How do you steal intellectual property from a capitalist? Just grab it off the boardroom table.
One of the weird things about blogging is that it brings you face to face with how obvious things can be. Rather than pat myself on the back and think I’m maybe psychic, that’s how I’m going to interpret it. Perhaps you recall a piece I wrote two weeks ago, about how exporting military technology to lower production costs can come back to bite one’s buttocks? [stderr]:
Recall that, in order for the F-35 program to be “affordable” by NATO, the US decided to amortize the cost of the program across all NATO members by forcing them to buy F-35s, In return, it doled out pork to NATO allies’ military-industrial complexes: a part is made here, a component there, etc. If you recall, Turkey got the contract for servicing F-35 engines for all European NATO allies.
TF-X mockup
Now that Turkey is being edged out of the F-35 club, they have decided to offer their own competing version! [bi]
Turkey unveiled a full-scale mock-up of a new indigenous stealth-fighter concept on Monday at the 2019 Paris Air Show.
The unveiling of the new TF-X, which is expected to be Turkey’s first homegrown fifth-generation fighter, comes as the US prepares to kick its ally out of the F-35 program in response to the country’s planned purchase of the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
Let me decode the language: “unveiled a full-scale mock-up of a new indigenous stealth-fighter concept”
- They put up a barrier around a fiberglass model of an airplane, at an air show
- The airplane is a “concept” design: i.e.: it’s what they think an airplane might look like if they built an airplane
- It’s a mock-up which means it’s a “concept design” there are no innards in it
- No actual aircraft exists
- But it sure looks F-35ish
If it existed, which it does not, it would possibly be a better aircraft than an F-35 because like the heavily F-35-influenced Chinese J-20, it’s a twin engine design. I guess the Turkish aerospace industry learned a thing or two about jet engine design, from building those F-35 engine maintenance plants, huh?
“Our machine is a mock-up, but in 2023 there will be a real machine, and first flight is in 2025, and [it will be in] service in 2028,” Temel Kotil, the president and CEO of Turkish Aerospace Industries Inc. (TAI)
That is an outrageous lie, worthy of Donald Trump. Even with the head-start of being able to use F-35 component knowledge, a stealth fighter is not a 6-year development to completion program. The press should have greeted that statement with catcalls and jeers, but these days it’s a bit of a bad idea to publicly laugh at authoritarian goons.
Prediction: they’ll sell exactly two of them.
There is going to be a great deal of cyberwar and espionage FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about how everyone in the world ripped off F-35 technology, but spare no tears for the capitalists: they’ve already made the massive amounts of money they wanted, for a plane that has no purpose. At least now it’s serving as a case-study and a warning to others.
I was reading over some reports about the current set of F-35 “variances” (i.e.: things that are wrong with the plane but we’ll sell it to you anyway) and apparently it has an F-35 version of an F-22 problem. On the F-22 the stealth coating was not waterproof, so it needed to be repaired every time the airplane got wet. The F-35’s stealth coating is not resistant to supersonic speeds – every time it flies supersonic for an extended period of time, it needs to have its stealth paint touched up. Fortunately for the F-35, it can’t “supercruise” i.e.: fly supersonic for extended periods of time, like it was supposed to.
There’s got to be a good “stealth turd” joke somewhere in here but I can’t find it.
The “case-study” and “warning to others”, unfortunately, will likely be, “Can you believe we got away with this shit? What can we try next?”
So, *so* much money wasted on this, but we can’t afford education, health care, infrastructure or climate tech, or even health care for 9-11 responders, even though that’s a gift-wrapped-in-the-flag no-brainer even for the rankest conservatives.
For the amount of times the F-35’s will use stealth maybe they should just paint them a good, durable tactical black.
@Sean Boyd,
I think next they’d like to try war with Iran. Or maybe a coup in Venezuela. Or probably both.
Is there any thing that was done right in the F-35 development program.
For the last six months or so I have had the suspicion that one of the reasons Turkey bought the S-400’s was to get out of paying for that dog’s breakfast that is the F-35. Probably not the main reason but one of them.
ridana@#2:
we can’t afford education, health care, infrastructure or climate tech, or even health care for 9-11 responders, even though that’s a gift-wrapped-in-the-flag no-brainer even for the rankest conservatives.
The executives at Lockheed Martin can afford health care!
jrkrideau@#4:
Is there any thing that was done right in the F-35 development program.
Well, a lot of taxpayers money has transferred from the public treasury into the hands of various defense contractors. It’s one of the greatest and most successful lootings of the treasury ever. In that context “it works just fine.”
Other than that, everything about the program has been done wrong, even the parts where experts warned: “this is not going to work” and were poo poo’d.
You mean to says someone will actually learn something from this? I’d expect the lesson to be that if you need to loosen the pentagon’s pockets all you need to do is think of a number greater than 35.
Wow. I haven’t picked a number yet but when I pitch my plane to the DoD it’ll be made from papier-mâché: Low weight, low cost and probably very stealthy. Issues arising from poor resistance to air flow (aka shredding*), engine heat (smouldering*) or atmospheric moisture (transatmospheric absorptive soggification*) can be touched up after a mission or in flight. In fact, that’ll be the co-pilot’s only job as they scramble all over the plane armed with a staple gun and a bucket of glue a la Hot Shots.
*These are technical terms quoted directly from the manual, once I write it.
But do they? I would be unsurprised if news broke that CEOs too stingy to pay for their stereotypical fancy private doctors pulled some legal tricks to register as residents in a country with advanced socialised healthcare. Live in New York, work in San Francisco, but when it’s time for the annual check-up, hop on the private jet to the UK so the NHS pays for the the doctor. The flight would almost certainly qualify as a tax-deductible, somehow.