F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

asianobserve

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What new F-35 jets mean for Israel’s air force



The arrival of the F-35 to Israel — simultaneously with the supply of S-300 missiles from Russia to Iran — preserves Israel’s qualitative edge over Middle East skies. “In most cases, the F-35 is able to elude the radar of the S-300,” a high-placed military source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “This is a big challenge for us, but we are up to it. The Stealth [aircraft] was built for exactly this purpose and will give us freedom of movement even against this new development.”
The reason is simple: “When you embark on an important strategic bombardment,” a senior Israeli military source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “you need aircraft that will carry out the shelling, other planes to protect the first ones from interception and yet other planes to provide protection from surface-to-air missiles [SAM]. But the F-35 carries out all these tasks by itself, with tremendous effectiveness. It has small radar footprint and is not threatened by most SAMs. It is a totally different world.”
Some high-ranking Israeli air force members have already flown simulation flights on the sophisticated F-35 simulator system. “We are in a completely different league,” one of them told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “The flight included dogfights against an octet of advanced, non-F-35 aircraft, and the Stealth [aircraft] won hands down.”
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ori...es-for-receiving-f-35-jets.html#ixzz4GPFOET8A
 

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Pilots say F-35 beats out A-10 in new report



More than 30 F-35 pilots said the joint strike fighter outperformed the A-10 in every maneuverability category, according to a report released Thursday afternoon.
While the Heritage report did not measure the F-35's close air support ability, the pilots interviewed for the report said the F-35 outranked the A-10 in every category of maneuverability from responsiveness at slow speeds to ability to regain speed after decelerating.
Even with some G-force limitations while the F-35 undergoes more development and testing, one pilot said that the joint strike fighter "exceeded pilot expectations." Once those restrictions are lifted, however, that same pilot said it will be "eye watering."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pilots-say-f-35-beats-out-a-10-in-new-report/article/2598652
 

asianobserve

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F-35 to make debut in Canada next week

The F-35 will make its debut in Canada at an airshow in British Columbia next week as aerospace companies ramp up their campaigns to sell the federal government new fighter aircraft.

The stealth aircraft is expected to arrive in Canada on Thursday, the first time the plane has come to Canada. It will be displayed at the Abbotsford International Airshow which starts Aug. 12.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/natio...next-week-super-hornets-to-be-at-same-airshow
 

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http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/01/most-important-technology-f-35/125228/

This Is The Most Important Technology On the F-35

By Patrick Tucker
January 19, 2016

Cognitive EW, today in its infancy, may one day help justify the Joint Strike Fighter’s enormous cost.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons program ever, won’t justify its price tag by outmaneuvering other jets (it can’t), flying particularly fast, or even by carrying munitions in a stealthy bomb bay. Instead, the U.S. military is banking on an emerging technology called cognitive electronic warfare to give the jet an almost-living ability to sniff out new hard-to-detect air defenses and invent ways to foil them on the fly.

While the specifics of the jet’s electronic warfare, or EW, package remain opaque, scientists, program watchers and military leaders close to the program say it will be key to the jet’s evolution and its survival against the future’s most advanced airplane-killing technology. In short, cognitive EW is the most important feature on the world’s most sophisticated warplane.

“There are small elements of cognitive EW right now on the F-35, but what we are really looking toward is the future,” Lee Venturino, president and CEO of First Principles, a company that is analyzing the F-35 for the Pentagon, said at a recent Association of Old Crows event in Washington, D.C.“Think of it as a stair-stepper approach. The first step is probably along the ESM [electronic support measures] side. How do I just identify the signals I’ve never seen before?”

To understand what cognitive warfare is, you have to know what it isn’t. EW makes use of the invisible waves of energy that propagate through free space from the movement of electrons, the electromagnetic spectrum. Conventional radar systems generally use fixed waveforms, making them easy to spot, learn about, and develop tactics against. But newer digitally programmable radars can generate never-before-seen waveforms, making them harder to defeat.

