Any 4th gen fighter is a beast when slick. Eagle, Viper, Superhornet......no stores or pylons will even give a Raptor trouble in BFM. The JSF will almost always be slick. I need to ask a couple friends but I’d guess the JSF would be better than any of those 4th gen in realistic fighter configurations. I know th Navy isn’t full up with BFM in the JSF yet. Maybe some AF dudes will know.

I started out a skeptic.  After I heard pilot after pilot who came from F-16Cs, F-15Cs, F-15Es, and Super Hornets say they would never think about taking their former aircraft into combat now that they've seen what the F-35 is, I changed my opinion.  That was when the F-35 was limited with the 3i control laws, before being opened up.

As to weights, for airshow demos, the F-16 normally doesn't carry more than half internal fuel so they can have optimum performance, with enough burn time to actually fly.  Maybe you have better insight, but this is what all the F-16 pilots I know have told me over the years when doing demos dating back to the mid-1980s.

The F-35 air show demo also states that they use 50% internal fuel for demos, which is over 9,000lbs. The F-16 can't even carry 9,000lbs internally.  You aren't arguing that the F-35 weighed less than the F-16, with less internal fuel, are you?  It's not possible to get an F-35 to weigh less than a slick F-16.  This is basic math.  F-35 empty weight is 29,000lb.

Every F-35 pilot has said they don't notice any real perceptible performance differences when loaded with internal stores, because there is no change in drag, and the difference in TOGW and the addition of even bombs isn't big enough to affect flight characteristics substantially.

It's a fact that the F-16 in the demo is stripped of external stores and wing pylons.  You can clearly see that it has wingtip rails, and maybe the very shallow centerline pylon, nothing else.

It's also telling that F-15E drivers prefer the F-35A after converting, and that F-15Es with Sniper pods actively searching for F-35s couldn't detect them, and got their clocks cleaned for sport on a regular basis.

The squadrons from Hill went out to PACOM to fight F-15C guys out of Kadena.

The results were that one of the best air dominance fighter pilot communities could only "sometimes" be victorious against mostly B school F-35 pilots who have no experience in anything else.

Remember when the F-15 was first taken out to Nellis in the 70s and had a 50/50 exchange ratio with F-5Es?

Something entirely different is happening with the F-35.

Yes, even though a guns dogfight between US and other aircraft is unlikely and becoming more unlikely as time goes on, there IS a very valid reason for fighter agility.

That reason is to be able to outmaneuver enemy missiles.    Of course there is absolutely no guarantee that jinking to avoid a missile (SAM or A-A)  will be successful.  The newer, better missiles
are probably going to be harder to outmaneuver.  (Probably!)   But the pilot wants that option and it can save him.

If missiles were as awesome and infallible as the designers wished they were, we'd call them HITtiles.

Of course, the F-35 carries a gun that it can't even fire yet.    That software addition that enables the gun is still a ways down the road.

its not just lockheeds word for it for 1

The F-35 does far better than an F-16 with a combat load for a multitude of reasons, with one caveat. Since all the fuel and weapons on F-35 are internal there is no drag and with the weapons tucked in tight and nearer the centerline,  there is less strain on the aircraft in maneuver. external Targetting pods are also limited to something like 4G on an F-16. F-35 has them built in and are at the same limit as the airframe.

One thing the F-35 numbers have done is use an actual defined combat loadout as well. This has caused trouble in the public analysis a lot.

Here is the Caveat: its after the bombs are dropped the F-35 weighs less but is not any less clean. So for example an F-16 in combat can pitch tanks drop bombs, and be less fuel on the way home and can get out of dodge a little better than an F-35. The F-35 has the same drag throughout for better (going into combat) or worse (leaving)

Yep. Of all the places to be a luddite Aviation is probably the worst. Aviation thrives on cutting edge. I remember reading about that radar thing, on my cellular phone that fits in the small of my hand and weighs less than a pound.. Says it weighs the aircraft down with needless technology, amazing when you consider bro Boyd was all about situational awareness...

There are lots of good reasons to bitch about the F-35 its got 99 problems but  Sprey's thesis ain't one.

I’ll throw this out there.....I know a lot of Hornet guys who now fly the F35 and not a single one has told me they wanted to go back to the Superhornet. Every single one would rather fly JSF.

