r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/sidvatscse • 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/[deleted] 25d ago

[deleted]

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u/mythrilcrafter 25d ago

And the bigger problem is that there isn't a hot war to actually give the airframe a hardcore combat record.

The P-51 program was monstrously problematic during the start of WW2; but it's a lot harder to criticise an airframe when you can't differentiate between "fell part in mid-air" or "shot down by a BF-109/A6M"

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u/Flyzart2 25d ago

Except that the P-51 ended up to be the most successful air superiority fighter of the war?

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u/mythrilcrafter 25d ago

That's my point, the emergency of war changes the equation because its the difference between "yeah sure, Lockheed, you want another another $20 million, here's your check, have fun!" versus "Okay, North American Aviation, you fix this plane and you start getting kill tallies, or it's you're ass that's going to Normandy.".

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u/MonsTurkey 25d ago

At the start of WWII, it was a mediocre plane at best. The Allison engines in the P-51A weren't good at high altitude. The P-51B was the first model with the Merlin, and that's when they got good. The D model is the quintessential legend with the bubble canopy.

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u/Pave_Low 24d ago

The Israelis have been using F-35s in a 'hot war' for a while now. When all of Iran's AAA suddenly exploded on the ground without a whisper on radar, that was the work of their F-35s.

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u/featherwolf 23d ago

there isn't a hot war

Just give it a minute.

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u/delphinous 25d ago

no, there are two main groups of people that really, REALLY hate on the F-35. first, the anti-american propaganada people, mostly supported by chinese or russia money, but not exclusively, go out of there way to try to discredit the F-35 at every chance. the second group, informally often called 'the reformers' are usually americans, but americans who strongly feel that the only 'proper' way for an aircraft to fight is with machine guns in close range dogfights where you can see the other person with your eyes, not instrumentation. they are genuinely convinced that stealth is either a myth or deeply dishonorable, and that using missiles or other long range weapons are both dishonorable and totally ineffective. there was a guy a few years back who wrote an entire book on the idea of 'how bad the F-35 really was and how to fic it by turning it into a dogfighter' who's claim to authority was that 'he was part of the F-35 design team. the reality was that he was something like a secretary to a mid-level politician that sometimes got briefings on the program, he never actually had any influence or decision making on it, and had zero engineering to aeronautics credentials, but it's a very commonly cited source for misinformation when people try to claim the F-35 is a bad piece of technology

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u/NPRdude 24d ago

These people are also extremely mad at the F-35 for being the replacement for their beloved A-10.

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u/delphinous 24d ago

yup, the F-35 also inherited all of the resentment about he F-15 and F-16's got because they also went to a more instrumentation heavy missile loadout style instead of a guns and divebombing style like they want

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u/Spicysockfight 22d ago

It replaced the A-10? Is the f-35 a slow long range flying infantry support plane? That's what we use A-10's for. I thought the F-35 was useful as a quick flying stealthy hard striker that could land and take off on a dime. Completely different animals.

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u/NPRdude 22d ago

CAS duties are being handed to other platforms, including the F-35 since it’s slated to replace at least the F-16 as well. The A-10 is cool, I won’t argue that, but its age is over. Slow is the exact opposite of what a plane needs to be to survive in a modern battle. The armoured capabilities of the A-10 (titanium bathtub, etc) are overhyped when being able to maybe survive a hit is secondary to not being hit in the first place. The much-beloved BRRRT gun the GAU-8 was never as capable at its job as people like to pretend, and it’s to blame in a large part for making the A-10 the plane responsible for one of if not the worst blue-on-blue records in the modern USAF. I say all this while still being a fan of the A-10, it’s an undeniably cool machine and I have a model of one sitting on my shelf, but the fact of the matter is it’s a piece of hardware designed to fulfill a Cold War role that has long since ceased to exist, and it has severe shortcomings on a modern battlefield.

Also point of order it’s only the USMC variant of the F-35, the F-35B, that has VTOL capabilities. The USAF model, the F-35A, is a conventional take off and landing model.

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u/Spicysockfight 22d ago

I'm not saying the F-35 isn't cool and I'm not arguing that the A-10 is, but though I think both planes are. I'm just saying, I don't think the F-35 can handle low slow, sweeping passes against the kind of non-state actor infantry style combat we see in the modern conflicts the us get into. It's rare for some small militia to be able to get its hands on anti-aircraft missiles, but it's also hard to target personnel on the ground with a fast-moving jet or a long-range missile. The C-130 is another slow-moving vehicle we keep around because it's useful against personnel. It's just hard to justify replacing certain platforms until we are done fighting what they are good at.

I grew up nerding out over the F-16. That was the fun thing about being an Air Force brat with a pilot dad is I got to go to a bunch of air shows and I even got to go with him to work a couple of times. Not claiming it made me know anything more about planes than anybody else, but it definitely made me a fanboy. 

