F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

For me, that was a moment when I realized that the received wisdom about military things can be just completely wrong.

I had considered myself to be reasonably informed about the F-35, and how "everyone knows" it's a boondoggle. I think this started with a long-form article I read in 2013, "How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane": https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...

Here is the HN discussion at the time, full of confident assertions that the F-35 is useless: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6211029

Fast forward to this year, when Israel's F-35s operated over Iran with total impunity. Not a single plane lost AFAIK.

Iran isn’t really a near peer adversary, however. But I guess that is the F35’s target market?

Do you expect it would do as well over Ukraine? Or if there was a spat with China over Taiwan (for example)?

It is possible for both things to be true.

Quick googling shows that the Internet is succumbing to the propaganda machines. MSN mindlessly reproduces Iranian article about 2 shot down F-35s but I was unable to find any credible source to confirm that.

They had some pretty advanced anti aircraft systems. Also they are invisible to radar so they were truly surprised attacks coming out of the blue. So yes, it would be.

Do you have any reason to attribute this to the fact they were F-35s? For comparison, how many jets were lost during "shock and awe"? Israel operates with impunity in Iran all the time, often on the ground. I'm not sure the fact they used F-35s is actually relevant here but if you have a source on that it would be interesting to read. Given the state of Iran it is hard to imagine the same could not be achieved with a last generation aircraft... it would not be surprising if by the time a peer power conflict starts manned aircraft like the F-35 will already be obsolete...

They said the same thing about the F-117 in 1999. It was shot down by a Soviet era AA. It was said once, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed". The same applies here. Comparing bombing Iran to a conflict with China is delusional, put plainly the capabilities of the aircraft have never actually been tested against a competent peer - when it actually matters.

Searching in Persian?

The expectation that there would be 'fair and honest' reporting about aircraft losses on the part of an aggressor is not reasonable. Why on Earth would Western powers allow themselves to be so easily embarrassed?

Read F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II. The book sets the record straight on a lot of these issues.

One of the crashed ones was larger than Antonov An-225 Mriya and was surrounded by people larger than 2 storey house.

The other had wings backwards, didn't look like f35 and had engine still running after crashing into pieces.

That F-117 was because it was flying every day for months on the same route at the same time and they lucked out with radar catching the plane during the couple seconds it's bomb doors were open.

Iran runs russian S300 and S400 air defence systems - the best non Nato countries have.

Yes, and they did that because of the same arrogance alluded to in my quote.

Sounds like an interesting book, though far too many pages for a subject I have only a passing interest in. I would note given the authors affiliations I'm not sure I would ever consider it something that could "set the record straight". If there's a controversy about the program the authors backgrounds don't exactly suggest one will be getting a balanced view. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I appreciate the suggestion anyway.

If the worst we have to worry about is China getting similarly lucky a few times, we'll win handily.

You're missing the point entirely. The adversary in 1999 was not remotely near peer. So say arrogance there costs you only one plane, which nonetheless becomes infamous as a cautionary tale about superpower hubris. The same against China will be far more fatal. Also, fwiw conflict with China is routinely simulated by American war planners, and to put it plainly there is no longer any plausible scenario where America "wins handily" in the Taiwan strait. Your suggestion that this is even possible is therefore vaguely amusing. Maybe also look to the past decades of American war fighting. When was the last time we felt like we outright "won" a war? When against a peer or near peer? Mission accomplished?

It’s not at all unbiased, in a journalistic sense, and doesn’t present itself as such (for others: it is written by the now retired program manager of the F-35 development program). But the relevant facts about the performance and cost effectiveness of the plane are a matter of public record, and the book is interesting for providing the inside view on the politics which resulted in the unfair propaganda campaign against it.

You are free to draw your own conclusions of course. I worked for Lockheed previously in my career, and some in my family still do. Though I hold no stock or other ties now (different career, different industry), my experience does lead me to take the authors at face value. There are many issues with Lockheed leadership, but professional integrity is not one of them.

If you look at the Ukraine war the planes are operating from a distance to the frontlines on both sides. The ones close the the front fly in low and then climb and drop their guided distance munitions.

The west has been in a very negative mood for a few years now. I'd generally discount the "We're losing the x race to y" kind of talk.

The f22 is more elegant though

>received wisdom about military things can be just completely wrong.

Consider that what you thought was "received wisdom" was literally Russian propaganda. However, the actual reality was always there, always being patiently insisted by people who knew what they were talking about, who were in fact still discussing actual boondoggles with the program, like the portion of the program that built the tailhook and was terribly run and ineffective at points.

People like Pierre Sprey have been shouting the same lies for decades, and credulous people with zero domain knowledge have been repeating his horse shit forever. He was the same guy who insisted that we should be building really stripped down planes without radar, without missiles, without anything.

He was very much the originator of a lot of anti-F35 FUD, on Russia Today no less. Western media was literally quoting the Russian propaganda firm to tell people how the F35 sucked. He helped push the utter BS that is "Oh, Russia's long wave radar makes stealth not work" which if you don't understand how that's irrelevant and untrue, don't ever have an opinion on modern warplanes.

There's a famous article talking about how terrible the F35 was by interviewing an F16 pilot who had faced it in dogfight training. The article talked at length about how the pilot of the F16 was able to out dogfight the F35. Now, it's sufficient to mention that gun range dogfights are not a thing in modern air combat, or at the very least are not designed for, because as long as your enemy has a single radar or IR missile left, you've already lost. However, beyond that, the F35 wasn't terrible, it's just very unlikely to match the literal king of dogfights. More importantly, the article mentioned something that I'm sure they didn't even realize the importance of.

Even at knife fighting range, the F16 radar assisted gunsight was unable to lock on to the F35. Go look at early jet aircraft gunnery statistics for an idea of how laughably bad dogfighting an F35 would be.

Oh, and that entire test was done with an F35 that wasn't allowed or capable of flying it's full envelope. It was an F35 with a hand tied behind it's back.