Big budget cuts are coming. The USAF doesn't know how many F-35s it can afford but somehow wants them. How will the service pay for the F-35 in the coming years?
Sacrifice.
I suggest that this exercise in force structure suicide happen as follows:
F-15E-Retire all small-motor F-15Es (about half the fleet)
F-16-Retire all non- Block 5X F-16s
F-15-Retire all F-15C/D
Remove the nuclear mission for bombers
Bombers-Retire all B-52s
Tankers-Retire half of the remaining KC-135 fleet
C-5-Anything that can't be refurbished to a C-5M standard gets retired.
C-17-Retire 10 percent of the force.
C-130-Retire all non-C-130J assets
VIP-Remove the E4 family of aircraft from service (leadership by example)
Retire JSTARS
Remove 20 percent of initial pilot training capacity.
Manning:
Remove the 0-10 and E-9 Rank except for USAF HQ
Remove all SES
All this needs to be done fast. Don't think about it. Pull the trigger.
Remaining F-15E and F-16 Block 5X will go into the Guard as "blended" units (Active, Reserve, Guard members with Guard leadership). They will take on home-air-defense alert at 17-20 (what used to be ASA) locations as well as other missions. This means for the F-15E, a crammed training schedule. Big time.
But hey, it is all about living the dream.
11 comments:
So many things seem wrong with the vid it's hard to know where to start.
1) he's accelerating through M1.13 with afterburner on for his bombing run, yes? Yet the hostile air defense fighters he's evading nearby have no IRST? No ground based IRST?
2) @ 12nm away from the target (air base) prior to bomb release and still no SAM detection? The simulator instructor claims "they still can't see us because there's no threat indicator yet of being locked on"... well, maybe it's a hostile force's tactics to not lock on until your fully inside a SAM trap? Will it be normal in future combat to assume one does not see you because you're not yet locked up?
3) So he's dropped his bombs 11.5nm away from the air base now, having not been engaged yet by any next-gen area Air defense system of any type and still undetected.
4) Now heading for that enemy fighter he's been tracking the whole time while accelerating in supersonic, and still assuming to be undetected.
5) One AMRAAM shot, one kill. The poor bad guy never even saw it coming... flew right into the shot. Very convenient kill - since had he missed, the F-35 would have had to dogfight his way out of that airspace.
Seems like an unnecessarily risky sortie, not to mention the pilot was clicking buttons and changing his display screen modules throughout the whole engagement?
Is it just me but was acceleration kind of slow? especially since JSF is in clean config, sure seemed to take quite a while to get to M1.1...
I also noticed the one shot, one kill, very convenient. The 2 bad guys never know that F35 is there even after opening ventral bay and banking away? The bad guys don't even know F35 is there even after it has just destroyed their runway?
I also thought that there was quite a lot of hand mvt and head down situations inside the cockpit...
Yeah. It is a cute computer game demo used to con the gullible.
Would be fun to see the classified combat sim. Then you would see the threat rings from enemy emitters in the main display and not just the little RWR display.
Can you also touch-screen the touch screen when the aircraft is jumping around in turbulences? I mean the whole HOTAS thing was developed to NOT fiddle around in the cockpit, not they again seem to rely quite a bit on moving hands inside the cockpit. Also dare say these input areas for the touch-screen are mightly small for a stressed-out hand during a combat situation when your fine motor skills might not be the best. Also in high threat areas the situational display will be full of circles, squares, and triangles. In short - I'm not a big fan of single seaters for air-to-ground missions in non-permissive environments, no matter how much sensor fusion, 5G, &c is in your plane.
Ok, I have a question about the F-35's Helmet display after watching this video.
The purpose of Helmet is apparently allow the DAS imagery to be displayed on the helmet screen so that the pilot doesn't require NVG, correct?
Now, what I'm trying to visualize in the nigh-time combat scenario being portrayed in this video is... how does the pilot do all the switching (and target selection, zooming in, etc) between the Tactical Situational Display, the Threat warning display and the Stores Management Display (selecting weapons)... in addition to viewing the dual FLIR/IRST data and SAR display data... all while his night-time DAS view is displayed on the pilot's visor simultaneously??
I understand from the video how the pilot's clicking between the the TSD and clicking targets and zooming in... but he's looking down at the flat panel display to do it, correct? Seems easy enough.
