Is The F-35 Worth $115 Million?

This episode of real engineering is brought to you by Curiosity Stream. Watch thousands of documentaries for free for 31 days. Curiosity Stream. Ford / Real Engineering this year on the F-35 will finally close its 27-year development phase and move towards the top. -volume manufacturing the culmination of 27 years of design and development by its manufacturer Lockheed Martin 27 years of development crossing the finish line in the middle of a political power struggle in the United States, after all, this is the most expensive in the history of humanity. have bloated as a result of the American military-industrial complex, where the intertwining of politics, economics, and the military industry encourages companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing not to vertically integrate their companies as a means of distributing jobs throughout the United States and, therefore, increasing political support for them. programs and the politicians who passed them through Congress to win contracts, we could dive deep into these murky waters of politics, but this channel is about engineering and the F-35 development costs would be astronomical even without these problems, so let's explore the design of this aircraft and see if its price is really

worth

it from the beginning, the f-35 sought to be the all-rounder, an air superiority machine to replace the air force's f-16 and a TENS, a stealth fighter which took the Lessons Learned from the B-2 program and improved on Lockheed's previous initiatives in stealth technology with the F-22 Raptor and the F-117 Nighthawk, a fighter capable of carrying the Navy's F-18 Hornets and perhaps the boldest of all.

It would take on the challenge of vertical landings, replacing the British AV-8B Harrier. Taking all of these advanced technologies and combining them into a single aircraft was never going to be an easy or cheap task, and the program became even more expensive for what was done. Initially intended as a cost-saving measure, this aircraft would be developed as a joint venture between three US military branches, the Navy Air Force and the Marines, a single aircraft for each branch of the military, the program would be called the Joint Strike Fighter and its goal was to produce a next-generation aircraft that can replace the fighter and ground attack aircraft not only of the United States but of all its allies, unlike the f-22 Raptor, which is a Exclusive to the US Air Force, the F-35 would be commercially available in The Joint Strike Fighter program began as a competition between McDonnell Douglas Northrop Gruman Lockheed Martin and Boeing, with Lockheed and Boeing developing prototype aircraft as finalists for the competition, both eager to win what would surely be one of the most lucrative contracts they would have.

Once Boeing's signature aircraft, the x32 was a strange looking aircraft with a huge single air intake that made it less VTOL and more beefy. Its appearance alone may have prevented it from winning this valuable contract, but what really stopped it was Boeing's decision to create two prototype aircraft, one capable of supersonic flight and another capable of vertical takeoff using the same thrust vectoring as the Harrier. , which was supposed to replace the engine used in the Harrier, is similar to a traditional jet engine in that it consists of a low pressure. compressor fan a high pressure compressor a combustion chamber a high pressure turbine and a low pressure turbine but it is less the location of the nozzle is anything but traditional two outlets are placed immediately after the low pressure compressor with two other ducts of air of the highest pressure turbines in vertical thrust mode the nozzles point downwards and allow the plane to balance precariously on these four columns of air the Harrier was not an easy plane to control in this flight mode and in more than On one occasion turbulence from its own downdraft caused the plane to roll over onto the cockpit during landings and kill the pilot.

A large portion of these control problems can be attributed to the proximity of the control nozzles to the aircraft's center of gravity, which gives them less mechanical advantage in manipulating the aircraft's attitude. The Harrier had small roll control nozzles at the tip of each wing, but control for these was completely manual, placing the incredibly unstable control mechanism in the hands of a human who needed to concentrate on several other factors when landing. The x32 used many of the same techniques to achieve vertical. thrust but improved many of the Harriers' deficiencies. Instead of using the same nozzles for cruise and direct lift, the x32 would close the valves for each when necessary.

In normal flight the cruise nozzles would open allowing the engine thrust to reaction would be efficiently directed through the At the rear of the aircraft, during the transition, this nozzle would close and force air through the direct lift nozzles. They placed larger roll control nozzles farther from the plane's center of mass and also employed a cold air screen placed just ahead of the lift nozzles. This was what was intended. to prevent hot, turbulent air from the direct lift nozzles from entering the front intake, which was a big problem for the Harrier when it landed. Jet engines need cold, smooth air to operate at maximum thrust, which was difficult to achieve when landing and directing all of their thrust directly to the ground.

