There is enough F-35 news to justify an entire F-35 blog, except the blog would suffer from severe cost overruns and its first posting would be almost a decade from now. And, naturally, it would consist of a fragmentary paragraph that did not say anything useful. What would we call such a blog? Perhaps “This is going to be great but it will cost a lot.”
It’s probably past the point where careers are going to be destroyed for this massive blunder, but I’m sure it’ll reverberate through the halls of the pentagon for decades to come: the idea of “let’s open the F-35 to everyone in NATO” was not well-considered because the NATO alliance included some characters that were on the fence, such as Turkey. The strategy was to use NATO membership as a way of joining the “pork for everyone!” club – once you’re in, you can participate in high-dollar fleecing of the public coffers, such as the F-35 program. This meant doling out who got to perform what parts of the service and construction of F-35s, which also meant that crucial information regarding the plane’s design had to be shared with everyone who got a slice of the pork. Turkey got two notable pieces of pork: construction of components of the nose-wheel steering system of the aircraft, and construction of the engine maintenance plant (which means that England, in principle, would have to ship their F-35s to Turkey for engine maintenance)
Turkey has been vacillating in terms of its allegiance to the US empire, and has lately been threatening to purchase Russian missiles, ostensibly to hang them on F-35s. As I mentioned earlier, the odds of that working are slim and none, respectively; it’s just a diplomatic threat. Turkey’s move is to say “we want to buy cheaper Russian missiles,” so the US says “no way!” and Turkey then says “we aren’t going to buy any F-35s, then!” and the whole scam starts to unravel. The strategy was bad to begin with – remember that, in order to get the Israelis to buy F-35s, the US had to give them money, earmarked for “use this to buy F-35s” thereby cleverly “selling” a bunch to Israel.
Presently there are 42 Turkish pilots undergoing training with F-35s in Arizona and Florida. [wapo] They are being ceremoniously booted out of the country:
In a letter Thursday to his Turkish counterpart, acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan said that Turkish personnel also cannot participate in management activities related to the F-35 program, a consortium of a number of allied countries, each of which is responsible for building parts of the aircraft.
Turkish companies currently produce almost 1,000 parts for the F-35, including landing gear and fuselage components. The Pentagon is working with Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer, to find new manufacturers for parts that have been made in Turkey.
Oh, look, a pork-fight! You can be sure that: 1) lobbyists suggested this in the first place, 2) lobbyists will have useful suggestions who could fill those contracts instead.
The deeper problem is that those Turkish pilots have been playing with all the super-secret stealthy F-35 stuff, and Turkish aerospace companies have had access to all the system design and CAD files for the F-35. When we boot them out of the F-35 program for buying Russian missiles, where do you think all that information is going to go? I used to joke, “how do you steal Microsoft’s source code if you are China?” (Answer: “ask the Microsoft board of directors for it”) but it’s starting to cut too close to the bone. The same forces that complain about the theft of American intellectual property are the forces that are shoveling it over the wall as fast as they can, for a measly gigabuck.
One thing that’s for sure: the F-35 program ought to make us all ponder what “works” means. For a weapons system to “work” you’d think that would mean it delivers damage or defends or flies around stealthily. But in the case of the F-13 “works” means that it is a vehicle for transferring money from one set of pockets to another: huge amounts of money. Now that the US is run by a bunch of corrupt grifters, the F-35 is going to work harder than ever before. This is its finest hour. In fact, if we ever have a remotely responsible set of political leaders again, it will be cancelled.
But.
Congress is in on the scam, too, of course. They are going to make sure that the F-35 “works” and continues to work until everyone has gotten their slice of pork: [bi]
- The Navy has been accepting new aircraft carriers unfinished and lacking key capabilities in an apparent effort to skirt cost caps.
- The USS Gerald R. Ford and the future USS John F. Kennedy do not and will not have the ability to deploy with fifth-generation F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters until post-delivery modifications have been completed.
- Lawmakers have decided to change things up with new legislation that will require the Navy to give the Kennedy this capability before it takes delivery of the carrier.
See, the Gerald Ford has already been accepted by the navy, which means that the builders are going to get paid, in spite of the fact that it does not have working catapults. So, it’s an “aircraft carrier” to the extent that it can, indeed, “carry aircraft” but let’s not be hasty, now, it can’t launch them or anything complicated like that. Some good news is that its arresting gear may be ready by the end of the year! The arresting gear is the system that captures the tail-hook of an incoming plane and slows it quickly to a stop before it falls off the other side of the aircraft carrier. In other words the Gerald Ford does not “work” yet, either, unless by “work” you mean it in the sense the F-35 “works.”
