F-35A has flown from a highway for the first time

Isn't this a very common requirement though ? India mostly has Russian planes but most new major Indian highways have several stretched that can be used as runways and Air Force also does test landings from time to time.

Yes, but it's also possible with most older planes, including Mig-29 and F-16.

https://bnn.network/world/poland/natos-resilient-runway-init...

The highways have to be built with that in mind though (and many are). In Poland it's called DOL and there have been 21 of them built, but only 1 is used regularly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_strip#Poland

It's primary for forward tactical, war-time refueling because you can't just drive a jet from a hardened bunker on an air base to a random road far away. Wingspan and trees and such get in the way. Finland, Poland, etc. roads fit the criteria where it makes sense to have emergency alternate landing sites than first-to-be-destroyed fixed bases.

An adversary such as Russia undoubtedly already designates straight, manicured roads in Eastern Europe for anti-runway demolition as secondary targets.

Also, given Russia's hypersonic capabilities, they undoubtedly possess something between JP233 and DRDO SAAW: stand-off anti-runway and hardened target attack with area denial.

> This has a significant deterrence effect because it means you can’t just massively attack all airbases and expect the Air Force to be disabled.

I'd be very surprised if being able to land/takeoff from highways wasn't one of the most basic design requirements for a project as massive as the F-35. If highways are already designed to be usable as ad-hoc airfields, it would make no sense at all to design new airplanes to keep them compatible.

This is where the F35's VTOL becomes handy. If you had a few jets stashed away or survived the attack on an airbase, they just take off vertically.

It's not only about being able to takeoff and land from a highway. The Gripen is designed to be maintained by conscripts, and the entire maintenance system is designed for dispersed operation from the get-go. E.g. all the usual spare parts and tools are located in shipping containers even in "normal" usage on an airbase. The hangars have slots in the sides where they place the containers, the containers thus becoming an integral part of the hangar storage. When it's time to disperse, they just shut the container doors and lift the container up on a truck and drive it away.

From what I understand the F-35 maintenance system is designed around the aircraft being based on permanent air bases. Could a next generation maintenance system be similarly designed around dispersed operation? I'm sure it could, but it's not the reality today.

As for the cost, I can definitely understand the F-35 being cheaper just due to all the fixed costs (R&D, etc.) being amortized over a huge number of aircraft over the life of the program.

Was Grippen actually cheaper to operate? Because I've been following Swiss and Finnish purchase orders and they claimed that F-35A came out both cheaper to procure and was not more expensive to operate (mostly due to much higher production numbers since every other NATO country seems to be procuring them, making spare parts and per unit costs lower).

Switzerland, too, has been doing this for ages: http://aircraftnut.blogspot.com/2012/11/swiss-air-force-jets...

Well I'm sure one of the backroom conditions for being let into NATO is that they must shop USA armaments, regardless of which is better/cheaper.

And the critical distinction between the two variants is that the F-35B has VSTOL (vertical / short takeoff & landing) capabilities, via ducted fans, whilst the F-35A does not. The reported test involved a rolling landing & takeoff, rather than a vertical approach as in the earlier test.

  > What am I getting wrong? 

That in combat, it's never that simple. It seems like that, seems like the enemy has 100% information, or is 100% capable. And it's not (nor are we).

Everything is muddy, nothing is guaranteed to work, the environment is unforgiving, people react differently under stress. We, they, everyone KNOW this and it still doesn't work.

So, you plan, you test contingencies, develop capability, even if they're never used.

In Germany, they had plans to use shopping centers as ad hoc aircraft bases. Knock large holes into the store front (they tend to not be load bearing), shove out all of the shelves and what not with a bulldozer, clear the parking lots of cars and lights (bulldozers work well for this as well). Boom, instant hangar and tarmac.

But that's just it, just warplans. Think tanks thinking through potential problems and ways to solve them. They also had warplans to blow up dams to wash over a teeming Soviet advance. Seems, in the large, to be a bad idea. But, on the other hand, consider the events and thinking going on when someone chimes in "Hey, maybe we should blow up the dams...".

Combat is very messy. No plan survives first contact. Just ask the Russians.

To add to other answers:

The enemy only has so many resources to target your resources. War has been, really for most of history, an economic struggle as much as a tactical one.

If they're planning an attack, they have to decide if the risk is worth the reward. They can't just magically hit all targets (or they can but that's because things go nuclear and hey, none of it really matters).

