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Comment by hyeonwho4 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a PR piece. Too positive, a lot of discussions of pilot's smiles. Given the very high program costs and the need by Lockheed Martin to convince US allies to buy the plane despite the high price tag, I think HN readers would be well served by skepticism.

To put it another way, it the F35 was really as good as the F22, as the article seems to claim, then it would not be available for export.

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What makes this article look like a PR piece, more than the smiles, is the appearance of a firm directive to talk about situational awareness etc. instead of flight performance and the clear defensive intent of some sections (e.g. the airshow demo).

There seem to be a large blind spot in these pilot accounts, some elephant in the room, but not being an expert I'm unable to pinpoint what it is.

> There seem to be a large blind spot in these pilot accounts, some elephant in the room, but not being an expert I'm unable to pinpoint what it is.

I'm not an expert either. But I suspect it might be one of the following:

1. the F-22 has a higher thrust to weight ration than the F-35, meaning the F-22 is more manouvrable.

2. the F-22 has a lower wing loading than the F-35, again making the F-22 more manouvrable.

3. the stealth on the F-35, while good against the radars of 20 years ago, might be a lot less effective against the radars of the future, for example long-wavelength radars with lots of ground-based sensors all tied together with sensor fusion. This is a big deal since the F-35 is expected to stay in service until 2070 and I'm sure the Chinese and Russians are looking at ways to counter it.

I though stealth as a concept was near obsolete due to cheap passive radar becoming feasible for about everyone? I didnt know they still built planes for this concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar

Stealth is relative; as long as your detection distance is greater than the adversary's, you're good. Also, passive is great, but I'd expect in a war situation all large transmitters would get disabled first.

All cellphone towers?

You don't have to worry about most small cell towers, since they are usually directional (pointed towards the ground to maximize signal coverage) and relatively low power. In the countryside with tall towers that cover tens of kilometers... well... it's kind of hard to miss those with a missile.

You can always mount the transmitters in trucks and keep moving. If you can pinpoint the source and fuse the input of, say, dozens of small sensors deployed all over the place, you can pinpoint the plane well enough.

Not well enough to do reliably do missile tracking, just enough to get an idea that yes, there is an object out there in the atmosphere. "Dumb" methods like TDOA / FDOA have quite bad limitations on resolution.

Multistatic passive radar is quite hard to do at high performance. Radio astronomy observatories have been doing it for decades; it's expensive, requires high grade equipment to synchronize time and frequency, and reliable, real-time high-bandwidth data links.

You can use passive radar for surveillance radars, but is it any good for tracking and guidance radars? If your radar stations can see F-35s, but your interceptors and SAM batteries can't fire at it, the stealth is still useful.

That's getting awfully ahead of things. Showing that it's sometimes possible to detect aircraft like this is a long, long way from demonstrating that it's even theoretically possible to replace all existing air defense and targeting/interception radars with it under all circumstance, much less actually trying to do it.

On the subject of stealth, I've always wondered if stealth aircraft could not actually be detected fairly easily.

True, stealth aircraft have an extremely small radar cross-section. But I'm guessing they also have very specific and recognizable radar signatures, with the proper signal treatment, despite high noise ratios, their signatures could be isolated. And they could also be easily identified down to the variant of aircraft.

This is a pure guess, not substantiated by anything, and I'm far from an expert or even an enthusiast in the field.

I think it's less "you will NEVER see me on Radar" but more "Radar detection range reduced from 100 miles to 40 miles", meaning you have more gaps in your coverage than you expected, and also they can get a lock on you before you get a lock on them.

As far as points 1 and 2, the F-22 was designed to shoot down other planes. The F-35 was designed for a large variety of roles. As far as point 3, that's a tough one. Nobody truly knows what detection technology will be like in 20 years. You may be right and the tech is obsolete quickly.

That the F-35bis a compromise designed for several sorts of missions it itself a criticism: it might not succeed at any.

(and let me be clear; I’m a pacifist... putting all the money spent on weapons into increasing interdependence is a much more effective strategy. You don’t want to level your debtors/creditors.

> and let me be clear; I’m a pacifist... putting all the money spent on weapons into increasing interdependence is a much more effective strategy. You don’t want to level your debtors/creditors

Lots of people want to level their creditors. Economic interdependence didn't prevent the World Wars--to some degree, it exacerbated them because some countries (e.g. Germany and Japan) had strategic reasons to secure their supply of natural resources.

Some clever/lucky Serbian back in the Kosovan conflict days realised that even then-old low frequency radar was able to pinpoint the F117s making nightly passes over their country, helping bring one down.

