Because transporting the toxic waste to a lower altitude costs money. It's pure greed, nothing more.

Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon say the F-35’s superiority over its rivals lies in its ability to remain undetected, giving it “first look, first shot, first kill.”

Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.”

Other critics have been even harsher. Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design.

Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. … It’s that bad.”

The development of the F-35 has been a mess by any measurement. There are numerous reasons, but they all come back to what F-35 critics would call the jet's original sin: the Pentagon's attempt to make a one-size-fits-all warplane, a Joint Strike Fighter.

History is littered with illustrations of multi-mission aircraft that never quite measured up. Take Germany's WWII Junkers Ju-88, or the 1970s Panavia Tornado, or even the original F/A-18. Today the Hornet is a mainstay of the American military, but when it debuted it lacked the range and payload of the A-7 Corsair and acceleration and climb performance of the F-4 Phantom it was meant to replace.

Yeah, the F/A-18 was trash when it first came out and it took YEARS and multiple changes/fixes to allow it to fully outperform the decades old aircraft it was designed to beat when it was released.

The F35 is not the best at anything it does, it is designed to fully be mediocre at all roles in order to allow it to be a single solution aircraft. That may change with more money, time, and data retrieved from hours spent in actual combat, but as it stands it is what it was designed to be. A jack of all trades and master of none, not something I would want to be flying in a role where I could encounter a master of that role.

As @ChaosEngine says, it is far beyond time that we move to a design where the pilot is not in the plane. There is no reason at this time that we cannot field a plane that could successfully perform it's role with the pilot in a secure location nearby. Such planes could be built cheaper, could perform in g-forces that humans cannot withstand, and would be expendable in a way that current planes are not. However, this would mean that our corporate welfare system for huge defense contractors would take a massive hit. We can't have that, can we?

I got up to 13,550 ft. at Annapurna base camp. I woke up after being there overnight with altitude sickness which was the most horrible thing. Once i got down a couple thousand feet the illness went away. Here is a pic i took from base camp of Annapurna https://imgur.com/aYvUR2S

(edit) and since i'm sharing here are a few pics i took while trekking in Nepal https://imgur.com/a/LOsiy

The Zero's Chinese performance was ignored by the U.S. command prior to pearl harbor, dismissed as exaggeration. That's actually the crux of my point.

Exceptional moments do not change the rule.
Yes on occasion a wildcat would get swiss cheesed and not go down, but 99% of the time when swiss cheesed they went down.
Yes, there were wildcat aces that did fairly well (and Zero aces that did even better), but 99% of wildcat pilots were just trying to not get mauled.

Hellcat didn't enter combat till mid 1943, and it is the correction to the mistake. The F6F should have been the front line fighter at the start of the war... and could have been made sooner had Japanese tech not been ignored/dismissed as exaggeration.


Russian quantity as quality? At the start they were shot down at a higher ratio than the manufacturing counter ratio (by a lot). It was a white wash in favor of the Germans.
It took improvements in Russian tech to turn the tide in the air. Lend-lease only constituted about 10% of their air force at the peak. Russia had to improve their own forces, so they did. By the end, planes like the yak3 were par with the best.


The Mig31 is a slower Mig25 with a digital radar. Their version of the F14, not really ahead of the times, par maybe.

F15 is faster than either mig29 or Su27 (roughly Mig31 speed).
F16/F18, at altitude, are moderately slower, but a wash at sea level.

Why would they shoot and run?
We have awacs, we would know they are coming, so the only chance to shoot would be at max range. Max range shots are throw-away shots, they basically won't hit unless the target is unaware, which it won't be unaware because of the RWR. Just a slight turn and the missile can't follow after tens of miles of coasting and losing energy.


Chinese railgun is in sea trials, right now. Not some lab test. It wouldn't be on a ship without first having the gun proven, the mount proven, the fire control proven, stationary testing completed, etc.
2025 is the estimate for fleet wide usage.
Try finding a picture of a U.S. railgun aboard a U.S. ship.


Why would a laser rifle not work, when you can buy crap like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7baI2Nyi5rI
There's ones made in China, too : https://www.sanwulasers.com/customurl.aspx?type=Product&key=7wblue&shop=
That will light paper on fire ~instantly, and it's just a pitiful hand held laser pointer.
An actual weapon would be orders of magnitude stronger than a handheld toy.
It's an excellent covert operations weapon, silently blinding and starting fires form kilometers away.