Congress’ response to this “crisis” is to require that the Kennedy “work” before the navy forks over great big bags of money for it. The fact that the F-35 doesn’t quite “work” yet, does not elude them – they just don’t care. The US government has not yet learned that paying for something, before it works, is called “paying in advance” and it’s a dangerous practice to engage in whether you’re buying an F-35 or a new washing machine.
The service has one aircraft carrier able to deploy with F-35C Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters, USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72).
That’s one more aircraft carrier capable of deploying F-35s than England has!
The steam catapult systems on aircraft carriers are an amazingly complicated and crufty system. The electrical systems designed to replace them are, too, but they have a different set of problems (like: water) and failure modes. Steam systems have unique problems like that you can’t get salt water steam into them or it’s amazingly corrosive and will ruin the entire system – that’s awkward when the ship is floating in a great big ocean of nothing but salt water. So they actually operate a distillery to produce enough water to drive the pistons. Distilling water is easy on a nuclear aircraft carrier: it’s basically a great big floating distillery to begin with. Obviously, the launch catapult has to work completely and correctly, or you wind up throwing a perfectly good insanely expensive aircraft (oh, yeah, and a pilot) into the ocean. From the height of the front of an aircraft carrier, that’s like flinging it off a building into a concrete parking lot. There’s a propaganda series about aircraft carriers (“Carrier“) [pbs] (not to be confused with former freethought blogger and litigious creep) made by Public Broadcasting – basically it’s a long hard love-fest with the navy. I wonder how much they were paid by the navy. I was not super impressed, as I was supposed to be, because I kept seeing everything as shabby and cobbled-together. What do you expect: it still runs on steam and its keel was laid down in 1968, around the time when Donald Trump was dodging the Vietnam war.
Steam systems are notoriously high maintenance, and with the distilling, they obviously have to take up quite a bit of space.
I had heard of the EM catapults while being developed (and recently heard that they were ready for deployment – is that in the sense of the F-35, or are they actually ready?) and I’m wondering if they’ll be better. In the abstract, doing away with steam for high-voltage electromagnets coupled with massive super capacitors is a great thing… but only if it works.
And I have no idea if the heat problems or mag-pulse problems are significant, or whether the power-management problems are relatively mundane in today’s tech environment. (Are they going to need to build build faraday shielding to prevent the magnetic fields from yanking people around by the dog tags? are the high-impulse pulses from the super capacitors going to require frequent maintenance on the discharge couplings?) I literally have no idea what the issues are. Though very, very, very basic EM physics suggests some things that could be problems, like attracting bits of metal on the flight deck, with the short range of the magnetic force I don’t know if this actually amounts to a true problem or not. And I’m not sure how you would shield this other than with superconductors to block the magnetic field and/or reverse-faraday shielding to create a magnetic environment inside the intended area while cancelling the field outside of the area – which I’m sure can be done, but I’m only familiar with blocking magnetism on the INSIDE of the faraday cage.
All in all, I think it’s very interesting tech, but if they need to use superconducting coils cooled with liquid nitrogen, I’m not at all sure that’s actually going to result in less maintenance than the original, high-maintenance steam system.
All of this is a prelude to asking: do you have any idea if these things are going on line soon? And if so, are they going to work?
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@#1:
The specs on a carrier catapult are daunting, no matter how you slice them – they need to get a load of between 20,000 and 40,000lb to 200 miles/hr in less than a quarter mile. That is reaching the performance of a top fuel dragster, except with the weight of a loaded semi-trailer (dragsters can hit 300mph in the quarter mile).
The biggest issue, as I understand it, is that the steam powered catapults only have one setting: “FULL ON” and the accelleration is instantaneous. That’s a problem for lighter-weight aircraft like drones, which can be simply ripped apart by the force of the launch. Apparently carrier deck aircraft do not last as long as land-based, simply because of the additional stresses placed on the airframe. An electronic catapult, in principle, can solve that problem by providing a smooth impulse with an arbitrary acceleration curve. In principle. It appears that that is the hardest part to get right, since it’s not a mechanical system, it’s a computer-controlled system and the impulse timing needs to be very precise and very very fast. It’s the difference between a modern brushless electric motor (which requires a computer to control it) and an old school one with carbon brushes that is limited at its top speed by when the carbon brushes start to float over the gaps in the commutator. Another way of putting it is that it’s a rail gun and rail guns are really hard for the same reasons. That’s my impression: the thing wears capacitors out and the software is problematic.
Just to give you an idea how problematic: apparently there is about a 4% failure rate. I’m not sure what that even means but when you are flinging an airplane off the front of an aircraft carrier, “failure” is not good. What if the catapult only gets the plane to 150mph? It’s still going off the front. Or what if it stops suddenly? Then the plane just hit an aircraft carrier at whatever speed and bounces down the deck as it comes apart and sprays jet fuel on everyone (if it has an afterburner it will be on, so that means burning jet fuel).