Despite these improvements, Lockheed eventually won the contract, impressing the Joint Strike Fighter program with its left fan system engine thrust here once again comes out of a single exhaust nozzle during normal flight, but when the show starts the ex35 was capable of something An incredible transformer-like shift hatch opens on the back top and bottom of the plane, revealing two counter-rotating fans, another two small open doors under the wings, exposing two additional exhaust ports that control the roll of the plane, finally when the plane begins to slow down, the nozzle of the crew begin turning downward transitioning the remaining jet engine thrust from horizontal to vertical the lift fan solved many of the same problems that plagued the harrier the lift fan produced most of the vertical thrust and did not heat the air significantly in the process, the roll control had a significantly greater mechanical advantage and divided most of the control into a computer, perhaps what most influenced its success in winning the contract.

This prototype was capable of vertical landings and supersonic flights. This was the Joint Strike kind of innovation. The fighter program was looking for the lift fan to essentially be a turboprop engine like something you would find on an Osprey. The propellers are driven by a driveshaft connected to the jet engine's turbines which can be disconnected during normal flights. This means that the lift fan is a waste. during cruising, but what it adds and weighs it more than makes up for in lift, these propulsion methods combined can produce 185 kilonewtons of lift, the Harrier could only manage 106. This increase in direct lift capabilities was vital in making the f -35 a

worth

y successor to the Harrier as one of the Harrier's greatest weaknesses was its limitations in maximum takeoff and landing weight.

The Harrier, like the F-35b, operated primarily in short takeoff and vertical landing mode. The Harrier aimed its four nozzles at an angle of approximately 45 degrees, allowing it to produce both horizontal and vertical thrust to take off from shorter runways, allowing it to take off with considerably more waste than it could land in a vertical landing. . The empty weight of the F-35b may be thirteen thousand one hundred and fifty. four kilograms compared to the Harrier's six thousand three hundred and forty kilograms, but it makes up for that with a maximum takeoff weight of 31,800 kilograms compared to the Harrier's fourteen thousand one hundred kilograms, or 11 additional tons of waste.

The F-35 had fuel and ammunition, something the Harrier had little room for, so the F-35 is more than a worthy successor to the Harrier, an aircraft that sold for about $24

million

per unit in 1996 or about 39

million

adjusted for inflation, so the addition of VTOL to the f-35b was just one of the many design challenges that drove down the price of the program, ironically, despite the entry of the joule prototype of Boeing was a sticking point for the sf program, the f-35 now comes in three variants, each designed for different branches of the us military, the f-35a is customized for the us air force. and, as such, it has been designed to take off from conventional runways, allowing it to discard much of the heavy equipment needed for the F-35, be it the Marine variant.

The Marines do not operate from large aircraft carriers like the Navy, and as such their ships, such as the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, have often been referred to as helicopter carriers, as no other aircraft except the Harrier or Osprey have been able to use them. . This is not the case with the Navy, which has large aircraft carriers at its disposal, the final variant is the F-35 C, which has been designed to meet the Navy's requirements and has wings that are approximately 40% larger than any of its sister variants and its landing gear. It is much heavier and more resistant.

Both features were included to allow it to land and take off from aircraft carriers without the need for vertical propulsion like the F-35b. The largest wings not only allow the F-35c to have the largest fuel capacity. of the three, but it also gives it much better lift at slower speeds, making landings and takeoffs much easier on the deck of an aircraft carrier, while the heavier landing gear allows the plane to survive the rough landings associated with arrester cable landings on aircraft carriers. -35 see also incorporates folding wingtips to allow for neat storage within the ship.

This expansion into three variants has been a large source of cost increases and the program probably could have drastically reduced spending if it had only designed three different aircraft for three different branches. Squeezing the needs of these three military branches into a single airframe was never going to be an easy task for Lockheed Martin's R&D division and forced them to make some design concessions that have limited the weight of the weapons in other areas. Criticisms directed at the F-35 are its deficiencies in dogfighting capabilities. Headlines about the f-35 losing simulated dogfights to the cold war era f-15 and f-16 caught the attention of many people and were used to detract from the advancements of the f-35 that only we knew about these problems as a result of a report that was leaked to the press, let's take a look at that report to see what this test pilot thought about the F-35 A.

