I'll just leave this here:



Canada backed out of their F35 purchases last year. McCain is the head of the Senate Armed Services committee and he has told the pentagon that they will need to reduce the buy. For the first time, they are reconsidering doing so.

Also, the latest 'little' hiccup? Concerns over ejection safety have forced the Pentagon to ground any F-35 pilots under 138 pounds from flying the jet.

I hate to break it to you, but this plane is rapidly going the route of the F22. We need to completely reconsider what we need a proper 5th gen fighter to accomplish and we need to do it with a minimum of cost. It also needs to not be a swiss army plane.

OK, so this is supposed to be convincing us that the plane works?...but they do admit that it can take numerous seconds between rudder input and response by the plane....my RC glider is more responsive than that.

<10% delivery, and only one variant = fail.
Most expensive plane ever=fail.
Past it's expected lifespan before it's deployed=fail.
'The same technology, but a little bit more advanced' is hardly worth the country bankrupting cost=fail

It sure seems like they're admitting that a minor systems upgrade to an F-22 would have ended up with a much better plane with the same tech for <1/10 the cost and time.
This plane seems designed to fight directly against technologically advanced adversaries....which means Russia and/or China. We are NEVER going to be in direct air to air combat with either of those nations. We avoid that like the plague, because it's all too easy to escalate to nuclear war. The enemies we are actually likely to engage don't have 1/10 the technological capabilities needed to take on an F-22.
The entire reason for this plane to exist at all is a fraud.

This is controlled by software, which can be tweaked... the whole point of having test pilots fly the thing. These jets are fly-by-wire as they are bricks-in-the-sky compared to a standard plane so they need automated assistance to fly the plane like 'arcade' mode in a video game. And if you've ever beta-tested a flight-sim you'll know they start off shit and eventually get better as they are refined.

Moving this video to transmorpher's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

This is 50% of a good video. The first half presents actual facts, which make a strong case that classic dogfighters are being made obsolete by very long range, stealthy aggressors. Simply put, fighters aren't fighting the same fight anymore. Muskets and grenadoes are out: rifles and mortars are in.

The second half, however, is propaganda and promises. Describing the goals of a program isn't itself a good defense of the demonstrated capabilities of a program.

It's true that the F-35 is being built to counter advanced technology opponents (Russia and China and their customers), and it's further true that we will probably (hopefully) never use them. This is not an argument against building the F-35, however: Russia and China are building their versions and the US would be at a strategic disadvantage if we effectively ceded air control of every conflict zone to the Russia-backed side. It's an arms race whether we like it or not.

It does feel like we're spending way too much on a overly compromised aircraft, though.