I believe that the EM isn’t that extreme (it falls off with the square of the distance) – the main trick is that it pulses like a rail gun. Imagine two lines of electromagnets with an object between them. First, you discharge magnet #1 to push the object away, while discharging magnet #2 to pull it forward. Then as the object moves past magnet #2 you flip it to push and turn magnet #3 on to pull, on down the line. But the object is accellerating so your speed of magnet flipping has to increase correctly and smoothly! There’s probably other factors in there (my guess is that’s what the problem is) like wind: how does the catapult know what other forces may be being applied to the plane? If the catapult switches a magnet to “pull” and the plane is actually a bit past it, you’ve just slowed the plane. So there has to be some truly wicked badass control system going on in there and I am sure only of a few things:
1) it’s badass
2) it’s expensive
3) it’s secret
4) we’ll sell it to the Saudis if they want it
5) it will be unreliable for years but eventually it will work great
The EM catapult is still a yuge savings over the steam, which used (I believe) a ram and a pulley system with cables. So the ram used tremendous force to yank the cables onto a giant reel, which had to be unreeled for the next shot. In principle the EM catapult will be much faster at firing planes off the front of the ship.
Good article thanks. The Aussie Air Force has also got caught up in the F35’s boondoggle and waste / spending priorities issue too.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/australias-biggest-defence-mistake-that-will-cost-us-billions/news-story/89641090fc2a72b7f3cee8f91f652ea6
Note : Article linked here was published 23rd October 2018.
These delays have, in turn, blown the project’s global budget out more than $163 billion, leaving Australia in a precarious financial situation.
Might be an interesting exercise to compare the development, building and use(s) of the F35 to the secretive X-37 b spaceplane :
https://www.airspacemag.com/space/spaceplane-x-37-180957777/
which is one fascinating new craft we hear & really seem to know sod all about.
Also trepidatedly curious and a tangeant here, sorry, but what are your thoughts about NASA’s Artemis project and the SLS rocket plans?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-15/nasa-artemis-project-aims-to-land-first-woman-on-moon/11113986
I admit I’m biased and would deeply love to see this go ahead but interested in your views here. One of those things (like a human Mars landing & cheap, common, wonderful nuclear fusion for all) that is always being predicted for twenty years time since, well, since I’ve been alive really.
^
Dóh. That lineis from the first article linked and not me. Stuffed up. Mea culpa.
SteveoR@#3:
These delays have, in turn, blown the project’s global budget out more than $163 billion, leaving Australia in a precarious financial situation.
Wouldn’t it be great if the F-35 program broke the global militaries’ ability to wage war, and there was a period of peace, or relatively low-level conflict while all the military had to fight with was harsh language and thrown rocks?
SteveoR@#3:
which is one fascinating new craft we hear & really seem to know sod all about.
My guess is that it’s a mobile monitoring station that they can park over someplace (e.g.: North Korea) and collect a variety of real-time data from. When you read about accounts of special forces being navigated around a battlefield by REMFs back in the states who have “satellite eyes” I bet this is what’s carrying the eyes.
The US being the lying cheating proliferating bastards that they are, I’d also be surprised it if was not nuclear capable. I see no reason to believe that the US is respecting any of the space-based nuke treaties – especially since the space shuttle was such a flexible platform for hauling things up and flinging them out. Think about it – a space-based reentry weapon has none of the disadvantages of an ICBM and cannot be interdicted in the boost phase. How long would a target get, in terms of warning? 2 minutes, probably. And there’d be not a damn thing to do about it. I would be shocked and awed if the US weapons labs have not developed such a thing and now that Trump has withdrawn from nuclear weapons proliferation treaties, we may see some trial balloons to the effect that such a thing may be possible (meaning: we built it 10 years ago and are just now thinking of using it on you).
NASA seems to have chafed pretty badly about the space shuttle’s being used to loft spy satellites (all those “black” launches) and “well, build us our own!” would be a pretty obvious response. Some of the shuttle’s design may have been compromised by the need to loft the KH11/Kennan platform, though that worked out remarkably well with the Hubble telescope and all. (If you want some fun, compare pictures of a Kennan and a Hubble – they are “arkansas cousins” as a friend of mine who was involved in both programs used to say.
what are your thoughts about NASA’s Artemis project and the SLS rocket plans?
I actually think that’s why Trump made the gaffe that he did about “the moon being part of Mars” – he was burbling bits of NASA briefing based on his limited understanding. It’s definitely the right strategy, to build a waypoint someplace where gravity is low and there’s no Earth-orbit space junk to hit it. It might be a first step in declaring the moon to be US protectorate, which I worry about. Do I sound paranoid?
