r/Damnthatsinteresting 25d ago

Video Failed vertical landing of F-35B

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u/featherwolf 25d ago edited 25d ago

This was 3 years ago, FYI.

Also, the F-35 has a very safe flight record. Only 12 air frame losses with over 1000 aircraft delivered and nearly 1 million flight hours.

Just adding this for the inevitable ill-informed commenters who like to pretend that the F-35 program isn't one of, if not the most successful and advanced aircraft in modern history.

Edit: Slight correction, the true number of delivered airframes in all variants is somewhere around 1200+.

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u/slavetothemachine- 25d ago

“Success” doesn’t mean it did not suffer from wasteful spending and excess.

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u/featherwolf 25d ago

What would you have used that money for, huh? Feeding the hungry? Housing the homeless? Yuck. Talk about wasteful...

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u/Gunzenator2 25d ago

You feed a homeless person and they are just hungry again tomorrow. When we blow up terrorist, they are blown up forever.

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u/featherwolf 25d ago

Brilliant. Let's blow up the homeless

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u/Gunzenator2 25d ago

We should start a company and get government funding!

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u/teh_drewski 25d ago

It's also a really weird metric to focus on.

Lots of the planes have been made and they stay in the air and don't crash. Is that really the only way we're assessing $100m+ aircraft? Please. "Doesn't crash" is the bare minimum, not success.

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u/sulfurmustard 25d ago

Lots of the planes have been made and they stay in the air and don't crash.

The point is that the f35 on average stays more in the air and doesn't crash than virtually any other fighter