In Forbes magazine 23 February (serve the Soviet Union!) published an article under the eloquent title "The U.S.. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed». That is, "The US Air Force admitted the failure of the F-35 stealth fighter project".
And we happily translated.
The US Air Force High Command wanted a relatively cheap and light fighter to replace the vintage Cold War F-16., and supplement them with a small fleet of sophisticated - but expensive and unreliable - stealth fighters.
The result would be a mixture of expensive "fifth generation" F-22 and F-35 and inexpensive "fifth generation minus" jets., explained Air Force Commander General Charles Brown Jr..
If this plan sounds familiar, so that's why, that the Air Force more than twenty years ago announced the launch of the development of cheap and light fighters to replace the vintage F-16 during the Cold War, and an additional small fleet of sophisticated - but expensive and unreliable - stealth fighters.
But over twenty-odd years of development, this "light and inexpensive fighter" replacement became increasingly heavy and expensive as, how the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin have been wrapping it up with more and more new technology.
Yes, we are talking about the F-35. The twenty-five-ton invisible combat aircraft has become the very problem, which was intended to solve. And now, as officials say, America needs a new fighter, to solve the F-35 problem.
With the price of a plane in the area $100 million a piece, including engine, F-35 is super expensive. And although he has invisibility and high-tech sensors, However, it also needs constant expensive maintenance., he is unreliable.
"The F-35 is not a cheap and lightweight fighter", Dan Ward says, former Air Force program manager and author of popular business books, including "Cycle of Simplicity".
"F-35 is a Ferrari", Brown told reporters last Thursday. "You don't drive your Ferrari to work every day., you only ride it on sundays. This is our high end fighter, we want to be sure, that we don't have to use it in all low-level conflicts».
“I want to regulate the frequency of use of this aircraft”, Brown added..
Therefore, we need a new simpler fighter, which would take over the load of daily operations. Today, about a thousand F-16s at the disposal of the Air Force fulfill this role.. But we haven't bought new F-16s from Lockheed since 2001 of the year. All F-16s are too old.
In his last interview before retiring in January, Will Roper, Air Force Purchasing Officer, announced the idea of purchasing new F-16s. But Brown did not approve of this idea., stated, that he no longer needs "classic planes".
The seventeen-ton non-stealth F-16 is too hard to upgrade with the latest software, Brown explained. Instead of ordering "new old" F-16s, he added, The Air Force should initiate the development of a "clean slate design" for a new low-cost fighter.
Brown's comments are effectively an admission of the failure of the F-35 program.. As expected in the nineties, this program was supposed to produce thousands of fighters to replace almost all the tactical combat aircraft that existed at that time in the ownership of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
One Air Force needs about 1800 F-35, to replace the aging F-16 and A-10, and in order to at least partially form a mix of simple and complex aircraft, also needs a replacement 180 F-22 with twin engines in the high-tech segment.
But the Air Force and Lockheed failed the F-35 already at the level of the basic concept. "They tried to make the F-35 do too much", Dan Grezier says, analyst at the Government Oversight Project (Project on Government Oversight) in Washington.
Need a small wing version for ground operations, a large-wing version for naval aircraft carriers with catapults and a VTOL version for small Marine Corps warships.
Complexity drives up cost. Cost increase causes delays. Delays give developers time to further complicate the design. It adds more cost. It causes new delays. And so on.
Across 15 years after the first flight of the F-35, the Air Force has only 250 such aircraft. Now the service signals a possible program cut. And not because, that Brown called them "boutique", high-tech fighter in the F-22 class. The Air Force completed the production of the F-22 after the creation of all 195 copies.
"F-35 is at a crossroads", Grazier says.
Pentagon leaders realized, that the US military needs to shift its focus towards the big threats - that is, Russia and China - and therefore the Navy and Air Force will need most of the US military budget, exceeding 700 billions of dollars. And all this at the expense of the Army.
“If we want to start production of a new fighter, now is the right time", Grazier says.
“The Air Force can end production of the F-35 after just a couple of hundred copies and redirect tens of billions to the new fighter program.
But the question remains open, Will the Air Force ever succeed in developing a light and cheap fighter?. New low-tech jet could suffer the same fate, which befell the previous (this is us about the F-35): he will gradually gain weight, complexity and cost, becoming a high tech, heavy and expensive.
If this happens, as it happened before, the next head of the air force might tell reporters, say in 2041 year, that "The new F-36 is a Ferrari, and you don't drive to work in your Ferrari every day.". And add, that “To replace the sixty-year-old F-16s of the Air Force, it is necessary to develop a new, cheap and light fighter".
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