Given that was nearly twenty years ago and we've since had massive advances in passive and synthetic aperture radar otherwise, I've long wondered about the worth of the massive extra cost stealth brings to Fifth Generation warplanes.

Given the Russians don't appear to be in a great rush to make all their wares stealthy, one wonders whether they've preëmpted its limited use in future?

The Russians aren't in a great rush to acquire anything new because they're simply short of cash. People seem to forget that Russia's GDP is about the same size as Italy. After they pay for their strategic nuclear forces there's not much room in the budget for anything else.

Sure, but they do have a healthy export market for their armaments...

Russia's remaining arms customers are mostly poor and desperate. They can't afford 5G aircraft. India used to be a major customer but now that they have more money they're shifting purchases to better alternatives.

The F117 was 70's tech. It looked like a weird polyhedron because we didn't have good enough computers to do the math on how the shape of a plane reflects radar. And it was only shot down because the bomb bay doors weren't stealthy.

There's no free lunch in radar. Long wavelength radars can give a general indication of an aircraft's location but aren't precise enough for targeting. They're also more subject to interference. And the antennas are larger, which makes them more vulnerable.

The F-22 is out of production and there's no practical way to build more. So regardless of its comparative merits it's not an alternative.

> The F-22 is out of production and there's no practical way to build more.

Lockheed Martin have all the manufacturing equipment in storage and have been trying to sell the Pentagon and others on the idea of restarting the production line to build more F22s with upgraded avionics/electronics taken from the F35. To offset the cost of restarting production they propose allowing Japan to buy them too since Japan has been keen on buying them for a long time.

Actually the tooling is owned and possessed by the USGov, not LM. And restarting the production line isn't as simple as flipping a switch. You'd need all the components made by subcontractors (that are out of business). And you'd also need to find assembly workers familiar with the processes involved in fabricating the airframes etc. Plus the technology is OLD. The avionics are old, 1980/1990 designed systems. So you'd naturally want to upgrade it to the latest standards, which would cost more money and extend the time required to deliver a plane to the AF.

What you're saying about long wave is true for monostatic radar where you're using the angle of the beam to localize the target. In the multistatic case, you don't need to do this, it can be all timing based. This wasn't possible in the past because we didn't have the ability to easily synchronize clocks to high precision and the computers and communication technology to easily fuse the results. We do now though.

That's more of a theoretical possibility than something that can be used operationally today.

It's a bit more than a theoretical possibility. 5G requires cooperative MIMO. If you can do cooperative MIMO, you can build the type of radar I'm describing. I don't have insider knowledge, but this is something that has been openly talked about for over twenty years. I'd be shocked if someone doesn't have at least a working test system.

You don't have to guess at #1 and #2. One of the pilots came right out and said it: "The F-35 is as maneuverable as any other airplane, except perhaps the F-22."

I noted the "we don't need to make the three versions identical" comment.

Yeah, you kinda do, if you want to keep the price of an individual airframe down.

The word smile was mentioned once in the article.

And the F35 was always going to be shared with allies for cost and geopolitical reasons so not sure how that can be considered a negative.

The US structured the F35 program to specifically avoid the F22 failures.

I guess they will structure the F48 program to avoid the failures of the F35 program.

It would be pretty bizarre to refuse on principal to learn from experience. The F35 is expected to be in use through the 2060s. Part of the engineering challenge is designing around the fact that human pilots are expected to be phased out mid-lifecycle for these airframes.

The whole thing makes a lot more sense knowing just that.

I have read countless of pieces bashing the F-35 without ever mentioning strategic details like that...

I suppose propaganda and political articles tend to put a spin on everything after all...

Not just that human pilots would be phased out.

But that the F-35 is planned on being a command and control centre for a fleet of drones flying alongside it.

In that context weapons capabilities and dogfighting aren't important but its key strengths in stealth and sensor unification definitely are.

Isn't this being sort for beta-phase at the moment because currently the f35 doing the targeting doesn't have to be the one launching the weaponry?

Wouldn't the sensors and fusion system be entirely swapped out in that case, too?

Sharing with allies for cost and geopolitical reasons is good for the contractors designing and building th plane.

You spread around the tax dollars spent on jobs between many different US states and counties, and voila, immunity from politicians. Kick that up to a nation scale, and you really have something good going.

Taking advantage of people’s interest in only their immediate future and their immediate surroundings, and people’s willingness to ignore long term and worldwide costs is a path to success and a downside of “democracy”.

