary later air while also not providing any Line-of-Sight RF wave propagation like the YF-23 did, which is the first signature a LO airframe needs to eliminate, let alone a VLO/Stealth design.
The YF-23 looked and flew superbly because it was an aerodynamic masterpiece, but had a lot of internet problems with the design that needed major attention and billions more in RDT&E. That’s why it was not selected.
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@Joshua Ngau Ajang F-35A/B/C will be far more successful than the baby and Super Hornets, not taking away from either.
The Hornet's design was compromised significantly by carrierborne compatibility, which dictated wing sweep angle, landing gear weight, structural weight, wing fold, and a collection of systems that took away from the hot rod that the YF-17 was.
The Super Hornet Block III will be a different animal from existing SHs with F-35 inspired avionics, CFTs, high throughput data link compatible with F-35, new cockpit, AESA, etc.
But the F-35 represents a transformational leap in combat system development in a mass-produced single engine airframe that connects coalition forces in ways we never dreamed of before.
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