Too Much Scrutiny. Yet, They Cannot Tell an F-22 from an F-35.
I was sipping some coffee with some versed folks while chatting about fighter jets that were sold to some Arab states in the gulf, e.g., F-15QA Ababil version, named after some Islamic mythological birds meaning a flock of birds. Until someone had mentioned the F-35.
First thing I felt it was just fair to do prior to making carelessly any statement, was to check how European news medium outlets were still approaching the topic every time Pentagon sold some US made aircraft. The most recent one that got them pissed off was the Swiss Air Force. Turning a blind eye to all the offers made by France's Dassaut Rafale. Nothing has changed since the last I checked them all out. Or, has it?
The same subjective rhetoric still going on as they've been desperately trying to belittle anything coming from the other side of the Atlantic.
There's been such negative media attention toward the F-35, as far back as I can recall.
The first thing this has to do with is paradigm shifts in aviation. These happen every few decades. If you go back to the '50s and '60s, the primary metric a fighter jet was judged by, was how high and how fast it could fly. You saw interceptors like the F-104 be developed from this fly at Mach 2, at 50+ thousand feet. Its job was to intercept Russian bombers and potentially launch nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles to destroy those bombers.
Then, in the 1970s, there's a man named John Boyd who's really a legendary fighter pilot. He came around and he said, "no, it isn't how high and fast that's going to determine how good a fighter is in the coming years, but rather it's how tightly it can turn and how long it can sustain that turn." And, the F-16 was developed from that philosophy.
As a consequence, it's a dogfighting machine and really good at turning quickly; has a great thrust-to-weight ratio—really a stripped down hot rod. Especially, as designed it back then before they put on all external stuff that have on now.
Since about 2005, there's been another paradigm shift that we have shifted from how high, how fast, and how tightly it can turn to, now, that has got to do stealth. It has do mainly with having great sensors, with fusing that data together and networking it out to mother aircraft. These are what make a fighter jet survivable and lethal in a combat environment; especially, a contested environment.
Now, there's really two reasons why this hasn't translated into the public. The first, I think, is that these numbers are all classified and ambiguous, i.e., how fast it can network with other aircraft; how many participants it can network with. That's classified information. I did my homework, in vain.
In addition, these aren't appealing things to exhibit. An airshow, for instance, doesn't really showcase how fast an F-35 can network with other aircraft out there. It's really designed to showcase the aerodynamics which are really a fraction of what determine how good a fighter jet is.
Second reason, has to do with technology. So, anytime a new technology is introduced it follows what's called an s-curve. Therefore, the very early on, it progresses very slowly. And, in fact, it's worse than the technology it's replacing as engineers are working out all the bugs.
If you look around where you're sitting or standing right now, if you've got a laptop; there's an LCD monitor, right? There're LED light bulbs. If you've got a smartphone all of these had major issues back when they were first introduced and; therefore, there was a lot of criticism that they weren't as good as the technology they're replacing.
After a while the engineers worked out all the bugs and they've surpassed whatever they replaced.
By the same token, fighter aircraft are no different. When the F-35 was first introduced, it had a lot of issues, but several years ago, the F-35 was able to surpass the capability of the 4th-generation fighters like the F-16 and Rafale Dassaut.
So, if you think about it, F-16s and F-15s have been incredible aircraft but they've been iterated on for decades. As a matter of fact, there's as much juice to squeeze out as the F-35 so while F-35 has already surpassed the 4th-generation aircraft, in 5 years, it's going to be exponentially better.
The next reason has to do with what's called concurrency. In other terms, typically, when there's a new fighter, you will build a test fleet, you'll figure out all the bugs, you'll finalize the design, and then you'll start production.
Now, Lockheed Martin chose to collapse the timeline by mergining those steps and they conducted a process called concurrency where they knew they were going to have to go back, retrofit, and fix lots of the bugs for the early production F-35s, but they were able to start building them very quickly.
Last but not least, the third reason being that the F-35 is the first fighter to grow up in the social media age. As a result, there's a lot of scrutiny on every infinitely small and insignificant problem the F-35 had.
Overall, It isn't sensical when rookie journalists who even aren't capable of telling an F-22 from an F-35 nor breaking down the ABCs of aerodynamics, are objectively, and in vain, taking Lockheed Martin and its marvel to task.
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Image credit: DreamsTime.
