F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by sschueller on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @08:21AM (#45038675)

Switzerland, if they want something they can fly for air policing is forced to buy the F35 at what every price the US feels fit (even though the contract with Lockheed states a fixed price, naive politicians and consultants found out the hard way). Of course the CHF to USD conversion is fix at a shit rate from many years ago and from what I understand there is no way around that because the SNB did the conversion back then already.

We have no alternative we can get before 2035. They are talking about extending the F/A-18 but since we would be the only ones still using them we would have to pay for that too at who know what price.

The public approved 6 billion and now it looks like it will be way more, excluding skyrocketing maintenance which is not included and a patriot missile system that when it is finally delivered will cost who knows how many billions.

The whole thing is an absolute shit show here and that's ignoring the technical issues this thing has...

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by orwin on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @09:13AM (#45039239)

With such a terrain, I would guess that agility and the ability to land on highway of in fields without burning all avionics and electronics would have been rated higher than stealth, but it wasn't. Still, the Swiss were offered a fairly low price, and promised low operating costs, and that's the main reason they didn't choose the Eurofighter (which isn't a multi-purpose jet but an interceptor)

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by stripe_away on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @09:17AM (#45039291)

JAS 39 Gripen can land on roads. Might have been a better choice.

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by nradov on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @09:36PM (#45047340)

Every modern tactical aircraft including the F-35A can land on roads. This isn't a capability unique to the Gripen.

https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3895003/us-a...

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by orwin on Thursday August 28, 2025 @11:17AM (#45053289)

You can, but it will destroy your plane electronics if you can't bring an external cooler fast enough. even with the next gen internal cooler (that won't be in test until 2029, so not installed until like 2035), the jury is still out until it's done.

And Stealth alone is not good enough, not anymore. Radar and optics tech caught up. You still have to load of flares for any CAS or any engagement that will involve fox-2 targeting (which, you know, break your profile and make you visible on old radars), and from what i heard, Thales is confident on its next-gen avionics/optics/radars ability to detect gen5 radar signal, so much so that they clearly focus on future-proofing against EW equipements (that don't yet exist, allegedly).

The future is Stealth+Altitude, or stealth+EW+unmaned, automated drone with similar radar profile, and that's probably when the F35 will probably shine, but until then, i just don't think it's a good plane, not yet.

Also i think fighter planes based on the Growler will probably be better in the future. If a country bought F35 without asking for Growlers, my intuition is that it was a political choice, not an informed/military one (So basically, Australia military, to me, is the only sane country).

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by UltraSane on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @09:24AM (#45039349)

Israel's attack on Iran using the F-35 proves it is a very effective, if expensive, weapon.

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by borlox on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @10:30AM (#45040251)

That's been a single strike.

I wonder how good it would still be when the enemy had resources and time to adapt in an ongoing conflict. In russia's war with ukraine, we saw tactics and tools quickly evolving.

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by FridayoLeary on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @10:49AM (#45040501)

Not on the level of responding to fith generation fighter jets. Most of their advances are in quadcopter technology. They both started with ww2 tactics. Its not surprising that they would take advantage of the low hanging fruits of 75 years of progress. If anything it's shocking how little both sides have changed fundamental tactics like not using meatwaves, which went out of fashion in ww1.

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Re:F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with e... by jajko on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @09:57AM (#45039787)

Only if US lets you use it, and given constant instability current government shows, next generation of fighters won't be bought from US.

Better to have something even worse on paper that can actually fly and lock targets than an expensive paperweight.

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