What the U.S. Senate was told about more F-35 trouble

The RAAF force structure cancer is a problem created by the Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy.

Gross over-optimism and hope will not fix that problem.

This read is what was told to the U.S. Senate recently. Unaffordable, unsupportable, unable to face emerging threats. That is the F-35.

And, the RAAF even wants another try at the bad idea of extending the airframe life on legacy Hornets. Here is the problem faced by the U.S. Navy.

The Navy intends that a SLEP would extend the life of select legacy F/A–18s from 8,600 to 10,000 flight hours. As yet, the Navy does not have sufficient data to predict the failure rate for aircraft being inducted into the SLEP program. Too high a failure rate could leave the Navy with too few aircraft that could benefit from the SLEP program, which would exacerbate the shortfall projections.

F-35 electronic warfare capability affected by production quality

The Senate is concerned about the F-35s electronic warfare ability in relation to production quality affecting apertures on the airframe, Reuters reports.

Apertures are a tough thing to design for stealth aircraft. The aircraft has to be stealthy, yet let antennas and radar detectors peak through the skin without creating adverse radar concerns.

The F-35 has 10 apertures that pertain to radar detection as can be seen from this graphic.



As a comparison, the F-22--sometimes described as an antenna farm--has around 30 apertures on the airframe.

Production quality has nagged the F-35 program even while proponents complain more aircraft need to be built per year. The problem with building a higher quantity of F-35s is that what is currently being built are "mistake-jets" because of production knowledge immaturity.

The electronic warfare concern may have been one of the classified issues mentioned in last years DOD "quick-look" report" pointing to a variety of F-35 troubles.

Electronic warfare is an interesting term with the F-35. It has no wide field of view self-defense jamming equipment. One of the assumptions is that the narrow-band and narrow field of view radar in the nose will perform some jamming functions. Due to the cooling issues and sustained power with AESA radars, this is probably not a very reliable function. The aircraft will have narrow-band, mostly nose-on low-observable capability and some expendable decoys. A towed decoy--combat proven in ALLIED FORCE 1999--is not expected until Block 4. Whenever that happens.

A paper on predicted F-35 survivability can be read here.