F-35 no cumple con las performances contractuales

[amalahama]

Pues no sé si sabéis que en los últimos días el pentagono ha tenido que reducir las especificaciones de performances porque el F-35 era incapaz de cumplirlas. Hoy ha aparecido un artículo en Flight International totalmente destructivo sobre el tema:

 

Reduced F-35 performance specifications may have significant operational impact

The Pentagon's decision to reduce the performance specifications for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will have a significant operational impact, a number of highly experienced fighter pilots consulted by Flightglobal concur. But the careful development of tactics and disciplined employment of the jet may be able to mitigate some of those shortcomings.

 

 

 

"This is going to have a big tactical impact," one highly experienced officer says. "Anytime you have to lower performance standards, the capability of what the airframe can do goes down as well."

 

The US Department of Defense's decision to relax the sustained turn performance of all three variants of the F-35 was revealed earlier this month in the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation 2012 report. Turn performance for the US Air Force's F-35A was reduced from 5.3 sustained g's to 4.6 sustained g's. The F-35B had its sustained g's cut from five to 4.5 g's, while the US Navy variant had its turn performance truncated from 5.1 to five sustained g's. Acceleration times from Mach 0.8 to Mach 1.2 were extended by eight seconds, 16 seconds and 43 seconds for the A, B and C-models respectively. The baseline standard used for the comparison was a clean Lockheed F-16 Block 50 with two wingtip Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAMs. "What an embarrassment, and there will be obvious tactical implications. Having a maximum sustained turn performance of less than 5g is the equivalent of an [McDonnell Douglas] F-4 or an [Northrop] F-5," another highly experienced fighter pilot says. "[it's] certainly not anywhere near the performance of most fourth and fifth-generation aircraft."

At higher altitudes, the reduced performance will directly impact survivability against advanced Russian-designed "double-digit" surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems such as the Almaz-Antey S-300PMU2 (also called the SA-20 Gargoyle by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the pilot says. At lower altitudes, where fighters might operate in for the close air support or forward air control role, the reduced airframe performance will place pilots at increased risk against shorter-range SAMs and anti-aircraft artillery.

Most egregious is the F-35C-model's drastically reduced transonic acceleration capabilities. "That [43 seconds] is a massive amount of time, and assuming you are in afterburner for acceleration, it's going to cost you even more gas," the pilot says. "This will directly impact tactical execution, and not in a good way."

Pilots typically make the decision to trade a very high rate of fuel consumption for supersonic airspeeds for one of two reasons. "They are either getting ready to kill something or they are trying to defend against something [that's trying to kill] them," the pilot says. "Every second counts in both of those scenarios. The longer it takes, the more compressed the battle space gets. That is not a good thing."

 

While there is no disputing that the reduced performance specifications are a negative development, there may be ways to make up for some of the F-35's less than stellar kinematic performance.

Pilots will have to make extensive use of the F-35's stealth characteristics and sensors to compensate for performance areas where the jet has weaknesses, sources familiar with the aircraft say. But engagement zones and maneuvering ranges will most likely be driven even further out against the most dangerous surface-to-air threats.

In an air-to-air engagement, for example, tactics would have to be developed to emphasize stealth and beyond visual range (BVR) combat. If a visual range engagement is unavoidable, every effort would have to be taken to enter the "merge" from a position of advantage, which should be possible, given the F-35's stealth characteristics.

Once engaged within visual range, given the F-35's limitations and relative strengths, turning should be minimized in favor of using the jet's Northrop Grumman AAQ-37 distributed aperture system of infrared cameras, helmet-mounted display and high off-boresight missiles to engage the enemy aircraft. If a turning fight is unavoidable, the F-35 has good instantaneous turn performance and good high angle of attack (50AOA limit) performance comparable to a Boeing F/A-18 Hornet, which means a similar strategy could be adopted if one finds him or herself in such a situation.

 

Lockheed, for its part, maintains that the F-35 has performance superior to that of any "legacy" fighter at high altitudes. "Having flown over 4000 hours in fighter jets, I will tell you the F-35's capability at altitude, mostly driven by the internal carriage of those weapons, as a combat airplane, this airplane exceeds the capabilities of just any legacy fighter that I'm familiar with in this kind of regime," says Steve O'Bryan, the company's business development director for the F-35 during a January interview.

