One of Obama's first acts as POTUS was to scrap the F-22 Raptor fighters - which were to own
the air for the next 20 years... Scrapping them means there are no spare parts and the then
fleet of 250 aircraft are now all but totally grounded....

Why - because they were made in states with Republican Governors and Senators...

Hillary didn't care - heck she signed off on sending 20 percent of our uranium to Russia....

The F-35 Can't Beat The Plane It's Replacing In A Dogfight


We’ve heard of significant shortcomings before with the fighter jet that’s supposed to be America’s future, but this is just as bad as it gets. The F-35 performed so dismally in a dogfight, that the test pilot remarked that the it had pretty much no place fighting other aircraft within visual range.


F-35 Can't Carry Its Most Versatile Weapon Until At Least 2022
The short takeoff and vertical landing capable F-35B, which has handicapped the entire Joint Strike …

And it’s even worse than a mere maneuverability issue. At one point, the pilot’s helmet was so big he couldn’t even turn his head inside the cockpit.

That’s according to a scathing report obtained by our friends over at War Is Boring that details the results of visual range air-to-air engagement tests between an F-35A and an F-16C. The F-35, which the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines are expected to rely upon, in addition to the air arms of militaries across the world for at least the next few decades, was supposed to be better than its F-16 predecessor in all respects.

The F-35’s ability to compete against other fighter aircraft in a close-in dogfight, even against the decades old designs it looks to replace, has always been a contentious issue. Long ago, the F-35’s maneuverability was planned to far exceed that of fourth generation fighters. Over time, those claims eroded to the point where the troubled stealth jet is described as being “about as maneuverable as an F-16.”

The fact that the F-35 can carry its weapons and fuel internally was of course the major deciding factor in being able to make such a claim.

Keep in mind, all of this is anecdotal, but testing reports over almost the last decade have supported the fact that the F-35 was not nearly as nimble as many would like it to be. Still, all claims regarding its performance against other fighters in a dogfight remained largely academic, with only bits of data to compare in a vacuum.

Which is why the candid report described in the War Is Boring article finally gives us a good first hand account as to how capable – or incapable as it may be – the F-35 is in the within-visual-range fight.

The test pilot flying the F-35 makes it very clear that the new jet, even in its ideal configuration without any external stores, was no match against a Block-40 F-16C in a less-than-ideal configuration with a pair of under-wing fuel tanks:

Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement.
In dogfighting, energy is everything, and if your enemy has more kinetic and potential energy for maneuvers than you do, then you’re toast.

The report even goes into what is akin to a fairly desperate move usually only used in one-on-one air combat maneuvers, known as a rudder reversal, that the F-35 is apparently decent at performing at slow speeds. The fact that this was even detailed in the report as a useful tactic is telling. In reality, using such maneuvers means you are probably going to die if any other bad guys are in the area as it rapidly depletes the aircraft’s energy state, leaving it vulnerable to attack.

Another area that the test pilot highlights on is the F-35’s abysmal rearward visibility. David Axe from War Is Boring writes:

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.
The report goes on to make other telling remarks about the F-35’s air combat maneuvering performance. It should be noted that the aircraft’s flight software can probably still be tweaked to offer a little wider envelope for pilots to traverse during a hard turning dogfight, but seeing as this test occurred this year (almost a decade after the first F-35 flew), the amount of extra agility that can be squeezed out of the F-35 is most likely marginal at this point. Also, the aircraft flown in the test, an F-35A, is the most maneuverable F-35 variant of the lot, being capable of pulling 9g, while the carrier capable F-35C is capable of pulling 7.5g and the short takeoff and vertical landing variant, the F-35B, is only capable of pulling 7g.

This is what happens when you have a dumb ass in charge.

To keep our remaining F-22s flying our fleet is being scrapped for spare parts !

Yet another F-22 at Tyndall AFB was scrapped up to the tune of $35 million, but is otherwise more or less intact. By my math, that means the USAF has 184 production jets left, which Air Combat Command chief General Mike Hostage, who recently flew his last Raptor sortie, agrees with. “Got only 184 of them,” he says. “A pitifully small number.”

The US Air Force’s factsheet says the service has 183 jets, but that was just prior to the latest crash at Tyndall–which means the service should have 182 jets left–if it is to be believed. But after the crash, when Steve Trimble–the founder of this blog–and I were tallying up the numbers, and we ended up debating whose numbers were right–my count or the USAF’s official figures.

I didn’t think the fact sheet was correct, so I asked ACC to give me a breakdown of the Raptor fleet. This is what ACC sent me: “The F-22 inventory is 123 combat-coded, 27 training, 16 test, and 20 attrition reserve. The incident at Tyndall was a training aircraft which brought the number down from 28. There are currently 186 total.”

So 6 years ago in a partisan move the F-22 Raptor which owned the sky was cancelled...


So how many F-35s are there ???

When will the F-35 be flown in combat ???

Based on the current F-35 services schedule, the F-35A will reach the initial operational capability (IOC) in July 2016; the F-35B will reach the IOC milestone by July 2015; and the F-35C will reach the IOC milestone by February 2018.


And a 20 year old F-16 or F-15 can fly 500 mph faster and blow it out of the sky ! ! !

we have a bunch of idiots in charge.

So Giga now that you are an expert on war planes and not just Godevils, how many planes does it take to do the job of one Drone? Have you calculated how many Drones are in our arm forces?

The F-35 (and the US defense technology as a whole) is a running joke these days. They push things into production before they're fully tested. They put a new vertical landing system into the F-35 that was buggy and required a bunch of work, but they were already pushing the planes into production. So what's that mean? The brand new planes sat while they figured it out, and then they made retrofits on the BRAND NEW aircraft that were just being rolled off the line, and by the time it was all said and done, the system was already outdated. Same goes with the targeting systems which were developed back in the mid-2000's which are already outdated by the newest Migs.

And don't even get me started on the new Ford class carriers.... They built them to be tailored to the F-35. So they built it and floated it out of dry dock and went to testing with the F-35. The F-35's vertical takeoff MELTED the deck on the carrier. So, we sent our brand new carrier back to dry dock to completely re-think the deck and bracing below it...

So to wrap it up, we killed the F-22, the modern definition of air superiority, and the A-10, the best close-air support platform....ever, for a plane that doesn't actually exist yet. On top of that, we built two aircraft carriers for this theoretical plane that will have to be retrofitted to allow for the plane, THAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR, to operate on it. We didn't build just one, but TWO carriers wrong because we didn't test them.

Some stupid people putting the cart before the horse, scaled up to a ludicrous level.

The best I can tell he has tried his best to decimate the country

Hey Giga we all know that you don't adapt to new things,example your ancient GoDevil.
just go here and read. I won't copy and paste the whole thing, not to use up forum space for nothing like you usually do.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/military-dont- ... d=32152912

Dammit man! Not good! Gator attacks, sharks, rainbows on the white house, supreme court ordering the removal of the Ten Commandments and Obama is trying to destroy the counrty.. Probably just coincidence!