Can confirm this as well

They've been firing the gun for years now.

Not sure where you're getting that.

The first complaint was, "It has no gun."

F-35A for USAF has internal 25mm gun.

Navy and USMC didn't feel a need to include it as a priority, but have gunpod option.

"It can't fire the gun because of software."

Years of live-fire gun testing commence as part of the scheduled testing.

"The gun isn't accurate enough."

I remember similar things with the A-10 and the F-16.

At least one A-10 crashed and the pilot died because of gun exhaust ingestion into the engines, causing engine failure.

The F-16 had buffeting problems with the gun, didn't have the best gun port cover, and went through a bunch of ODT&E changes that were finalized hundreds of production aircraft later, not even in the A or B models, but with the C model.

Pod limits are a lot more than 4. The pod isn’t the limit on any A/G config.

The F-16 isn't normally going to ditch pylons, and certainly isn't capable of ditching the Sniper pod, nor will it jettison an ALQ-184 or -131 ECM pod.

As configured after stores jettison in a worst case scenario, the F-16C Block 50 still has a larger drag profile than the F-35A, with way lest thrust, and lower weight of course.

The F-35A is able to accelerate faster, turn better, climb faster, and burn fuel more efficiently, kinda like what F-16 pilots and air planners have been wishing for ever since the F-16 was introduced and started operating.

F-16 aggressors (which don't carry all that weight) are getting beat by F-35As at Nellis regularly, even at ACM.  They never expected that.  Former F-16C pilots are saying they have acceleration, turning, speed, and climb advantages over the F-16C, with nose pointing authority reminiscent of the Super Hornet.

It's like having the best of both worlds between the F-16C large inlet Block 30 (which weighed less than Block 40 and higher), as well as a slick Super Hornet with better Thrust/Weight, on top of all the other improvements across the board.

All these things are the least impressive about the plane.  They don't talk about what the most impressive aspects are.

There are things I recently learned about the engine that are pretty game changing.  Look how reliable it has been, for starters.  F-16s were falling out of the sky left and right, and still crash regularly.  We've had 2 total losses with 1 fatality just this month in the US alone with F-16s.

Mirrors my experiences with bros coming from all of the AF legacy fighters.

Several of my Strike Eagle bros couch it with stuff like, "yeah, we can carry a lot more bombs in the dark gray..." or "we have more loiter time for CAS in the mighty mighty.." but the statements always end with a "but...." and their eyes glaze over praising F-35 stuff.

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms about the Lightning's capabilities, but there are legit criticisms of absolutely every combat aircraft ever produced.

He bashed the F-20 at the time as well.  Said they ruined it by giving it BVR capability.

And I would disagree about Sprey. I don't think he was ever a good analyst The Navy gave it to him with both barrels after he talked out of church and used bad numbers in an attempt to harpoon the F-14. HE was basically persona non grata there after that. Which is why he joined other malcontents and appealed to the media and civilians with such "common sense" military control with such hits as "if its complicated it breaks!" Muh Enbloc never jammed!

The "fighter mafia" is the fucking not another new town people in military form with about as much experience.

@LRRPF52

If you haven't read revolt of the majors by Michel you need to. Lays out exactly how full of it he was and how the US Military got itself into trouble in Vietnam, and got itself out in the 70s and 80s. ITS FREE ONLINE. And its amazing. DID I MENTION IT IS A FREE DOWNLOADABLE PDF?

Not to toot my own horn, but I personally think that fighter jets manned by pilots in the aircraft are a dying breed. IF the solution to the problem of "pilots are squishy, expensive, get tired, and tend to be prima donas" happens to be "make an AI drone" .  Why use missiles, and the accompanying weight,  Say a quality missile cost 3 million bucks, drone costs 6, to take out a 40 million dollar enemy aircraft(and pilot and missiles/bombs), seems to be a win once the AI is developed, you can have said AI be set to only turn on if ground control is lost/delayed. Then you  have IFF capability built into said AI. you lost a 6 million dollar drone(which BTW can corner at 15-20 G's, humans tap out at 8 IIRC). Gold star families become a thing of the past, so politicians love it(really hard to argue "we want to put Americans in harms way, and some of them will die.." VS. "we safely bombed the hell out of XYZ, it was rough we lost some drones, but yeah we are safe"); heck CNN can put some grieving factory worker on talking about how great their AI drone was??.

