F-35B trials on USS Wasp.
 

Sorry if it is a repost.

F-35B Ship Suitability Testing - YouTube

Amazing stuff! Thanks for posting that.

Amazing piece of engineering.

Brought to you by the kings of cost over-runs. Lockheed can get it right if cost is no object. The F-22 is another data point....they priced themselves out of that contract. The F-35 program cost is about triple of the initial estimates. Their days of Kelly Johnson's skunk works are long gone.

Tis a neat plane, though. It looks like the ship is not moving....maybe that will be Phase II.

The Marines and their flying machines!

Cool stuff.

Knowing nothing about planes, is this technology a competitive advantage?

This might be the last era of the giant aircraft carrier.

Why dont they use verticle take off?

Fuel burn rate & load capacity.....both suck in VTO mode. Maybe that's phase III.:D

Vertical takeoff uses quite a bit more fuel than a rolling start. The aircraft is capable of it though. I am sure there are other considerations, such as heat buildup on deck etc.

Why do any modern fighter planes have pilots?

Amazing! Thanks for posting.

Soon, why fighter planes?

And my wife designed a lot of the human systems on the F-35.

Why do computers have keyboards (or their ilk)?:D

DOD: here's the specs we want you to meet and here's the contract.

Contractor: OK here's your plane that meets all those specs.

DOD: wait, we want this too. And that. And we changed our mind on the specs, we want to double the performance and add seven more radar systems, and we want it to be able to do this and this and this.

Contractor: hold on a minute. All that stuff is going to double the price per plane!

DOD: So? We already got the order for the planes approved, they'll pay what ever it costs to get them delivered anyway I want them to be configured.
Sure they'll get pissed, but it's a whole lot easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Can you imagine if every freighter ship going through the Somalia straits had one of these parked on her deck?

Cool stuff, pricey, but cool.

In lieu of that single giant clamshell door on top opening, I thought it was to be a pair of split doors like the landing gear and bomb bay doors.

Golly, I've never made that argument:rolleyes: .......but Lockheed works the "system" better than anyone else.

The same reason vasectomies aren't done by robots.

And got the contract. Hmmmm....

you might want to try a search on surgical + robot


This indeed probably is the last manned fighter from the US. It is (another) leap in technology (one reason the cost went up - obviously, not the only reason), and re "competitive" yes -- a big yes.

However, "competitive" needs to be evaluated in a defense systems perspective, and that brings up a lot of issues. One is that it is not clear how much longer we will be able to operate our carrier groups unimpeded by swarms of little PT (fast attack) boats armed with anti-ship missiles -- esp. in a littoral environment. Another is whether we might be better off with more, but smaller "drone carriers." Then there is the whole issue of what you can do with submarines as vs. what you can do with surface ships... Things are changing fast.... maybe too fast to permit long drawn-out development of the the uber-fighter, uber carrier, or even uber-LCS.