But much of the discussion is theoretical at this point, the F-35 has not been operationally tested, nor have tactics been developed for the aircraft's usage. How the aircraft will eventually fare once fully developed and fielded is an open question.

 

Creo que ya oficialmente podemos denominar al F-35 como El Truño (así, con mayusculas) en cuanto a A/A se refiere.

 

Saludos!

[SERGI-]

Yo de EE.UU, no guardaría aun los F-18 de la Navy

[Galahad78]

Espero que se den cuenta de que cerrar la línea del F-22 con 183 unidades fue una locura.

 

Y bueno, que el F-35 está siendo el Fighter Ops del mundo real es vox populi (como diría la Sara Carbonillas ) desde hace años.

[amalahama]

Lo que nos vamos a reir cuando empiecen a hacer dogfights con F-16...

 

Saludos!

[danipelos]

Siempre tuvo fama de gordito. Ahora estara justificada.

[darthkata]

Esto....que me dicen de la carga del Gordito?? Porque por ahí he leído que las "medidas" se tomaron con dos 120, 2 JDAM y fuel a tope con lo cual no es justo compararlo con un 16 con sólo dos 120...

[JOSETI]

Faltaba la confirmación pero queda claro que el gordito no iba a ser tan bueno en tantas cosas a la vez.

 

Mas les vale aguantar en el inventario al Viper al Hornet y al cerdo porque como tengan que agrupar todo eso un F-35 las risas pueden ser mas grandes aun de cuando un F-18 entro en dogfight con el Rafale o cuando el EF le pusieron un par de estocadas un viper de por ahí....

 

Un saludo.

[Guest Darkness]

WoW!! tiene las performances de un F-4 Phantom!! Welcome to 1967 buddy!!

[djembe]

La copia China sera mejor que el original

[Angel101]

Aparte de que el gordito parece que pierde aceite

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-f-35b-been-grounded-david-cenciotti-the-aviationist-2013-1

[jorgeid]

Esto si es un truñofighter...

[Blackleg]

Y la putada es que lo compraremos.

[chapas]

Yo de EE.UU, no guardaría aun los F-18 de la Navy

 

Yo aún diría más... que desempolven los F-14 Tomcat de TopGun

[Espanto]

¡¡¡Uy, como mola!!! Podemos volver a instalar el armamento en nuestros F5 de Talavera, nos vamos a por los yankees y les damos pal pelo, y nos acabamos con la crisis.

 

Supongo que allí no pasará como aquí, y si no cumple las especificaciones con las que consiguieron la adjudicación tendrán que hacer una buena rebaja.

Si es que yo sigo diciendo que en el mundo de la aviación militar no se puede hacer nada que sea bueno en todo: podrás hacer algo medianamente bueno en todo, pero la excelencia, o haces algo específico o no vale.

[Davicico]

Donde se ponga un buen F-15 que si quite lo demás :D

 

Salu2!!

[amalahama]

Que para ser un buen avión no hace falta tener un T/W > 1 ni la carga alar de una mariposa... el problema viene cuando algun lobby de lockheed en el pentágono o en el congreso pretende engañar a todos con la cantinela de que el F-35, gracias a su "stealth", es la poya en verso como avión de superioridad aérea.

 

Cuando se establecieron los requisitos de diseño del F-35 todavía la USAF aspiraba a tener 800 F-22 surcando los aires y velando por la superioridad aérea allá dónde hiciera falta, entonces enfocar el F-35 al aire aire con tal despliegue de poderío no tenía mucho sentido; pero a día de hoy la situacion ha cambiado, por mucho que quiera LM justificar su caro juguete con unas más que dudosas características A/A como ya hicieran en su día con el "F/A-22" y sus "maravillosas bondades para el ataque aire-tierra".

 

En fin, está bien que vayan saliendo estas cosas y más que irán saliendo cuando el avión comience a entrar en servicio; lo triste es que los pilotos de pruebas sigan predicando que las performances del F-35 son "sin duda superiores a cualquier avión de combate de la anterior generación"

 

Saludos!

[Bear]

Bueno, quizás el truco resida en no precisar de que generación se está hablando.

Igual se refiere a la de la guerra del 14...

Edited February 6, 2013 by Bear

[Chiquito.]

Yo pensaba que montaba Rolls-Royce

 

http://sp.rian.ru/Defensa/20130223/156480122.html

[Guest Darkness]

Aquel que dice "Aguantas menos que un F-35 a 9Gs"

[Ninja]