I’m a bit torn – part of me is aware that scenarios where the belt is populated with space-miners and Mars is a colony – that’s all BS and it won’t happen for hundreds of years and our technological civilization may not last anywhere near that long. But there’s useful follow-up technology that comes from such exploration. If I look at it not as “space exploration” so much as “exploring the edge of engineering” then it looks worthwhile. The whole idea of putting people on Mars seems absurd, though there’s an angle to that which I ought to do a posting on someday. I have been meaning to for a while, it’s a variation of my “no testicles in space” argument. [stderr]
I’m Canadian. We’re caught up in all this too, although (fortunately?) our government keeps waffling on whether or not we actually want the damn things. I mean, even looking at it from the military’s point of view, the Canadian Forces are internationally notorious for having out-of-date equipment, F-35s should be pretty low on the priority list. We only just got around to retiring the Sea King fleet and we started trying to do that when the CF-18s were brand new. We’ve got trucks that have been in service since Korea.
And I don’t even know what we’re doing with our air force that warrants top-of-the-line fighters anyway, we’re not exactly getting into a lot of dogfights.
Since writing that I discovered our current government cancelled our participation in the F-35 program and is currently holding a competition for new fighters. It’s believed Boeing (and by extension Lockheed Martin) is going to be docked quite a few points for taking legal action against us relatively recently.
I would like to correct that previous comment, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are making separate bids, however Lockheed Martin is pitching the F-35 again so I doubt that’s winning. Basically it’s looking like either the newest version of the Saab Gripen or the Eurofighter Typhoon.
@Marcus Ranum :
# 5 : LOL! Yes!
& #6 :
That makes sense. Yes.
I was thinking more here about how the X-37b compares with the F35 in being a cutting edge advanced military tech craft but I think much less costly (?) and built only for the USA and not shared or sold to others and working relatively quickly and as planned. (?) Also getting so much less attention and publicity.
Yikes. Plausible certainly although I hope not. Of course, if we can think of that then so can other nations like Russia and China too..
A little bit to me given the International nature of space exploration and science and the whole “coming in peace” thing with the Apollo missions although, of course, the Moonshots did have clear military implications and was a sort of war by other means thing too.
Thanks. I do love the vision and idea of seeing people land on Mars and explore our solar system, grew up on reading the old Asimov, Clarke etc .. SF works and think we could learn and benefit a lot from doing so. Mind you it seems like a lunar colony(~ies) & people landing on Mars has been twenty years ahead ever since the 1960’s and we don’t seem all that much closer to them like with cheap, commonplace, safe(~ish) nuclear fusion. Would love to see it happen and whilst I’d agree that we may not last that long and think tackling Global Overheating must be our immediate main priority we could still work on spece exploration here too?
@Marcus Ranum #2
I would suggest the performance is in some ways beyond a top fuel dragster. The dragster engines are torn down and inspected after every run, and even then they wrap parts in kevlar blankets for when they explode. A catapult launch system needs to be able to work every minute-ish (20 seconds?) and do that for some number of launches. It needs to do the same thing, with a lot more reliability.
The weird thing about Australia buying F35s is as far as i can tell we only need them for taking part in imperialist powers overseas wars. Of course joining in other people’s imperialist wars is an Australian tradition dating back since before we were a country, so…
@ ColeYote
My current opinion is that we should buy some Su-35 or even some Su-57 planes if we can get them.. Cheaper and Russian quality control looks good.
Well, almost anything looks good compared to the F-35 fiasco.
The Gripen? A bit light weight but not bad. And apparently it actually flies.
I don’t know anything about the Typhoon.
Anyone stupid enough or corrupt enough to consider the F-35 needs a sudden retirement.
dangerousbeans@#11:
I would suggest the performance is in some ways beyond a top fuel dragster.
True. If you expand your understanding of “performance” to take into account cost and reliability, then it may give a very different view. How far can an aircraft carrier throw a dragster? Now, how far can a dragster throw an aircraft carrier?
[I recall one drunken conversation with friends in which we were trying to estimate how far a nuclear aircraft carrier could go ashore if it hit the beach at speed. Estimates varied from 1/4 to a full mile, depending on whether there were rocks or buildings or just nice soft sand and sunbathers. Alcohol was involved.]
jrkrideau@#12:
My current opinion is that we should buy some Su-35 or even some Su-57 planes if we can get them..
That would definitely put the fox among the chickens. Why not Chinese? Maybe Huawei’d run up some J-20s for you guys.
hmm, apparently a top fuel dragster weights about a tonne compared to the 27 for an F35, so the catapult will probably just shred the dragster and fling little pieces all over the place :P