USMC: We want more F-35s per year than you Limeys will get in half a decade

Re: Irrational

I don't know if the Harrier ever actually vectored to avoid being shot down, I doubt it, from my recollection of Falklands the Harriers were winning far too well to be in danger of being shot down.

Who ran the red flag exercise? Lockheed for a guess. I watched a report from Australia where 95% of the F35s failed to return from missions against reasonable modern opposition (like the Russian SU planes). Indeed they appear to fail fairly basically against existing American planes as well.

True the Harrier is old but frankly I would like to see our government doing the reverse of its last move, buy all the Harriers it sent to America and all these usmc ones at a knock down price, put them on the carriers, build a couple more small carriers and go ... at least we have something to sail around in.

And yes, agree with the comments about missiles and saturation of the ships defences... but more ships is more targets is a slightly better chance for an individual ship to survive....

Re: Irrational

I think it was a USMC pilot who first used it in combat, rather than the RAF (Gulf War 1 maybe). Remember seeing a documentary on it a while back.

Re: Irrational

Well a bit too old to be relevant now but Sharkey Ward's book Sea Harrier over the Falklands has some interesting accounts of operating in bad North sea conditions when the US carriers couldn't launch (Chapter 1) and some exercises with the US using F5s and F15s where they used the Harrier's characteristics to their advantage (Chapter 6). He reckoned you could pull a 2G "stop" at 400 knot by vectoring and used it against F5s.

Having said that he isn't exactly reserved and unbiased in describing the performance of the Sea Harrier :-)

Re: Irrational

> "On a related matter the F-35 has just completed its first Red Flag exercise where they managed a 15:1 kill ratio."

Flying through a flock of sparrows and then crashing doesn't exactly count as 15:1 kill ratio.

/trollface

Re: Irrational

"Maybe if it's irrational enough, May would buy them?

Otherwise some OTHER evil anti-human rights regime will buy them."

FTFY

Re: Irrational

"Maybe, but the source you quote (and all the way back to the Pentagon and Lockheed) I wouldn't trust an inch. The F35 programme is long on cost, short on delivery. Having some token exercise to generate some impressive "kill" figures is mere marketing by the military-industrial machine, and I don't believe it."

There is a book (and movie) about real life experiences in weapons development programmes, written by an officer who worked in that area of the Pentagon... "The Pentagon Wars"... recommended.

Re: Irrational

I am not a fan of the F-35, however...

"But against modern air defence assets, I'd expect the F35 to suffer significant losses"

Considering that is outside the specifications and purpose of the F-35, of course it would not do well.

The F-35 IS a 2nd-rate fighter, designed to be the workhorse/bomb-truck to the F-22.

It's use doctrine is:

Let the F-22s and Intruder-type aircraft take out the enemy air defences - aircraft, AA, etc.

THEN the F-35 does the high-rate close-air-support and precision strike sorties, with no significant enemy air defences left intact.

It is not designed to be a front-line dogfighter or a 'penetration'-type strike aircraft, that's the f-22's job.

The Bad Guys shoot back

"An A-10/Harrier can get in close on a strafing run within a couple hundred feet, "

The Bad Guys, even irregular guerilla forces usually have heavy machine guns that can shoot back if a ground attack aircraft gets within "a couple hundred feet". Pilots that want to go home after work shoot up the Bad Guys from a few kilometres away using Hellfire and Brimstone missiles from well out of range of heavy MGs and shoulder-fired missiles. As a bonus they don't accidentally walk cannonfire through friendly forces when the nose of the aircraft drops in a rough air pocket.

A sniper wouldn't charge his target to bayonet them, why would it be necessary for ground attack aircraft to knife-fight when they can stand off beyond visual range and turn the opposition into mince without allowing them a glimpse of the weapons platform that is destroying them?

As for the Harrier, a triumph of 1970s engineering, it is slow and short-ranged with a limited payload compared to regular catapult-launched aircraft such as the F/A-18. Its big advantage for the USMC is its ability to operate from rough airfields and short decks on the Tarawa-class and new America-class Marine assault ships, America's other aircraft carriers. The F35-B can also fly off those short decks as well as being faster, longer-ranged, smarter, stealthier and generally isn't falling apart due to the age of the airframe hence the USMC's keen interest in getting more of them as soon as possible to replace their forty-year-old Harriers.

Re: Swap

To my knowledge, the last major upgrade to the Harrier was an extended composite wing designed by McDonnell Douglas which gave extended range and carrying capacity, but at reduced speed and turn rate. BAe designed a GR5K "tin wing" Harrier which maintained the turn rate.

This "tin wing" could have been retrofitted to the existing Harrier (and Sea Harrier) fleet giving a faster, more manoeuvrable aircraft with more lift capacity than the AV-8B, but the US Government would only buy their own AV-8B design, and would only purchase if the RAF also purchased it.

As a compromise BAe designed metal wing root leading edge extensions which gave improved turn rate. These were eventually fitted to both the RAF and US Marine Corps versions of the AV-8B. The wing root leading edge extensions are metal because McDonnells refused to export the composite materials technology to BAe.

Note that the eventual AV-8B/GR5/GR7 is actually slower than the GR3/FRS1