For those who are interested:

The Red Guardian
"Alexi Shostakov was one of the Soviet Union's most acclaimed test pilots whose heroism caught the attention of the KGB. They arranged for Shostakov to wed Natasha Romanoff , a top agent of the secret Red Room Academy, later known as the Black Widow. Intending to manipulate Natasha years after the couple’s marriage the KGB arranged for a rocket Shostakov was supposedly piloting to exploded, giving the appearance of his apparent death.

Shostakov’s “death” drove Natasha deeper into the Red Room’s service, although, in reality Shostakov, was alive and recruited into the KGB. He was given the identity of the Red Guardian, a costumed heroic guise first assigned to Aleksey Lebedev (aka Volodymyr Fomin) during World War II by Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, but the costume had become the property of the Red Room. Through the Red Guardian, the Russians hoped to hone a national hero to represent them just as Captain America (Steve Rogers) represented the USA. During Shostakov’s training the Black Widow, who was again using her maiden name turned against her superiors, and defected to the USA, becoming romantically involved with Hawkeye (Clint Barton) of the Avengers."

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.

You said...."1. Nobody can say for certain what the F-35 is capable of or not capable of." then went on to write tomes and tomes about what's it's capable of, most of which has been contradicted by the testing, but you would rather believe what some test pilot said it may be able to do some day in the future if they fix all the problems or what your flight simulator games represented. HA!!!! Good one.

There's a HUGE difference between random vegan's self serving idea of what is and what is not good nutrition and factual historical data about the existence or non-existence of dogfighting since WW1. The cracked.com was simply a follow up entertainment article delineating 5 notable dogfights since WW1.

Smell ya later.

Yes, you did. You said repeatedly that dogfighting capabilities are not needed at all because this fighter won't ever see dogfighting because it never happens since WW1, and all engagement happens at long range and stealth will protect it 100%.
You must have not read, the articles I linked were about air to air engagements, not bombing, and included up to the gulf war.
Again, the F-15 and F-4 as deployed today is not inferior to Russian planes. Only if you compare the original incarnation of the F-15 with the top of the line Russian planes of today, sometimes it comes out on top, sometimes it's specs are worse.
There's no such thing as a real F-35 pilot, only test pilots have ever flown it, and never in real life situations, only pre conceived situations where it still fails the test designed for it to pass.
The F-35 can't dogfight, and it's not even in the US arsenal. Jesus Christ!
The article I listed before cracked was the one with data, the cracked one was simply to show dogfights using guns have happened repeatedly since WW1, in fact at least up through Vietnam including one completely insane example of using the rotor wash of a helicopter and an AK-47 to take out a pair of fighters (which, agreed, sounded made up it was so insane), contrary to your repeated assertion that it hasn't happened at all and never will again. I notice you don't dispute their facts though.


Oh well. Here I thought perhaps reason and facts had finally permeated the fan boy shell. I guess I was wrong. I give up. If you're going to stick with ridiculous positions like 'there's been no dogfights since WW1', and 'the F-35 will out dogfight the F-4' after being proven wrong time and again with real data and test results, there's no logic or fact that will break the shell, so I quit. Don't feel bad, you're in good company with all of congress (but of course, they all got PAID to hold their positions). Enjoy your $2 trillion fleet of useless planes, since no amount of failure or expense can kill the project.

LOL I can't be a pig and Sarah Palin at the same time. Make up your mind

Those are all valid criticisms, but nobody apart from the flight engineers and test pilots truly know whether this plane is a lemon or not. If it does everything it's supposed to do, then it's exactly what the military asked for, just 10 years too late....

Any suitability and fit for purpose criticism that anyone has ever come up with for the F-35 also applies to just about any piece of military equipment that has been created in the last 70 years. Engineering is a balancing act, and an iterative process. Almost every aircraft, and vehicle in the military today was built to fight a soviet army. Luckily that never happened. But that means that most aircraft and vehicles in the military today have been grossly modified to make them fit for a different purpose. The F-35 will probably go through this as well over the next 30 years, because it's a normal part of the life-cycle of military equipment. Almost every plane dropping bombs now was previously designed as a fighter. But nobody ever calls them out for being mutants like they do with the F-35, they call it additional capability. The F-35 was born with these capabilities instead of being added over time.


Expensive: I'll agree. Could the money have been spent better else where? Definitely. You could argue that the cost is tiny compared to that of a full scale war, maybe F-35 is a good deterrent. Air superiority is the key to winning a war. If you're going to spend money then that's where it should be spent. When the oceans rise enough, is a country like Indonesia going to lash out and try to take land and resources for their civilians? Maybe. I doubt all 200 million of them will just stand there and starve. (Ok I'll concede, this does make me sound a bit like Palin. But hopefully not as dumb )
They could have probably made 3 different stealth planes for 1/2 the cost, but that has it's own strategic downsides. You have to have the right assets in the right places or you have to spread them quite thinly. With a multi-role plane you have all of the capabilities everywhere. Just a matter of a loading it with different weapons.

Not needed: Time will tell whether this is the right plane, but new planes are needed. And they absolutely must have stealth. Within 10 years, weapon systems will be so advanced that if you are spotted, you're as good as dead. We are currently dropping bombs on fairly unsophisticated enemies, but wars tend to escalate quickly. You just never know either way, and it's better to be prepared for the worst. There are plenty of countries with very good planes and pilots that could get sucked into a conflict. If you're really unlucky you could be fighting US made planes with pilots trained in the same way, and you don't want to be fighting a fair fight.
Further still, Russia, China and Japan are developing their own stealth planes, which pretty much forces everyone else to do the same thing.
Especially if Donald Trump gets elected. You never know who that crazy asshole is going to provoke into a war

Doesn't work: It's still in development and testing.