The more redundancies you have, the more likely you are to stop their attack, or to exhaust their ability to extend themselves. Given the absurd size of most road networks, that's a lot of potential targets to worry about, even if mostly undefended.

> In my lay-man‘s imagination, there will only be a few of these highway airstrips

Not in Finland, where this military exercise occurred. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_90 and the earlier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_60 . I don’t have an exact count, but the number of Highway runways available in Finland is on the order of like 50.

And sure, these are well known and mapped. And yes, an enemy could target each and every one of them. But to do so they would need far more ordnance to destroy all these highways instead of just a few runways. But there’s some additional context. So, the most efficient way to disable an air base (or improvised air base using a highway) is to destroy the runway, preventing aircraft from taking off. But, it’s also the easiest thing to fix. Just takes some bulldozers and engineers and you can get it fixed relatively easily. So runway cratering is more about suppressing an Air Force instead of destroying it. Generally, you want to follow up those runway strikes with additional strikes to target the aircraft on the ground. And that is a lot harder when they are scattered all over the country.

This doesn’t look like a special part of a highway that’s prepared to be an airstrip, but just a stretch of road without any obstacles such as road lighting.

This being Norway, I expect they have quite a bit of that. The country is reasonably large (385,000km²), population density is fairly low (15 persons/km²), so in large parts of the country roads won’t be busy and don’t need much infrastructure.

Maybe this video about how the Swedish Air Force uses the JAS-39 Gripen helps?

https://youtu.be/eEX8JJ0eXL4 (part of it at around 3m30s)

> there will only be a few of these highway airstrips

In Finland there is hundreds of them of various levels of preparedness while we only have 4 actual air force bases.

Some of them have nice extra wide tarmac, bunkers hidden in the forest to store gear, etc. These are the ones used during peace time for practice.

During wartime if those are destroyed you use the less prepared ones which are just normal roads with a long enough straight and no bridges etc. You go and cut down the trees and electricity poles next to the road, fill any potholes and use that.

In the end all you really need is a road wide enough to fit the landing gear of the plane and enough length to speed up / slow down. Though obviously you use the better/nicer ones if you can (especially during peace time)

I was going to respond to this, only to have found myself at the end of an urban legend (no, there isn't a stipulation in the US to have 1 in every 5 miles straight in the US interstate highway system in order to allow for emergency landing of aircraft: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/landing-of-hope-and-glory/).

I do agree with the other sibling responses, though -- bombs cost money, and there's a lot of roadway that would need to be bombed in order to render entire highway systems unusable. So that's probably where the "win" comes in -- being nimble in takeoff / landing of aircraft locations makes life much more difficult for the enemy.

There are few air bases but many sections of highway which are long and straight enough to take off from. Targeting all of them with expensive precision munitions is totally impractical.

There's a lot more highway than airstrip length. According to Wikipedia[1], Finland has 78,141 kilometres (48,555 mi) of highways. That's a whole lot of runway to destroy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_Finland

There’s a lot of highway in the US

It's tricky to put airstrips out of service (for long), especially if the one looking to do the attacking doesn't have the ability to meaningfully contest the airspace there, as would be the case for most if not all adversaries an F35 might have.

Think about what it takes to put a military aircraft in the air.

You need: A fuel Truck A munitions truck People

And that's really it. That means you can put an airstrip anywhere that's long enough and relatively smooth. If you have alot of highways, you're good to go, and, in most places, you can land, then park the jet off the highway with a tug (read: ATV with a hitch adapter) and it's trivial to keep it out of sight because even with the best tech available, it's just not possible to have eyes everywhere, all the time.

It does not mean it would be meaningful inside the US, but Sweden, now a NATO ally, has had this doctrine and design requirement for a long time. Evidently they think it is useful.

> Can anyone explain how this makes a meaningful difference?

See how Ukraine is using roads to hide its warplanes and site decoys.

Jet engine intake is basically a giant vacuum cleaner... and the jet engine itself can be destroyed by a small debris like small stones etc which is plentiful around any kind of a road. And a damaged jet engine is kinda bad news on takeoff, especially if there's only one to begin with.

A-10's high mounted jet engines are up there for a reason. It can operate from almost anything resembling a runway.

Some fighters are especially good at sucking road debris into the engine.

Where's the source for this? You've italicized as if this is a quote but neither DDG or Google shows any results for any quoted portion.

That’s an overly specific exclusion.

Highway strip is a real thing, but obviously the US doesn’t need 20% of all highways to be useful in this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_strip

The stretches that qualify are tracked as useful military assets and worst case alternatives by the FAA, but you need to avoid overpasses etc, not just have a long stretches of strait road.