A concern that U.S. EW was falling behind the challenges of today’s world prompted a 2013 Defense Science Board study that recommended that the military develop agile and adaptive electronic warfare systems that could detect and counter tricky new sensors.

“In the past, what would happen is you’d send out your EA-18,” the military’s top-of-the-line EW aircraft, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said last month in an event at the Center for New American Security. “It would find a new waveform. There was no way for us to do anything about it. The pilot would come back, they would talk about it, they’d replicate it, they’d emulate it. It would go into the ‘gonculator,’ goncu-goncu-goncu-gonculatoring, and then you would have something, and then maybe some time down the road, you would have a response.”

That process is far too slow to be effective against digitally programmable radars. “The software [to defeat new waveforms] may take on the order of months or years, but the effectiveness needs to programed within hours or seconds. If it’s an interaction with a radar and a jammer, for example, sometime it’s a microsecond,” said Robert Stein, who co-chaired the Defense Science Board study.

Read “interaction” in that context to mean the critical moment when an adversary, perhaps a single lowly radar operator, detects a U.S. military aircraft on a covert operation. That moment of detection is the sort of world-changing event that happens, literally, in the blink of an eye.

Just before the study came out, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, established the Adaptive Radar Countermeasures program to “enable U.S. airborne EW systems to automatically generate effective countermeasures against new, unknown and adaptive radars in real-time in the field.”

The goal: EW software that can perceive new waveforms and attacks as quickly and as clearly as a living being can hear leaves rustle or see a predator crouching in the distance, then respond creatively to the threat: can I outrun that? Can I fight it? Should I do anything at all? It’s a problem of artificial intelligence: creating a living intelligence in code......
 

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http://www.defenseone.com/technolog...-f-35s-brains-will-change-air-warfare/130812/

Navy Pilots Describe How the F-35’s Brains Will Change Air Warfare

By Patrick Tucker
6:00 PM ET

* “The F-35 is a lot easier to fly and a lot more difficult to operate,” than the older F-18 Super Hornet, he said

* A Stealth Aircraft the First Week of the War

In a major conflict, military officials expect the fighter jets flying initial combat missions would need to do more than just destroy air defenses in stealth mode. So the F-35 also features sophisticated artificial-intelligence enhanced electromagnetic warfare capabilities. The jet also has three points under each wing capable of carrying conventional non-stealthy weapons, like GBU-12 Paveway II 12 laser-guided smart bombs.

“Why does a stealth aircraft need external weapons? It’s a stealth aircraft for the first week of the war,” said Thomas Briggs, the lead flight test engineer for the F-35 program. “When you destroy the enemy air defenses. After that, when you need to go out and take as many bombs as you can to prosecute a mission, we can start to strap weapons under the wings and take more ordinance over the target. That’s why that’s there.”
 

asianobserve

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F-35 is advancing on all fronts. The F-35C has been staying on board USS George Washington for testing. Some of the latest vids:


Although I must admit with its extended wings, the F-35C is not the best looking of the 3 models.
 

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Pilots to Test Fix for F-35 Helmet ‘Green Glow’ Problem



ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON — In coming days, five test pilots here will begin conducting night trials with a new software load for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter helmet that they believe will spell the end to a troubling issue.

Adjustments that decrease the contrast of the Generation III helmet-mounted display should allow pilots of the F-35C to land on aircraft carriers without having their view obscured by the display’s ambient light, said Tom Briggs, acting chief test engineer for the Navy.
http://www.defensetech.org/2016/08/...-for-f-35-helmet-green-glow-problem/?mobile=1
 

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Navy F-35C Landed So Precisely, It Tore Up a Runway



