Oh look, X is awash with a story about the F-35 again.
(media.scored.co)
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Apple and Oranges. The F-35 is a failure, and a corrupt, bloated program that is designed to enrich the military industrial complex. In the end it will get shelved and replaced with a cheap UAV.
That and our tax dollars pay for that failure. Should have just kept making F22s instead of funding two separate next gen fighter programs.
The F-22 can't even drop a bomb on a moving target. It's an extremely limited aircraft.
And I personally have no idea why people are so obsessed with it and why they think it's some kind of wunderwaffen.
The F-22 has a lot of major problems. It served as a good learning platform for what the F-35 became. Improvements in the design of the fuselage, the LO coatings, the avionics, and a lot of that can't simply be "upgraded" into the F-22. I mean, the LO coatings alone - the F-35 uses a different type of LO coating and allows the vast majority of panels to be accessed without any LO maintenance. The F-22 requires very costly LO removal/repainting with most maintenance, which means the aircraft have to be held down for typically about three days just for one panel. What this means is in the F-22 world, they're basically flying around with a ton of Code-2 writeups until they can hold the aircraft down for a week. If you look at a good picture of the F-22, it looks like it's covered with 'digicam', because of the constant patch jobs needed on the LO.
The PTMS/IPP package of the F-35 is an entire generational leap beyond what the F-22 uses, and you have to build the aircraft around that.
Dogfighting has already been an incredibly rare thing for decades, and it's seen as being nonexistent in the future. Silly lies about the Vietnam airwar theater don't change that. And if you consider that, then it becomes a question of things like 'do we really need thrust vectoring'? 'Do we really need to extremely expensive engines'?
Even for people who complain about the cost, the F-22 would never have been affordable. It has needed enormous numbers of upgrades over the years owing in part to its limited mission profile, and the extremely dated avionics package it flew with. The engines are one of the most expensive parts of an aircraft, and, well, you're paying for two for every F-22.
One of the big reasons the "muh F-35 can't turn" shit is because unlike any other aircraft, the F-35 was basically shipped while it was still in development. The physical structure and design were laid down, populated with 'rudimentary' avionics, and sent off to begin live flying and training while the avionics were further developed. Stories like 'can't turn' were because the F-35 had immense control law limitations put on it until block 3F.
Previous aircraft were fully completed when they shipped, which meant your systems were 10+ years obsolete by the time the pilots got their hands on them.
That's what we have bombers for, bro. Also drones. A fighter should be specialized in destroying other aircraft to gain air superiority over an area; trying to make it a jack of all trades is a mistake.
Seriously, the mission profile of the F18 Super Hornet is about perfect. An Air Superiority fighter which can launch from carriers and has a long operational range.
Fighters gain Air Superiority in a combat zone. Air-to-ground attack aircraft kill shit.
The A-10 is less expensive per hour of flight time than an attack helicopter. So use those. Send Reaper Drones (or whatever) as required.
The F-35 does everything but the maintenance costs are just stupendous when you cost them out per hour of air time.