F-35 crashed into the carrier Carl Vinson’s deck, fell into the South China Sea | Hacker News Reader

F-35 crashed into the carrier Carl Vinson’s deck, fell into the South China Sea

navytimes.com

21 pointskcb12 comments

The F-35 has not enabled any military victories, but it has consumed so much money that we could just write $64k checks to every American instead. Which option would make this nation stronger?

F-35 research, development & maintenance employ a lot of people and move science forward.

The employment and “moving science forward” are certainly not commensurate with the money pit that is F35.

How many JWST-scale projects could be funded with that money?

170 is the answer. 170 JWSTs.

For more fun facts, JWST has employed 1200 people in the world, F-35 has produced around 250,000 jobs.

So F-35 has produced more jobs per dollar than JWST so from that perspective it is a steal

Employing people to produce a plane that does not function as intended is a good use of money? It seems like there might be superior alternatives available.

Can you point out any specific ways in which the F-35 project actually moved science forward, even indirectly?

Identifying underseas airplane crashes obviously

> we could just write $64k checks to every American

Actually $51k. Over 66 years. Comes at around $780 per year. If it were paid off only by Americans. It will be used and paid for also by Brits, Australians, Israeli, Japanese and about 10 other nations.

That's interesting, the UK Navy lost one of their F35s in the Mediterranean a few months back. Maybe there is an issue with these aircraft that they need to resolve quickly?

Back in the day (idk about now), the CAG (Commander, Air Wing), wasn’t working them hard enough if a least one a/c wasn’t lost during a deployment.

As F-35s roll out to the fleet more, expect more.

Let Top Gun do the tuning?

I think that plane was lost soon after takeoff because a raincover was left on an engine. Perhaps this incident was something related to landing heavily, unless the pilot made a very quick go-around.

https://theaviationist.com/2021/11/24/f-35b-crash-cover-poss...

Will be interesting to learn more about what happened if it gets released. Hopefully they can learn from a $74M error.

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