The main notable flaw of this pilot was the poor quality of the F-35 A. 35 A. energy maneuverability, meaning that the F-35 had difficulty maneuvering without expending a significant amount of its kinetic energy, which is an issue I discussed in more detail in my video on fighter jet instability. The main aspect of the design that the pilot attributes this to is the smaller wing area and weaker afterburner thrust of the f-35 compared to the f-15e he was used to essentially his problem with the f-35 was which used up its stored kinetic energy faster than its competition.

We have no reason to believe this pilot was wrong. In his findings, then, what does this mean for the F-35? It is important to note that this was not a fully functional version. It was missing software that allowed the plane to detect its enemies before they could detect it and it was also missing radar-absorbing paint. The f-35 has no shortage of trained military aviators who praised the f-35, such as US Navy Corps Major Dan Flatley, who helped design the combat training program for f-35 pilots. 35 and has fragmented these problems into old habits of pilots who have spent much of their lives dedicated to previous generation airplanes that were designed with a different philosophy in mind.

Since then, the F-35 has performed phenomenal in simulations with reports of up to 22 1K TRS. Other pilots who have had more time to get used to it. to the f-35 had more positive things to say as John Beasley the chief test pilot of the f-35 with 22 years of experience as a test pilot at Lockheed Martin and was involved in the development of the f-117 Nighthawk and the f-22 Raptor claims that the F-35 can outperform any American fighter except the F-22, which was designed specifically as an air superiority machine and is not available for purchase outside the United States and, in fact, has a unit cost taller than the F-35.

With around one hundred and fifty million dollars, it's hard for me to make a decision.decision on this because I have as little information as any other civilian, but honestly, outside of this report, most pilots who have flown the F-35 sing its praises, John. Beasley also makes an important point: Air combat has always been based on stealth, whether it's World War I pilots diving from the Sun behind them or modern fighters using advanced radar masks in the design, because in In the grand scheme of things, in an aerial combat, the real star that matters is who sees and shoots first and the biggest factor contributing to that is onboard sensors and stealth.

What really sets the F-35 apart is its suite of sensors and computer guidance systems that have been integrated with the user interface of the An aircraft unlike any other aircraft in human history, while also sharing that information. In full force, this is what really makes this plane something scary and it all starts with this small set of transparent faceted sensors that contain the aircraft's infrared imaging and tracking equipment, but those are not your typical windows, they are made Sapphire and a notoriously expensive gemstone, one of the few materials that is hard and durable, but also transparent to a wide range of waves, image data from these sensors can even be fed to pilots.

Helmet visor improved with augmented reality technology. This helmet alone costs $400,000 and allows the pilot to look directly through the plane and see at night without having to wear uncomfortable night vision goggles. The helmet also feeds data from a multitude of other sensors. As the advanced high frequency radar in the nose of the aircraft along with data received from sensors from other aircraft and ground units the data does not enter the pilot's AR helmet unfiltered, although it does pass through the onboard computer which does all the filtering. and necessary data analysis and only presents the pilot with the information he really needs.

The technology is so powerful that even an unarmed F-35 would greatly increase the combat effectiveness of its allies, but detection is just one step toward that goal of shooting first and not being detected is just as important. Incorporating stealth was just another design challenge and is probably the source of much of the unexpected cost first let's clarify something despite what you may have otherwise heard stealth does not make an aircraft undetectable unless it physically does not exist everything is detectable If we can find and analyze planets billions of light years away we can detect a plane flying directly overhead stealthily.

The purpose is not to make the plane invisible, but rather it serves to complicate and delay the detection of a plane by part of the enemy. Stealth has proven invaluable over the past two decades prior to the creation of the F-35, the F-117 Nighthawk flew 1,300 missions over Iraq during the Gulf War, directly striking more than 1,600 high-value targets without missing a single plane, but it was far from perfect. Lockheed knew this well, as the F-117 maker in 1999 infamously saw a Nighthawk. by radar and subsequently shot down over Serbia the pilot survived but the plane crashed and remained almost intact deliver valuable technology to the Russians to reverse engineer Celt has a sole purpose to avoid detection and the f-117 failed here but was developed Using computer technology from the 1970s, its panels were flat and faceted simply because we did not have computers capable of analyzing more complicated shapes to optimize stealth.