“They were landing in the same spot on the runway every time, tearing up where the hook touches down,” Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker, head of Naval Air Forces, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “So we quickly realized, we needed to either fix the runway or adjust, put some variants in the system. So that’s how precise this new system is.”
The new system in question is called Delta Flight Path, a built-in F-35C technology that controls glide slope and minimizes the number of variables pilots must monitor as they complete arrested carrier landings. A parallel system known as MAGIC CARPET, short for Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies, is being developed for use with the Navy’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers. Together, these systems may allow carriers to operate with fewer tankers, leaving more room for other aircraft, Shoemaker said.
http://www.dodbuzz.com/2016/08/18/navy-f-35c-landed-so-precisely-it-tore-up-a-runway/
 

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US to deploy 16 F-35 stealth fighters at Japan base next year

The Japanese government informed the city of Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture on Monday that the United States plans to deploy 16 F-35 fighters at the US military base there from January to August next year.

It marks the first time for that stealth aircraft to be stationed overseas.
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-...35-stealth-fighters-west-japan-base-next-year
 

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Block 3F software aids F-35 weapons test







During Block 2 software testing on the F-35, the service accomplished three weapons delivery accuracy tests in one month. The recent tests employed 30 different weapons including the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition, Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM, Boeing GPS-guided Small Diameter Bomb and Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder, according to a 22 August Lockheed press release.
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/block-3f-software-aids-f-35-weapons-test-428711/
 

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Despite the advances a great deal of challenges still lie ahead for the F-35...

Pentagon weapons tester: F-35 fighter jet has 'significant' problems

Dated just one week after the Air Force declared its version of the F-35 ready for initial combat operations, Gilmore wrote that the advanced aircraft continues to demonstrate limitations related to its software, data fusion, electronic warfare and weapons employment, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported the memo.
"Achieving full combat capability with the Joint Strike Fighter is at substantial risk" of not occurring before development is supposed to end and realistic combat testing begins, he wrote in the memo to Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James; Gen. David Goldfein, the service's chief of staff, and Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's acquisitions chief, according to Bloomberg.
"Achieving full combat capability with the Joint Strike Fighter is at substantial risk" of not occurring before development is supposed to end and realistic combat testing begins, he wrote in the memo to Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James; Gen. David Goldfein, the service's chief of staff, and Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's acquisitions chief, according to Bloomberg.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/26/politics/f-35-fighter-jet-problems-gilmore-memo/
 

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South Korea will receive first batch of F-35 by 2018.

Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $7 million contract for providing the multispectral database for the upcoming delivery to South Korea of 40 F-35A Lightening II stealth fighters with conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) capability.

The contract was awarded Aug. 23 by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) under the Foreign Military Sales program. The US Naval Air Systems Command in Maryland will handle the contract.

The 40 F-35A CTOL fighters were released to South Korea in March 2013 for $7.06 billion. Then in May, the DSCA released $793 million of arms in support of the F-35, including 274 AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, 530 Joint Directed Attack Munitions (JDAM), 154 AIM-9X-2 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and 530 “Bunker Buster” BLU-109 2000LB Penetrators equipped with JDAM.

The DSCA originally released 60 CTOL fighters for $10.8 billion, but South Korea reduced the number to 40 for budgetary reasons. The fifth-generation F-35A beat the fourth-generation Boeing F-15 Silent Eagle and the EADS Eurofighter Typhoon for South Korea’s F-X fighter competition.

South Korea joined Israel and Japan, who selected the F-35A in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Lockheed will begin deliveries of the F-35A in the 2018-2021 time frame.
https://www.facebook.com/TejasMrca/photos?ref=page_internal
 

asianobserve

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US Air Force gets its 100th F-35

The Air Force received its 100th F-35 Lightning II Friday.
The fifth-generation aircraft landed at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, joining the service’s ever-growing fleet of the aircraft less than a month after top brass declared the F-35 had reached its initial operating capability Aug. 2.
The current 100 F-35s are stationed mainly at Luke and at Hill AFB in Utah, with more set to join them before the end of the year as they roll off the Lockheed Martin assembly lines.
By the end of 2016, F-35s could outnumber F-22s.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/air-force-gets-100th-f-35
 

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