Overtasked: It does the same stuff the aging multi-role planes (that were originally built as fighters) do. With the addition of stealth, and better weapons/sensors/comms. Small performance variables don't win wars, superior tactics and situational awareness does.

Underpowered: Almost every plane ever built has had it's engines upgraded to give it more thrust through it's life. And engines on planes are almost a disposable item, they're constantly being replaced throughout the life-cycle of the plane. Like a formula one car.
The current engine, is already the most powerful engine ever in a jet fighter. It is good enough to fly super sonic without an afterburner, which none of the planes it's replacing are capable of.

Piloted: Agreed. But who knows, maybe a Boston Dynamics robot will be flying it soon

Test Failing: That's only a good thing. You want things to fail during tests, and not in the real world. Testing and finding flaws is a normal part of developing anything.

Fragile: That can be said for all US aircraft. They all need to have the runway checked for FOD, because one little rock can destroy even the best plane. Russian aircraft on the other hand are designed to be rugged though, because they're runways are in terrible condition. But in reality, all sophisticated equipment needs constant maintenance, especially when even a simple failure at 40,000 feet becomes an emergency.

Quickly Obsolete: Time will tell. Perhaps it would have been better to keep upgrading current planes with more technology like plasma stealth gas that make then partially stealthy, better sensors and more computing power. But by the time you've done that you've got a plane that's as heavy as F-35 anyway, and not as capable. Although it might have been cheaper in the long run.

Like I said in my previous comment. All of this doesn't make an interesting story so you'll only ever hear the two extremes which are "the plane sux" vs "it's invicible!!11" depending on your media source.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Unflappable. This kind of personality would make a good test pilot.

I doubt the people flying this are the same people who fly the planes on passenger routes. This is a professional test pilot. Not sure about licenses but these guys really know how to fly!

Test pilots have balls of steel

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Ordinance, flight testing, no sound, test pilots' to 'ordnance, flight testing, no sound, test pilots, drop tanks, bombs, missiles' - edited by calvados

They don't pay prototype helicopter test pilots enough. And they never will.

The notion that if it was deployed 3 months earlier it would have changed the outcome of the war is a bit short sighted. By 1944 things had changed significantly against the Luftwaffe. Of the many different types of problems, two are the most straightforward here, shortage of fuel and Goering's obsession with bombers.

At this stage of the war in 1944, fuel was scarce enough to force flight schools to cut their training times to less than half of what they received in 1942, receiving on average 111 hours of flight and of that only 20 hours in the combat aircraft that they were to fly, the rest would be in a trainer. To give a contemporary comparison, in the US you need an absolute bare minimum of 190 hours to earn a commercial pilot's license which is usually done in the same type of trainer the Germans used, THEN you start working on the plane your "really" going to fly. Training deficiencies were already showing in 1943, when during the first half of the year they experienced the same number of losses to accidents as they did to combat. So you can imagine that new and even experienced pilots, transitioning from the relatively lower speed of their prop driven planes to high speed jets, would have problems in tactical use and even accident avoidance. Even the Me-262 suffered from flameouts caused by aggressive use of the throttle, something that prop planes can manage much better, would otherwise cause the flameout that killed the test pilot Ziller.

Even if deployed in large numbers as a fighter-bomber, the probable use would be as a bomber. Goering was very much a part of the "cult of the offensive" in the air that meant holding to the old WW1 notion of "The bomber always gets through". Though to be fair, the technology in this aircraft might very well have helped proved him right, he pushed this notion at the cost of the defense. He refused committing more resources to the fighter wings, so while the Ho-229 might have been considered a "fighter-bomber", its use may have been predominantly focused on the bomber aspect. This is actually exactly what happened to the Me-262 in its earlier days, its capabilities as a fighter were ignored and preference as a bomber, preferred. Why does all this matter? Because at this point, Germany wasn't able to come close to stopping the bombers breaking through their lines. They needed the flow to stop since it was already disrupting their existing production to produce the "what if" fleet of Ho-229s. Goering proved that the bombers were getting through thanks to his belief that his would instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Galland (The later part, when he commanded the fighter force)

And from the comments section on the website where I found this:
Just to set the record straight. The MD-80 in landing was accomplished during the testing phase known as a "High Sink Rate Landing". Hence the filming. The test pilot with a FAA pilot in the right seat got too high a sink rate he couldn't abate. The A/C hit so hard, the other pilot sitting in a passenger seat up front got his ankles broken. I flew this A/C many times afterwords, MDC put it together in conjunction with another wrecked A/C. The combined A/C was interesting as it was a test bed of many instrument configurations.

http://avherald.com/h?article=4438e8ff&opt=0

Flight test pilots have an amazing amount of courage and certainly earn my respect:

Here are some videos of the legendary Tex Johnson:

Tex Johnson rolls a Boeing 707

Tex Johnson on test pilots

Fixed and thanks. We will use Netherlands'!

In reply to this comment by jonny:
Neither can I, but google translator can: "There is no such video."

*dead

>> ^bareboards2:

I think this is dead again, ant. I can't read Hungarian....

Neither can I, but google translator can: "There is no such video."

*dead

>> ^bareboards2:

I think this is dead again, ant. I can't read Hungarian....