My mistake

We are not there yet.

Someday yes. Not yet now. The plan now is keep pumping out Manned fighter and AUGMENT in the meantime. So maybe an F-35 will have 2 automated wingmen until it can be 3 automated.

John Boyd isn't out there doing any such thing, nor was he doing that before he was dead.

I think "farce" is a bit over-doing it, as E-M theory remains a cornerstone of design and maneuvering thought, and the OODA loop and center of gravity theories remain valid warfare philosophies.

There are certainly a lot of people who have picked up Boyd's torches, though, and blindly think quite highly of them because SOS and ACSC told them to.

I'm not disagreeing with you, We are on the same team. That is the ONE thing I could think of where the F-35 might be at a disadavantage, and I was wrong on the targeting pod. Everything else gives F-35 comprable to F-16 or F-18 capability which is what everyone has been saying for a long while now, and what the original requirements called for. Even if it "falls short" of the F-16 slightly, thats a burtal bird. Since Vipers are scary agile

I'm surprised we haven't had an insightful Tyler Rogoway-penned "article" linked in here, invariably advocating bringing back OV-10s, or F-14s, or making super-A-10s instead.

How so exactly?

That guy is such an alarmist tool. We have thousands of unemployed veterans with real world experience and he has a job wirting about the details of the military.

Virgins giving sex advice

There are F-35 squadrons beating F-16 aggressors at Nellis regularly.  The eye-opening moments are when the F-35 flights show up "late" for de-briefing the sorties.

F-16 guys:  "Where were you?  We've been here waiting for a long time now."

F-35 guys:  "Oh, after the ACM we did together, we had to go drop some JDAMs on the instrumented test range...got 100% hits too, which isn't hard.  Yeah, we had them in the bays the whole time we were doing ACM with you.  You didn't know?"

F-16 guys:  

We haven't seen anything like this before in aviation history.

It is the Aggressors' job to get beat, just like all red air.

This isn't a metric that you can use to prove any point, unfortunately.

Shack.

I understand that, but after kill ratios in the 127:7 realm, there was an internal discussion about people not believing these stats, so they started handicapping F-35s and adding more assets to Red Air, including other F-35s and F-22s, while handing over F-35 blue air IFF squawking just to try to even things up.

Still beat.

For the worst case ACM, my understanding is that the exchange ratios are unusually high for F-35.

Guys coming from F-15 and F-16 into the F-35 are giving the Aggressors a hard time in that realm, especially FWS grads.

LTC Berke said when he started flying F-22 (he was a Navy FWS instructor with a lot of F-16 stick time), he said the first 6 months of flying the F-22 was the worst time in his career, other than having to bury one of his ANGLICO Marines when he was FAC in Ramadi.

He said new F-22 pilots were slaying him every sortie, and most of them were about as old as his time in fighters.

Sprey can eat shit and suck his own dick, how many hours has he flown of the F-35 or F-16 or F-15 or A-10? Not one fucking hour or one fucking second. He is French so he does not like any thing made in the USA. Fuck him big, with the biggest dick ever.

Red air's job is to be a training aid.  That is it.

They do not provide validation of capabilities or tactics, only a means to assess the performance of those tactics or uses of those capabilities.  They are there to fly the dance card and exploit execution mistakes on the part of blue air.

"We really wiped the floor with the bandits" isn't a useful boast, even if your bandits were unrestricted and very capable with no handcuffs.

Ahhhh SOS and ACSC...AF Madrasas.

I use the term farce specifically WRT the OODA loop because of its misuse.  When you have OODA taught as mandatory religious teachings and its applied to every problem (or given lip service) its not useful.  I've sat in several meetings where I've heard "leaders" tell people that we need to OODA the s%$t out of things to fix them...inspiring.

Centers of Gravity is more of a Warden thing with his similarly repackaged 5 rings concept.  The 5 rings concept is just a rehashing of basic Airpower 101 for the powerpoint uber alles generation.  And it is not at all surprising that Warden's BS is still a cornerstone of things since he's pretty much responsible for the design of the current ACSC construct.  People who went thru his ACSC have Stars on their shoulder.  Hes a Maxwell Swamp Monster who's got his dirty fingers in all sorts of stuff down there, probably so his name and "legacy" continues.