But is the pilot also having to switch off the night-time DAS view on his Helmet every time he's activating and viewing a Flat panel display and then switch back on the visor DAS imagery every time he looks up again when flying the aircraft? Back and forth... turning on the night-vision DAS display then off, to view the flat panel displays, etc?
Also, is there some voice command functions with this helmet to help switch between modes and turning on off the DAS display, etc, similar to how the EF Typhoon's helmet reportedly has voice-command operations built in?
It just seems all highly complex and exceptionally high in the work-load department, especially while under the high stress of a combat and with potential for 'Fat Finger' mistakes when touching those tiny display buttons as was eluded to by Distiller above...
Thanks in advance for any clarification and better insight on the Helmet operation questions.
In high workload situations, all time critical and important functions are accessible by HOTAS, the same principle used in 4th gen fighters. Before entering an engagement, the cockpit is already set up. In a turning enegagmenet under 5g, the pilot would not be able to lift his arm anyway!
The DAS in the HMD has several blanking settings selectable by the pilot. It could be blanked (image removed) whenever he is looking inside the cockpit, when he is looking at the touchpanel, or it could be selected to be persistant with a HOTAS selectable manual blanking function. There is also scope for the pilot to look 'under' the FOV of the DAS at the panel.
Dealing with high workload situations with lots of sensory input is what single-seat fighter pilots do. At the moment, they deal with comparable inputs but they are presented in a much less user friendly format.
Interesting, thanks for that info. That would make sense to have blanking functions... as potentially buggy as they might be in functionality at times.
Anyway could you elaborate more about the 'scope' pilots have have "to look under the DAS FOV?"
A follow-on question then might be... can a pilot easily shift between blanking mode settings?
For example, between the HOTAS default blanking setting and the 'whenever the pilot is looking at the panel' setting? It would seem conceivable that in a night-time air-air engagement eg, there might be some need or desire by the pilot to switch between various HMD blanking settings?
Also, I assume this to be a 'yes', but within a WVR engagement scenario, does the F35 HMD (either during daytime or night) allow for cueing under-wing AIM-9x at the off-bore target simply by the pilot turning his head and looking at the target?
Or do targets need to be selected and weapons cued using the Tactical Display Panel only?
Either way, I'm sorry but the video in this blog entry depicts a completely unrealistic scenario... with enemy fighters completely aloof, even when within 20nm of the F35 and pointing everywhere but the direction of the F35... and implied as not having any IRST and FLIR (or capable AESA) of their own!
also keep in mind that the guy running the demo was clearly doing it at a pace to enable the guy with the camera in the cockpit to keep up.
A pilot with several hundred hours under his belt will be far more proficient....
Not sure why you think the blanking function would be buggy. Legacy aircraft use JHMCS with blanking functions which work just fine.
Human FOV goes about 75° down from level, while the FOV of the DAS image in the visor of the HMD does not extend that far. The gap leaves space to 'look under' the DAS image at the touch panel. This is how current pilots look at their panels while using traditional NVGs.
Having quick access HOTAS to blanking functions would make sense and is what current generation aircraft have with JHMCS.
Yes, the video in the scenario is unrealistic. It is an unclassified demonstrator of the cockpit.
Yes, the AIM-9X can be cued by the helmet. In the video, only BVR modes are looked at. Just like current generation fighters with JHMCS, if the pilot spots a visual target, they can hit a HOTAS switch slaving the seeker to the helmet, look at the target, and shoot.
Thanks Flasheart for admitting that the video was at least 'unrealistic' and of course an unclassified example of how a block III F-35 would perform in an actual future scenario vs a high-end threat... Most would concur with you there.
I guess that was the most frustrating thing about the video, more than anything -- ie the fact that it was deceptively unrealistic in depicting how easily the F-35 would prosecute a mission sortie as shown.
And an obvious follow-on question might therefore be... are Partner govts (parliaments) and US Congress alike shown the classified version of this vid, of how a block III F-35 will actually prosecute and face such a difficult, uncertain and indeed risky sortie vs a high-end hostile opponent, in say a 2020 scenario??
Or are lawmakers and decision makers only shown these unrealistic marketing versions of the vid?
I don't believe there was anything 'deceptive' about the video. It is for ice-cream lickers to look at the basic cockpit mechanization. Therefore, you need a few targets to bomb and a few aircraft to shoot at.
If anyone was trying to look at a video on youtube as an authoratative source, they're going out of their way to whinge about something.
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