A strategy to advance the geopolitical stability of America and its Allies is about the opposite of taking a short-term view.

There are far better ways to advance geopolitical stability than a boondoggle of an aircraft project, especially when the military is already so far ahead of everyone else. However, this specifically results in lots of long term high paying defense contractor jobs in many congressional districts. We could have beefed up education, research, space exploration, energy efficiency improvements, mass transit, etc.

Agreed on the skepticism. However you can't just say that a combat aircraft is better than an other. It highly depends on the kind of mission considered (Air defense, Close air support, Ground strike, etc...), and on the underlying warfare infrastructure (refueling tankers, AWACS, jamming vectors, etc...).

As to export of the F35 vs. F22 : the F35 program was designed from the ground up as an international "cooperation program", so as not to say a "sharing costs" program, so it would be exported.

> However you can't just say that a combat aircraft is better than an other. It highly depends on the kind of mission considered (Air defense, Close air support, Ground strike, etc...), and on the underlying warfare infrastructure (refueling tankers, AWACS, jamming vectors, etc...).

So maybe they should've published a spreadsheet instead, or an interactive, explorable chart. There are ways for effectively communicating multidimensional spaces of trade-offs, and I'm saddened that those ways are almost never used.

This won't happen for a combat aircraft, because most of the true detailed performance is kept secret (for obvious strategic -and commercial- reasons).

Full data - sure. But to the extent of information you can publish, comparisons could be done in a way that are not misleading. Otherwise, why publish?

Your argument basically boils down to- we need specialized aircrafts depending on the mission. However, the F35 was exactly created to circumvent this- to have a aircraft that can fullfill any aircraft mission and excell in it. It was supossed to be the swiss-pocket knife of airplanes.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnjvb9/the-us-air...

A swiss knife does a lot of things, but doesn't excel at any of them when compared to specialized tools that do one specific thing.

The knife is pretty good and keeps its edge, but you can get a knife that's larger and locks. The can opener works great, but it's miles behind an electric can opener. The corkscrew never failed me, but it's not as comfortable as a two-step lever corkscrew. And so on.

Anyway, I think the analogy still holds. Any system that's built for multiple purposes will lose out to another, more specialized system built for a single purpose. Of course, this more specific system cannot perform all the other tasks.

Cost is supposed to make up for the difference.

I'm not saying you have to have specialized aircraft (although, as it has been said, a "swiss knife" tends to to it all but less effectively).

I'm saying you can't easily compare two combat aircraft. You have to be very specific when doing so.

> It was supossed to be the swiss-pocket knife of airplanes.

This is the main reason this program was massively over budget and didn't meet expectations.

By trying to create one airframe for three very different sets of requirements, they significantly compromised the performance of all three variants. In particularly, the STOVL requirement for the USMC meant that the Air Force and Navy would end up with an airframe with worse aerodynamic performance and worse radar cross section than if it didn't have to accommodate the lift fan for the F-35B.

The whole idea of the JSF was to save money by featuring 80% parts commonality between the versions. Instead, it only has 25% parts commonality. This resulted in much, much higher cost than anticipated.

With further development and time to work on tactics, the F-35 will probably be fine on the battlefield. But the military could've ended up with far more capable platforms had they heeded the lessons of past procurement failures like the F-111, rather than doubling down on them.

> This seems like a PR piece

No kidding... it comes across more like a late night Ronco ad rather than real opinions.

The U.S. allies don't need much convincing, F-35s sell like hot cakes despite the recent degradation of American foreign policy. With Russia still unable to produce an S-400 missile modification capable to intercept it, this warplane is largely unchallenged in the skies.

Don't fool yourself into thinking US allies are unilaterally wanting the F35. There's heavy lobbying and strategic pressure underneath.

If on only one example, in the recent Belgian Tender (which led to adoption of the F35) appeared a wholly new operational requirement for the Air Force to do stealth-requiring missions, such as SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) [1]. Up to then, the Belgian Air force was not trained nor expected to do such aggressive undertakings. It seems this requirement came from NATO.

[1] https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/aeron...

PS : Apologies for my source being in french, there might be some english versions of the story somewhere. The guy reporting the story is Stavros Kelepouris.

Don't understand the issue with this mandate coming from NATO.

The Belgian military policy has never been an aggressive one (modest-sized country and army), yet SEAD missions are. NATO is some sort of US military policy deployed in european countries, and can serve (as in this case) US commercial interests.

NATO is definitely serving Western European interest. NATO is probably the major reason there has not been a land war against NATO members since WW2.

