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Think we should buy it? The Air Force in jeopardy of losing dominance of the sky
- Thread starter bunk22
- Start date
Note:
- that article is 5 years old;
- it was referred to as the F/A-22; now, it's just the F-22. Hmmm...
- Mr Roche retired from the Navy as a Captain, and was a recipient of the Arleigh Burke Fleet Trophy;
- was cited for 2 ethics violations just before he left the SecAF position;
- was a Northrop Grumman executive: gee, I wonder if that has any bearing on the fact that the RQ-4 Global Hawk got rammed into the inventory?
Maybe the air force should just cut back on the golf courses and other luxuries that they like to build on all their bases... Seriously, I was up at Lackland just before Christmas. They couldn't buy a Christmas tree. But they were allowed to buy a flat panel monitor to put up the image of a christmas tree... Make sense to anyone else?
I don't know to what extent they max perform their jets, but it's got to be more than us. 20+ years of 9g fighting is simply going to wear the thing out. Same principle to our jets running out of trap life (Hornets anyway). Our ~20 year old Hornets are all starting to show corrosion problems as well, however I think the Navy is just simply more experienced in prevention and control. Plus I doubt the spend even a fraction of the man hours on the issue.
No offense taken at all. One thing you have to remember is that:
1. AF equipment is not engineered from the get go to be as robust as Naval equipment. It's more sensitive to the elements and we don't have the maintenance practices to keep many things at bay. You'd be surprised at the aircraft wash mentality in my old community even based in Souda and the Deid! There was none! Being an old aircraft DivO and AMO school grade I cringed at many things the AF does.
2. QOL is huge. That's the type of people the AF attracts, wimpy-whiny-psuedo-military folks make up nearly 40% of the AF. There's a part of 30% I think that's like people in this group ~true warriors. The rest are a mix of 5-and-out, or had nothing better the could think of to do in their lives and decided to try the military, but wanted to be in the least martial of the services...
On the Viper, HAL (onboard computer) limits the max G to 9.0. However, you can rapid onset Gz above that which requires maintenance inspection. If you've got external stores you're limited to 6.6 and then 5.5 depending on the mix of GBU, and drop tanks. That's about all I know.
Oh yeah, HAL doesn't limit your Gs when you load the stores on the weapons pages either, pilot still has to keep those in check manually. As we know, no Viper pilot has ever over-G'd his jet when carrying drops.:icon_wink
If Congress would let them, IF being the keyword since Congress keeps saying no, the Japanese would buy some of them. Probably just enough to replace some of their older airframes until their Mitsubishi ATD-X get into service.
http://dailylark.blogspot.com/2008/01/mitsubishi-atd-x-shinshin-japanese.html
Well.... if this one turns out to be as big a disappointment as the F-2 at least it will look good in the next Godzilla movie.
Hahaha, indeed. But I think that since this is a made by Japan, made for Japan airframe that it should be a sweet airframe. The F-2 was a USA/Japan co-production effort.
My thinking was more along the lines of: Does the LDP have the political capital and leeway after restarting the OEF refueling mission.