The first attempts at stealth worked under a fairly simple theory. Radar works by sending pulses of electromagnetic waves and waiting. and listen to the reflections, the idea behind stealth technology is not to reflect those waves back to the emitter and thus avoid detection. That's why the f-117 has this shape. Each panel has been angled and positioned so as to minimize the amount of this. The energy that will reflect back to the sender was also coated with a paint that would help absorb some of that electromagnetic radiation. Opponents of stealth technology, despite its proven track record, are quick to point out that long-wavelength radar is capable of detecting stealth aircraft.

The same type of radar that detected the F-117 over Serbia and the same type of radar used in the Battle of Britain. While this is true, these stealth aircraft are optimized to avoid detection by higher frequency radars. Those opponents rarely mentioned long-wavelength, low-frequency radars. They do not provide high fidelity measurements and have difficulty determining aircraft location, this makes them effective early warning systems, but completely useless for directing missiles, although this is certainly not useless, it is not particularly useful in air combat. air if I had the f-117. Nighthawk that night was escorted by its usual squadron of electronic jamming Prowler aircraft, the missiles may have never managed to lock on, this was made worse by the fact that the plane was flying on a regular flight path so the Serbs knew where search to top it off.

The F-117 was designed in an era before sophisticated computer analysis was available, so it took this relatively simplistic flat faceted shape. The B2 and F-22, however, greatly improved the technology by using complex curved shapes that no human could expect to calculate radar. signature and have never closed the curves spread those radio waves in many directions instead of reflecting them all in one direction, making it easier to detect by receivers listening in places separate from the sender, a practical Pretty standard today the F-35 uses the same complex curves to avoid detection by these high frequency radars and this is probably one of the things that raises its development costs more stealthily.

The technology requires precision beyond any other type of manufacturing. This is manageable in small scale production such as the B2 and F-22, which had very small production runs, however, the F-35 is expected to be a mass-produced aircraft that foreign allies with fewer resources that the US military will be willing to pay to create a manufacturing line that requires this level of precision was never going to be. The panels cannot have spaces between them that cannot be deformed. A single scratch on the radar-absorbing coating will require a complete repainting of the parrot. Minor manufacturing defects have caused recalls on multiple occasions.

Lockheed is just now getting rolling comfortably. The plane leaves the assembly lines and this is reflected in the drop in the price of the plane. The last batch of orders has been reduced and costs 5.4 percent for the F-35, 5.7 for the B variant, 11 .1% for the f-35 see we leave with a unit cost of 89 point two million for an f-35 to one hundred fifteen point five million for an f-35 B and one hundred seven point seven million for an f-35 see with The F-35 is expected to fall by a further four point seven percent to 85 million by the end of 2019.

This sounds like a lot of money to an average person like me, but we get a clearer picture of these costs when we compare them to other fifth generation fighters like the F-22 Raptor which cost a hundred and fifty million dollars apiece or even looking at the other aircraft it will replace, I think it's fair to say that we have established that the F-35 is a worthy successor to all of these aircraft. They individually come with their own high prices, but the F-35 manages to combine the capabilities of all of these aircraft into one aircraft. Yes, the development cost of this aircraft has been astronomical, that cannot be denied, but much of that money has been returned directly to the American economy so, considering that the aircraft is expected to sell up to 4,600 units in the end of its useful life, almost identical to the total sales figures of the F-16, this will inject more money into the American economy considering a large sum of these orders.

It will be from international exports, so the f-35 is worth 115.5 million and its price as an Irish citizen is not for me to decide, but I can't say anything: it is a fascinating aircraft with amazing capabilities, it may have been a There is pay a high price, but what isn't is a subscription to Curiosity Stream priced at just $2.99 ​​a month. At that price you'll get access to thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles like this fantastic gun history series, not only that, also get free access to nebula, the video streaming platform created by and for independent creators like Tear Zoo Lindsay Alice Minutephysics Wendover Productions and my new channel Real Science, which launched last week, where the curiosity stream is all about big budget non-fiction videos. building nebula because we want a place for educational creators to try out new content ideas that might not work on YouTube.

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