Since the 1950s the Belgian military policy has been that it will do whatever is required of it as a NATO member.

This. I don't get this complaining about "NATO made us do it". NATO is a voluntary alliance, and they all signed up for a reason - defense against Russian aggression. That defense doesn't look like America does everything to keep the Russians away while everyone else sits on their butts. Everyone who wants that protection needs to step up and do their part.

Doing their part does include purchasing modern aircraft that are capable of participating in missions in support of an overall strategy of air superiority.

Not to mention, so far most of the NATO missions are about participating and helping in US wars on MiddleEast. And it is not only about military budget. But also the budget to deal with immigration issues after MiddleEast conflicts.

I don’t think it is fair to blame NATO. They did their best so far and they deserve the support.

Well, while I can agree with this, it doesn't deny the fact that the US can use NATO for its defense industry interests. And they will. Which I mean, is okay, that's life and geopolitics.

I'm not saying it's the primary purpose of it. But I think one should not be overly naive towards NATO.

Goes both ways tho. The US military has been the major export client for Belgian arms industry.

That's fair.

Though to be totally honest, Belgium could withdraw from NATO and still benefit from it, since any enemy would have to go through multiple NATO member states to even reach Belgium. France pulled this stunt once.

If the point of NATO is to get money flowing into the U.S. from Europe, it's failing horribly.

EDIT - I mean via direct military purchases. Obviously the stability protected by NATO enables tremendous trade between Europe and the U.S.

This is actually an interesting calculation. I'm not sure how I'd do it. We'd have to figure out what percentage of US defense funding goes toward NATO or NATO members specifically.

Or, NATO is trying to defend Eastern Europe from the encroaching Russian front.

    The Belgian military policy has never been an aggressive one (modest-sized country and army)

Sadly, that's not always enough.

Ask Ukraine and Georgia about what can happen to non-aggressive, modest countries with modest armies.

    NATO is some sort of US military policy deployed 
    in european countries, and can serve (as in this 
    case) US commercial interests.

I totally agree and I wish that wasn't the case.

But the solution to that is MORE engagement, responsibility, and contribution by European NATO allies, not less.

The greater Europe's role in NATO, the smaller the US's role can be...

Here in Norway the sentiment been largely positive, including feedback from the pilots. Perhaps it helps we border Russia.

And face it the NATO was formed to confront a nuclear armed superpower, don't act surprised as if you just learned this today.

source?

The cost per unit has actually come down below modern variants of older generation fighters. Boeing has been trying to get the air force to buy some new F-15Xs over the next few years, this has been controversial to say the least because they would cost more per plane than F-35s while being unable to operate in contested airspace. An ex Boeing CEO as secretary of defense has not eased the controversy to say the least.

>they would cost more per plane than F-35s

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26305/f-15x-will-come-...

"Maybe what's more important, is that the F-15X is being designed specifically to slot directly into the USAF's deeply established F-15 infrastructure, even down to seamless pilot conversion. Our sources say it will only take one or two flights per F-15C pilot to convert to the F-15X for the air superiority mission, saving millions on retraining aircrews, not to mention ground crews, that are already intimately familiar with the Eagle. "

Sounds familiar!

Yes, the new F-15 MAX

Canopy glass goes edge to edge!

Let's hope it's MCAS ships and can read from two AOA sensors

Isn't that what they are saying about the 737 max?

It's pretty standard. That's why there are so many letter revisions of military equipment, from small arms to aircraft. It's pretty standard in software design, too, for that matter.

Just because the 737 MAX has a problem doesn't mean the underlying philosophy that directed the design was a poor one. The philosophy is basically, "keep what works, fix what doesn't." It's basic iterative design.

1- Can you link a 2018/2019 source for "F-35 cost < F-15 cost" in particular? Most of the "cost" estimates I've seen for F-35s leave out the engine (another ~$20M last I checked).

2. Given advancements in adversary radars and passive sensors (IRST, etc..), it's not even a given that the F-35 can operate in contested airspace.

You can load one of those puppies up with 22 air to air missiles, have a forward F-35 pass along target information, and light them up from the F-15. One team. F-15 is a missile truck that can go Mach 2.2.

Ask because it goes Mach 2.2 it is probably the only fighter vehicle that can launch a hypersonic glide weapon, at least from what the early generation is likely to look like.

So the F-35 becomes like a really really fast AWACS on the front lines? I... don't hate that.

Yes, The F-35 is more like a EA-35.

>F-15 is a missile truck that can go Mach 2.2.