Russia does not need to sink a U.S. carrier for no reason.
And the U.S. has no interest in giving Russia proper a need to defend from a U.S. carrier. For the very reasons you mentioned.


What Russia can do is proliferate such a missile, and effectively deprecate the U.S. carrier group as a military unit.

We need carriers to get our air force to wherever we need it to be.
If everyone had these missiles, we would have no way to deliver our air force by naval means.

Russia has land access to Europe, Asia, Africa. They can send planes to anywhere they need to go, from land bases. Russia doesn't /need/ a navy.

Most of the planet does not have a navy worth sinking. It's just us. This is the kind of weapon that disproportionately affects us.

-scheherazade

We have conventional missiles that hit hypersonic speeds for short periods. Aim54 fired at altitude checks that mark, and that's a 60's/70's tech missile.

The X15 did it manned, and that first flew in the late 1950's.

Why would Russia not be able to come up with something similar in the last half-century?


Re-entry from orbit is 4x hypersonic. Russia has plenty of experience with the effects.

The Russian p-270 was made in the 80's, and used a ramjet.
This new missile is an incremental improvement over tech they already posses. A higher speed ramjet missile. Hardly a stretch.

It's not like they are spamming the internet with updates just so you can see how they are doing.

-scheherazade

I'm a little skeptical now that I'm older, but a few decades ago I read that the SR-71's wings actually had a small gap that fuel leaked out while at low speed/altitude. Once it got up to speed, the metal heated up, expanded, and closed the gap.

Skoe-skoe-skoe!
F1 acceleration, no power loss at altitude...why not go for the overall record?
Can't wait to see it run.

Amazing model, but I'm having a really hard time getting my head around how altitude can be controlled. I think the lift produced by the rotary wing would vary with airspeed, but that seems an awfully crude control mechanism.

Fortunately they were already doing a go-around by the time ATC noticed, a few seconds later would have been a disaster. Their minimum altitude was reported as 18m, which is a bit under a metre above the tail height of a Boeing 787-9.

They do have those alarms, but it was initially reported this plane was too far off course from R28R to trigger them and part of the investigation will be whether they were even operating at the time.

A major contributing factor for this incident was that the second runway, 28L, was closed and lights off at the time of the incident. As a result, the FAA has changed San Francisco landing procedures no longer permitting visual approach when an adjacent parallel runway is closed - https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/faa-changes-san-francisco-landing-procedures-after-a-440380/

It has a fan driven by the main gearbox. It's pretty rare for those to fail, but does spin like it lost control of yaw though. My first thought was since it's landing so close to the edge of that cliff, if the wind is moving from the right to left, there is going to be a big updraft coming over the cliff.

Watching it again, it looks like the pilot is having to fight some wind and seems to be having trouble keeping it down. Between 40-45 seconds, it looks like the wind changes as the helicopter appears to lift up and weather-vane into the wind just before losing control.

I found this video which is in German. If the Google auto-translate isn't too off, it says the cause is still unknown, but whoever they're interviewing at the end speculates that the helicopter was too heavy for the altitude it was operating at.

Ok, so I heard a similar story from a SR-71 pilot that went like this:

A SR-71 was entering LA control control space and was listening to the chatter of pilots requesting various altitude changes, so the pilot of the Blackbird decided to have some fun.

He called ATC and requested Angels 7-0 (I think this correct: 70,000 feet). LA control came back and said smirkingly, "Ok, if you think you can reach it, you're cleared for Angels 7-0."

"Roger LA ATC," the pilot came back, "Descending to Angels 7-0".


Dunno if it's true or not, but it's a story.

"Uhhh, hello from the flight deck. This is your captain speaking, Captain Badass. We are currently flying at an altitude of negative 1 feet. If you look out your right window you will see water. If you check your left, more water. Don't worry folks, first were going to blast the shit out of a forest fire, do it all over again, then have you home for dinner. Thanks again for flying Adventure Airlines!"

Nice catch---

Wow.
10,000 feet of altitude loss.

"I wonder how many Gs they pulled coming out of that? and how much altitude they lost?"

Not sure about the G's but they lost 10000 feet in the manoeuvre. Look at the PIP in the upper right corner. The numbers beside the virtual aircraft represent the altitude.

I believe they stall at 15000 feet and pull out on the bottom around 5000 feet.

Fun ride... can we go again!!