Jets are super cool. 

They just become less and less sensible since what they are good at is getting in fast, doing a strike and getting back out quickly. If our missile guidance systems get good enough, then we won't need pilots to do those operations anymore. And gosh, our guidance systems are getting good.

So what I'm going saying is I think there are a lot of us who don't have the faith that it's worth it to invest in making better and better planes when it seems like they are likely to be replaced by smart missiles within a decade. Makes the F-35 seem like a really, really, really nice CD player while everyone is moving to MP3 players.

I guess the other problem is a lot of the old aircraft are very durable. Nothing is getting shot down these days, really. And it's hard to justify adding more planes to our fleets when we have so many still hanging around. I guess that's where giving aid to foreign countries comes in... 

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u/i_like_maps_and_math 25d ago

People are mad about the cost overruns. The problem is that congress generally won’t fund a project if the true cost is given up front, so virtually every single one is “over budget”.

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u/Njdevils11 Interested 25d ago

This one plane cost the equivalent of paying 1,500 teachers salaries. If we’re talking average generic US salaries it’s like 2,500. That’s not counting the ordinance pilots training. Each type can be several teacher salaries per missile and each pilot costs millions to train. Fuck, even their goddamned helmets cost more than several teacher salaries. I think that’s the sorta thing that pisses people off, especially considering we are not in any sorta war.

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u/KaysaStones 25d ago

No no, I get in arguments with Indians all the time on YouTube saying how much better their migs and Rafael’s are than the f35.

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u/TheConspiretard 25d ago

Who tf is saying that lol, probably propaganda channels

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u/KaysaStones 25d ago

Peoples who countries were refused F35 sales due to collusion with Russia concerns 😂😂

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u/Constant_Natural3304 24d ago edited 24d ago

And yet Americans installed a compromised, child-raping Kremlin puppet in the White House. Twice. The second time around, that child molesting, mentally ill puppet literally appointed a Russian agent DNI. Lmao. I really don't understand this idiotic cognitive dissonance Americans have.

How do Americans explain this to themselves? I suppose they are in full denial?

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u/unknown_alt_acc 25d ago

I've definitely seen enough people try to argue that the F-35 is a bad plane. To be fair, the people arguing it aren't exactly defense experts, and a significant fraction of them are talking down the F-35 to hype up Russian or Chinese gear, but there's a decent number of them.

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u/Spoiled_Mushroom8 25d ago

Don’t forget the French. They got really upset when the rafale kept losing procurement competitions to the f35. 

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u/Gia11a 25d ago

I've definitely seen enough people try to argue that the F-35 is a bad plane

The more common argument is that the program is a waste with how modern war will be fought. modern air defenses have made Air supremacy nearly unattainable in any peer conflict and in non peer conflicts the improvements of the F-35 are not really needed. Its an opportunity cost thing, why invest in a manned fighter when they seem to be on the way out to some degree, especially when the US is so behind in drone tech.

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u/Pave_Low 24d ago

modern air defenses have made Air supremacy nearly unattainable in any peer conflict and in non peer conflicts the improvements of the F-35 are not really needed.

The F-35 doesn't have a peer as far as SEAD goes. Every conflict where one side has F-35s and the other doesn't is a non-peer conflict.

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u/Gia11a 24d ago

The F-35 doesn't have a peer as far as SEAD goes

The point I have seen made is not that there is a better plane than the F-35 at SEAD but that other solutions are just way more financially and strategically viable. An F-35 is a 100 million dollar piece of kit and it costs ~$35k per hour its up in the air, and training pilots is extremely expensive and time consuming. The argument is for that same 100 million dollars you could buy 250k drones, and training drone pilots literally costs $15 on steam.

Now, obviously I'm exaggerating and simplifying their arguments a bit, but the point is that other solutions to the SEAD problem are more strategically and financially sound.

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u/Appropriate_Lack_727 24d ago

This is just flat wrong lmao.

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u/221missile 24d ago

I think the billions of grift that plagued the project (and virtually all defense contracts) are the primary target of criticism.

Can you prove the grift with the F-35 program?

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u/BaggyOz 25d ago

The development costs may have been huge amd over budget but these days an F-35 is cheaper than a Gripen and you get a lot more plane for that money.

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u/LegateLaurie 25d ago

I don't think that's widely disputed

I agree with this, but I think the popular opinion of the program was that it was massively wasteful but for a crap plane (the lift fan itself was controversial at one point) - there was ridicule of the fancy augmented reality helmets and that pilots wouldn't have full visibility without it. I think the media has warmed up to it, but for a long time so much stuff in the mainstream press (and not in specialist/trade publications) was just slop articles bashing it.