High speed missile truck sounds awfully lot like multi track drifting!

It is a bit disengenuous to imply that an F-15 is a "missile truck" that can go mach 2+.

There is no way it will be going anywhere near mach 2 with double rails carrying AIM-120s, let alone 20 of the missiles in total.

In an engagement with an S-400, bits of it will probably end up going at mach 2+.

Not unless you have EA-18Gs and EC-130s raising the noise floor along with lots of disposable drones cluttering the fire control RADAR. And more missile truck F-16s, F-18s, and F-15s carrying AGM-88s to supress/destroy the RADARs and MALDs to add more clutter and become seductive targets.

Eh, view those cost comparisons with a grain of salt. Something F-35 proponents have been fond of is quoting the flyaway cost of the F-35, against the total procurement cost of legacy aircraft. They'll exclude all the testing, tooling, and r&d costs from the F-35, then exclude the procurement and support costs to finagle a unit cost number.

Meanwhile, the quoted cost for something like a Super Hornet includes support/maintenance and some one-time costs.

As for the F-15X order, that is to supply an Air National Guard squadron, which is currently using old F-15C/D's. They were not slated to switch to F-35's, so the idea was to just supplement with F-15X's in the meantime. IIRC none of the ANG squadrons are switching to the F-35 in the near future.

Military pilots might tend to project their assigned aircraft's reputation to their own. And therefore focus on the selling points.

Yeah no working military pilot is going to publically disrespect their aircraft, lest their career take a sudden turn toward desk duty.

Nobody giving an interview to the media is going to disparage their own company if they want to continue working.

It's just common sense.

it's not common sense, it's fear. That's very different.

Agreed! However, not all of the pilots in the article were actively flying, so there's that.

I did get a sense of

"These sandwiches are acceptable."

"Permission to speak freely?"

"Permission denied"

"These sandwiches are acceptable."

Like many fields, they will bitch non-stop to fellow pilots, but to 'external' groups will always say how much they love it.

It's natural.

They didn't get to fly the most prestigious planes for lacking soft skills.

I'd like to see anonymous reports.

It's good we on HN, unlike military pilots, have no bias and can focus on things that matter in warplane mission performance.

Can't wait to find the forum of fighter pilots bitching about Rust vs. C.

Clearly they would choose raw x86_64 assembly for its superior performance profile.

x86-64 is very non-deterministic - way too many issues can impact individual thread performance. Better go with a barrel processor design.

Have you heard of Spectre?! The whole architecture is crap and should be scrapped in favor of Acorn RISC.

The F22 hasn’t upgraded its cockpit yet, so is a bit behind the F35 generationally. Additionally, the F22 has much more stealth that makes exports more difficult than the F35. This is really orthogonal to whether the F35 is great in its role or not.

But F35 has a different role from the F22. How can it be 'as good'? By what metrics would you compare them?

I kind of assumed so because it would be hard to find pilots that would put their name on a critical piece.

Well the f22 was canned 8 years ago, hard to sell even if you wanted to sell as is, let alone with all the downgrades that are require for export which would push the price up

It’s not good enough for us by hey want to buy one ?

It was just too expensive

It was originally developed by many nations sharing the data. So, it can't probably be kept as much in secret as F22 anyway, this is why it is available for export.

It also fills a completely different role. U.S. has such an overwhelming air superiority in any potential combat theater from Somalia to Moscow that they shouldn't be worried about someone having a better plane to bomb then.

also...can't really build more F-22s either, not without significant additional Congressional cash...

I doubt US allies are going to buy a plane because of a PR piece.

No discussions about how we smile at the costs?

"Given the very high program costs "

I am skeptical about the F32. It looks to me like a one trick pony. But an individual plane is not expensive (which is different from program costs). It is on par with the Eurofighter/Thyphoon.

Why the downvote?

1. It is a one trick pony. I can't fly fast, can't carry big payload, can't dog fight and takes a shit-load of maintenance. The only advantage is that it may or may not be "invisible" to opponents. I am sure it outclasses any third world countries like Iran, Iraq, whatever. But against China or Russia this is a big if. And if not (invisible) then you are screwed big time. You bought a ton of trade-offs for one advantage that disappeared.

Take this as an example: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russias-s-500-f-35-or...

Or this one (dubious source) https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-24/russian-su-35-pilo...

2. The price of the two planes (Eurofighter vs. F35) is basically the same. Fact. So the price of the F35 is not really an issue. https://aviatia.net/eurofighter-vs-f35/

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