OPSEC is a myth, apparently.

To me, this pales in comparison to the part about the large empty medians being designed for moving tanks from coast to coast.

Well, ideally the road has been prepared in advance. But fighter aircraft are much easier on runways than heavier planes (bombers/cargo) because there's typically only one or two engines producing thrust. The F135-100 engine used in the F-35A puts out 43,000 foot-pounds (191 kN) when in afterburner.

In comparison, the B-52 has eight engines, each of which produce 17,100 foot-pounds (76 kN) for a total of 136,800 foot pounds (608 kN), and the C-17 (which is rated for rough-field landings) has four engines, with a total of 161,760 foot-pounds (720 kN).

But the most likely scenario is that larger planes will have their wings & engines extend beyond the sides of the pavement, and they'll tear up any grass and/or throw any gravel back behind them from the exhaust blast. The road surface is likely to be fine.

I’m also trying to discover what’s note worthy here as well.

I feel as a community we are failing to ask critical questions. This should be the sort of forum where PR puff pieces come to get picked apart.

Presumably the RAF performed the test in Finland because our roads are too full of potholes

Only the F-35"B" variant has this, if I remember correctly. The F-35A doesn't.

Even the F-35B doesn't actually do vertical takeoff in practice (though it's capable of doing so IIRC), it does vertical landing and short take-off. Going straight up uses a LOT of fuel.

In addition to what the others have said, the F-35B is more properly a STOVL aircraft: Short Take Off, Vertical Landing. It can't take off vertically with a useful combat load.

this version doesn't have vertical take off.

Also, in my understanding, B variant doesn't have vertical take off too, it has short take off and vertical landing. It can do vertical take off, but burns too much fuel that way for any useful mission.

F-35B is the VTOL variant.

The A variant of the F35 doesn’t have vertical takeoff.

>> How is this useful if you can’t refuel or reload ordnance?

You can. It is true that there are logistics challenges to provide fuel/ammunition to a vehicle that does not have a fixed base (such as an airfield). Similar logistic challenges are solved for tanks.

>> aren’t you a sitting duck for the enemy?

Only until you take back off again. In the event that your airfields have recently stopped existing, that will likely be as soon as you refuel/reload.

That's pretty standard. Better than F-15s and F-18s. Slightly worse than F-16s. It's a non-story.

I think some fighter jets have the intakes on the upper side of the fuselage to enable this. Closing intake by some flaps seems like a bad idea, given that on take off you'd probably want to have all the power you can get.

I mean it's well known to not turn off an old machine lest the hard-disk not spin up. Same basic idea, no?

Article is an oversimplification. There is a proper shutdown procedure which takes some time. Deviating from it requires the aircraft to be checked and possibly serviced by ground crew.

Police leave the car running for the same reason.

Can any plane land in a foot of snow?

i.e. Why would there be an expectation that a military plane would be significantly different in this hypothetical?

Ice is fine. These and other planes routinely land on icy runways in Finland and all over the world. You do need to take that into account for the length of the runway needed.

For snow you just use a snowplow. The same thing you used to keep the snow off the road you just converted into a runway for planes.

It's a good thing militaries have bulldozers, then!

There are 3 models that roughly breaks down like so:

A - Standard runway takeoff, carries the second most amount of fuel B - VTOL, carries the least amount of fuel C - Carrier launched, carries the most amount of fuel.

There are tradeoffs each version makes. The F35 is the plane of the future for NATO and other US allies. Having the A variant able to take off and land from a highway allows (theoretically) you to have the less expensive to maintain A variant and deploy it all over your highway areas (Norway) for example.

The article is about the F-35A.

> The U.S. Marine Corps has already shown its ability to use its short and vertical takeoff and landing capable F-35Bs in this way, as The War Zone has previously reported.

Additionally- the F-35B has a smaller combat payload than the F-35A, due to the combination of internal space/weight for SVTOL capabilities and lower payloads and the lower payload available for short takeoff.

Vertical takeoff is mostly an airshow demonstration- you can't carry a useful amount if fuel or weapons vertically, so in practice it's an STOVL rather than VTOL.

I think that's specific to the Marine version.

Someone nearby needs to set up a pirate radio station that play Kenny Loggins in a permanent loop.

They erect a grounded mast to provide lightning protection for each parked plane. (Source: discussed purpose of said mast with ground crew at Nellis last year).