The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

It didn’t take 20 years to make an airframe it took 20 years to do lots of research which eventually resulted in a wide range of systems and multiple very distinct airframes.

Hell F-35B does vertical takeoff and still mostly uses the same systems as the other designs, that should tell you something.

It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.

Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.

F-35B was added to JSF to ensure Lockheed (who had been working on exactly that since 1980s even to the point of licensing designs from USSR) was the only company that could win the contract.

The SR-71 had a strait forward mission well suited to a specialized airframe, and again you’re focusing on the airframe.

Just the software for the helmet alone provides a huge technical advantage that has little to do with how the aircraft is manufactured other than having the appropriate sensors, communication systems, and computing power. Yet through all that bureaucracy what would normally be 3 different airframes all get to leverage the same systems without the need for retrofits etc. It’s inherently a two step process to figure out what you need before you can finalize the design.

By comparison vs the F-35, the B-2 spirit was vastly more expensive and far more limited. The F-35 also costs less than the more specialized F-22, but that versatility takes time.

Agree, agree, agree.

New technologies should make iteration time on this stuff faster not shorter... even for complex things like fighter aircraft.

The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.

I will say though that during WW2 and the Cold War, the amount of tolerance for killing test pilots was much greater given the number of people dying during active military conflicts at the time.

But it's not the technologies that are a problem most of the time. It's that:

- DoD / DoW is a chaotic project owner, trying to squeeze in colossal and sometimes self-contradictory lists of requirements, which it wants to change often.

- The US government is a poor customer, which runs out of money from time to time.

- The US Congress is a cantankerous financier, which haggles for the money every year, and demands the production to be distributed all over the place, to bring jobs to the constituencies which voted for the congresspersons.

- The companies that produce this stuff are few and mostly cannot be easily replaced, and they know it. This is because in the late 1980s the US government decided that it has won the Cold War and will not need the many competing manufacturers of military gear any more. That proved to be a bit shortsighted, but now it's a bit late.

To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.

What evidence is there of that?

And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?

Harrier 2.0

Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)

Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.

However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141

That is a theory, but the evidence is that VTOL F-35s are needed and used widely.

> -B meant delays and issues

The -B was the first of the three variants to become operational.

For very special meaning of operational that could be summarized as "USMC could not allow it to fail".

And the delays were on the whole project due to forced commonality (in addition to L-M being L-M)

Can you provide any evidence? What I'm stating are public facts. We can always come up with reasons, but we need evidence of what actually happened.

> The fact that there are over a dozen Chinese humanoid robotics companies that have shipped working products in the past 12 months should be a big red flag.

I think that mostly means money is cheap in China. In America, if you try to start a humanoid robot company you'll immediately run into the "Why though?" question when you try to get money for it. The case for the economic relevance of humanoid robots is dubious at best, so to proceed with such a development program you need your own money or at least good friends with connections who don't care about money.

You'll never find evidince hard enough to fashion the sort of club people who ask such questions ought to be bludgeoned with.

Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.

Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.

In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.

I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower.

That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.

The "special casing" of "operational capability" is public fact - USMC decided to claim initial operational capability on aircraft that didn't even have complete SMS (stores management system), something that was missing even after first "front line" USAF units got theirs. Block 2 software had only minimal air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities implemented. Block 3 was the infamous one with constant reboots, with Block 3F the first planned to provide full not just weapons capability, but even flight envelope. Heck, in 2015, they barely lifted limitations on attitude and acceleration/wing loading after finally testing them in flight.

Conflicts between requirements of -A/-C and -B, among other reasons due to weight, were discussed as far and wide as GAO reports, because like with F-111, there was strong political push for maximum commonality, which resulted in cascading issues - for example, -B added 18 months around 2004 to -A and -C when the fuselage ended up too heavy for -B to operate with any equipment, and extensive rework had to be done on all models to shave ~1200kg. By 2010 there was discussion to cancel -B altogether.

On a topic closer to typical fare on HN, ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015. Something that anyone with experience with that part of Lockheed probably expected and were not listened to.

Ultimately the aircraft is probably pretty good (I am saying probably because some crankiness isn't much talked unless you're actually embedded with users of such hardware, and is secret - there I have only my suspicions), but the road there was more painful than it should be - and ofc I would not trust it if I was foreign buyer for reasons of not just software black boxes but also dependency on US-located labs to provide mission data updates - at least I have not heard of that aspect changing. We used to joke it was first aircraft with "phone home" license system...

I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of the price of a supercarrier; It's not that adding tens of thousands of tons of steel is going to break the bank, it's that a carrier group encompasses most functions of the military. The larger a ship gets the easier it is to move quickly through the wind, and the slower effective landing approaches are. The longer the catapult, the lower the necessary acceleration. CATOBAR takeoff and landing that works a little more like normal runway takeoff and landing means more of the USAF R&D ends up being projectable power.

It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.

The US military doesn’t want to sacrifice the capacity to go through the Panama Canal without getting a large benefit.

As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.

Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.

So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.

So you have no evidence. I do, and I'm open to something besides conspiracy theories.

Thanks. I do know about most of that but I'm not sure it distinguishes the F-35 from any very large, very complex, bleeding edge technology project.

> the road there was more painful than it should be

See above - it's so hard to say. The conception was such an enormous project: build a bleeding edge system, higher performance than anything to be built for decades, even a new concept of fighter planes (as a sensor node on a network built around situational awareness, more than anything, as I understand it), that satisfies the requirements of not only the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but a dozen militaries in other countries - and for all, critical to existential survival.

If you've ever had a project with more than one boss who are independent of each other, you know the pain of trying to choose even specifications. Imagine the F-35 meetings.

Was it worth the pain? It did allow an enormous economy of scale, a trillion dollars over its lifetime. They payoff is now, when it's the best fighter plane in the world that everyone wants, and a Dutch jet can land in Italy or Okinawa and get parts and maintenance.

But that doesn't answer the original question of whether the VTOL (really STOL) -B model was included mostly to give Lockheed the contract. In all those countries, there was too much demand for S/VTOL to just skip it, and there were and are zero alternatives. Something else could have been designed - but why when you can leverage all this massive development of the F-35?

> ALIS (IIRC now renamed to ODIN, but awarded back to the same team...), the ground support system critical to even running the airplane, was close to useless in 2015.

Also, I think ALIS was controlled and operated by Lockheed - it was essentially a service from Lockheed. The US military was limited in its ability to do its own inventory, maintenance, etc. Now the military insists on controlling the IP for its acquisition, to a large extent. I don't know what the IP status of ODIN is.

The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations.

Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.

Repositioning is far from the only concern but it is something they care about.

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed the Suez Canal in 2021.

The much smaller Wasp-class amphibious assault ship on the other hand can carry as many as 20 F-35B’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...