Exit Stage Left Its Not About Boeing But The F-35

Several months is this commentary in the making. The much over-priced F-35 is not Boeing's F/A 18 Super Hornet. The Lockheed martin F-35 came from the same Skunk Works my uncle worked on with the SR-71 "spy plane". I guess you may call me an F-35 neophyte by default, since I've only spent about two years researching and giving developmental commentary on the subject of the F-35.

Here is the very quick and very dirty comments on the F-35. If the US Air Force had any common sensory helmet-head for its decision making or about spending your money from near-do-well to infinity and back. They did it with the Lockheed Martin F-35 extravaganza from 2005 through 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the Farnborough flight-line. 

Ooh, awe and wow the F-35B showed only its bicep bursting out of its tight paint job during the flying palooka-extravaganza in Britain last week. Denmark proudly smirked we "bought some" then Norway stepped and said, we shot down an F-16 during demo days with our F-35. It was just plain better than the fourth generation fighter aircraft such as the F-16. 

Hill AFB concluded a 88-88 sortie success rate deployed at Mountain Home AFB last month. It bombed its way into the hearts of Generals, Colonels, and flying AF captains when it went 15 for 16 on bombing runs. One bomb was  flawed as its F-35 performed flawlessly on bombing runs at Mountain Home, Id.

Having a new ejector seat design in hand or with Hill AFB maintainers successfully adjusting its Twelve F-35 fighters for IOC simulation standards,  it silences all those complainers, critics and arrogant thinkers who have just left the room since the F-35 program has put together the first usable fighting example maintained by Air Force personnel after installing a block 3i level of sophistication.

Glitches are being secured and retired every day as the LM top 1,100 things to fix list has shrunk as in any progressive developmental flying wonder had from the last century. The Works-in-progress norm for any program continues forward like a countdown just as even if inventing a type of oil for rocket science, as by its fortieth attempt of searching for that special oil, then the F-35 moment has arrived and its not called Water Displacement Formula 40 after a number of 39 attempts glitched. WD-40 is in my tool box today. The F-35 is just short of WD-40 status and the haters are going to hate about the F-35, since it cost this nation its national treasury and it sells copy to say so.

The F-35 has become so advanced at this stage it can't be replicated even by chance will lessor technology employed by Russia or China. They, can't even hack successfully all its secrets if they wanted to do so. There are 100's of businesses in dozens of country's working on this project in secret. Yes, we've been hacked and will continue to be hacked for the next forty years. Even if Russia or China owned the F-35 blue prints at this moment, it would be another twenty years before they could replicate today's working example. In twenty years the F-35 will have evolved beyond the current technological horizon that others are concurrently chasing as LM spins the word concurrency. 

Complexity to do the fantastic is a bridge too far for any consideration. Look at what the US has just gone through making a helmet fit right with its systems. The secret F-35 doesn't just hover, and go Mach 1.6, it is invisible to most radar. There are many more secrets that are undisclosed and will remain undisclosed going forward into the future. Pilots are just beginning to learn how to fight using the F-35. Visionaries did not yet foresee how all the "works" would work under real combat condition, but they did provide a cornucopia of items allowing the pilot's artistry to emerge. The planners had hoped enough tools were provided within the F-35 frame allowing a pilot to write his own combat opus against future combatants. That is the miracle of the F-35, the planners do not even know how good the F-35 will become until after its faced with every conceivable combat scenario.

Glitches are normal for any fantastic idea, but it does not mean the F-35 should be dropped because of its lab testing is coming out from its Initial Trial and Error Mode (ITEM not its IOC) while striving towards a conceptual objective. Let the Skunk Works work, it’s in the American DNA.