Production of the Second Netherlands F-35
Teams at the Lockheed Martin facility in Fort Worth, Texas, work on the second F-35A for the Royal Netherlands Air Force in December 2012.
Richard from Rotterdam wrote:
Coalitiepartijen VVD en PvdA spraken in het regeerakkoord af eind dit jaar te beslissen of behalve de testtoestellen nog meer JSF’s worden gekocht ter vervanging van de oude F-16′s. Doordat de toestellen steeds duurder worden, kunnen er steeds minder worden aangeschaft. In plaats van 85 toestellen kunnen er nog maar 56 worden betaald. Daarvoor moet al worden beknibbeld op andere onderdelen van de krijgsmacht.
Marine Major Aric "Walleye" Liberman was uncharacteristically modest for a Navy SEAL turned fighter pilot. He had just landed an F-35--one of the 2,457 jets the Pentagon plans to buy for $400 billion, making it the costliest weapons program in human history--at its initial operational base late last year. Amid celebratory hoopla, he declined photographers' requests to give a thumbs-up for the cameras that sunny day in Yuma, Ariz. "No, no, no," he demurred with a smile.
Liberman's reticence was understandable. For while the Marines hailed his arrival as a sign that their initial F-35 squadron is now operational, there's one sticking point. "It's an operational squadron," a Marine spokesman said. "The aircraft is not operational."
The F-35, designed as the U.S. military's lethal hunter for 21st century skies, has become the hunted, a poster child for Pentagon profligacy in a new era of tightening budgets. Instead of the stars and stripes of the U.S. Air Force emblazoned on its fuselage, it might as well have a bull's-eye. Its pilots' helmets are plagued with problems, it hasn't yet dropped or fired weapons, and the software it requires to go to war remains on the drawing board.
That's why when Liberman landed his F-35 before an appreciative crowd, including home-state Senator John McCain, he didn't demonstrate its most amazing capability: landing like a helicopter using its precision-cast titanium thrust-vectoring nozzle. That trick remains reserved for test pilots, not operational plane drivers like him.
The resulting bastard child was a compromise, not optimum for any one service but good enough for all three. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy liked its stubby design. The F-35C's squat fuselage puts its tailhook close to its landing gear (7 ft., compared with 18 on the F-18 it is replacing), making it tough to grab the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier. Its short range means aircraft carriers ferrying it into battle will have to sail close to enemy shores if the F-35C is to play a role. It can fly without lumbering aerial tankers only by adding external fuel tanks, which erases the stealthiness that is its prime war-fighting asset.
Cramming the three services into the program reduced management flexibility and put the taxpayer in a fiscal headlock. Each service had the leverage generated by threatening to back out of the program, which forced cost into the backseat, behind performance. "The Air Force potentially could have adopted the Navy variant, getting significantly more range and structural durability," says John Young Jr., a top Navy and Pentagon civilian official from 2001 to 2009. "But the Air Force leadership refused to consider such options."
Pilots love the F-35. There are few gauges, buttons or knobs in the cockpit. "What you have in front of you is a big touchscreen display--it's an interface for the iPad generation," says Marine Colonel Arthur Tomassetti, an F-35 test pilot. "You have an airplane that with very small movements of your left and right hand does what you want it to do. And if you don't want it to do anything, it stays where you left it." That makes it easy to fly. "I'm watching the emerald-colored sea up against the white sand," Tomassetti says of his flights from Florida's Eglin Air Force Base along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. "I remember lots of flights in other airplanes where I never had time to do anything like that."
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