Or someone referencing AUairpower or whatever that Auzzie POS website is...

Boyd is deader than disco... but yeah, agreed.

Yes he is, but there are legions of people who bleat out his ideas like gospel.  He's the AF Karl Marx and his acolytes/disciples who continue to follow his teachings are still around being muckrakers.

I know this in partial jest, but his temperament along with those of the reformers really killed their credibility with the military who were not happy with civilian good idea fairies telling them how to operate after Vietnam.

Even Boyd embarrassed himself when he went to Naval Fighter weapons and told people there an F-4 couldn't beat a Mig-17 which was news to some of the people there who had done exactly that in Vietnam.

I know a long retired USMC Col. Who told me about going through the high level colleges (I think Boyd was the man he mentioned at his) acting like they had "invented jerking off"

They were a bunch of ivory tower professor types. telling a bunch of Field grades with Vietnam and other real world experience how much smarter than them they were.

I feel like I need to buy you a dozen beers for these two posts alone

Doesn't a missile have to see something to track it?

Pssst.
The F-35 outter wing has been fixed.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/02/f-35c-getting-redesigned-wing-tips-that.html

"The U.S. Navy variant experienced an undisclosed amount of oscillation or turbulence during flight trials with the AIM-9X in December 2015"

That's why they do flight testing.

Yet another Balista post.

Computers do what they're programmed to do.

Have you ever tried to program values?  Or even simple cost driven decisions?

Old guy logic is old.  Theres something to this newfangled technology stuff...

Sprey's ideas of fighters are laughably out of date, if they were ever accurate at all.

Well I will soon be exiled to NM via PCS soon!

Would it be a logical apology ad the F-35 is a 2018 Ferrari, A-10 is an used Camry.

Although the state of the art Ferrari can get a bachelor more asses than a toilet seat, the slow and low Camry can better take care of the family for a married man.

It's amusing how things change.  In '04-'05, GD hated the Super Hornet like they hate F-35 today...

Do you even GTC4Lusso T, bro? Take care of the family AND get ass on the side.

Just let me know, Srs.

If you spend the rent money on the car.

I remember that. THE MIGHTY TOMCAT REITREMENT TEARS WERE THE STUFF OF LEGEND IN EVERY FORUM. The way people talked NAVAIR was on the verge of open mutiny. Then 10 years later I was hearing the same crap with the new kid on the block and the Super Hornet was the trustworthy warhorse...

Can't wait to see the hand wringing in the future when F-35 is replaced, and it will be something without a pilot which will really chap the ass

Sooo just thinking here.

Lets take a version of the F35B, ditch the fan and use that space and weight for the GAU-8??????

Hmmm?

Not really no. When Fighters show up A-10s are helpless. In contested environments A-10s are in deep trouble.

A-10s basically need a lot of help in big threat environments. a good friend of mind graduated JTAC school and they had to emphasize to them that the A-10 is not invincible. its superb in some environments and vastly in need of lots of help in others.

Basically every assertion from that Aussie Air Power website has been thoroughly debunked.

They have some really ridiculous diagrams showing how the Russian Su-35 and Su-30 have better radar than the F-35's APG-81 AESA with GaAs TRMs, showing Su-35 detecting F-35 before F-35 detects Su-35, completely false TRM counts for the APG-81 antennae, false kinematics and assumptions that the F-35 is a dog, cult-level hopes for Russian BVR missile pk that they've never been able to demonstrate even remotely in the real world, and all kinds of garbage like that.

It's a well-polished, nicely done site in terms of graphics, but the graphics are all wrong.  Some examples:

supposedly the 35 can lose a shit load of speed and not give a fuck with the amount of thrust it has.

LOL oh thats only the tip of the iceberg. They endorsed the Super Hornet, said it could easily handle Flankers. Then Australia bought them (and not their jerk off fantasy F-22) and then they said it was no longer good because it couldn't beat flankers. They even outted themsleves:

APA Notice

This  article  predates the  mid December, 2006,  announcement by Defence that Super Hornets may be sought as gap fillers for the RAAF, and subsequent decision to acquire these aircraft. The article does not constitute  an  endorsement  of  that  proposal in any fashion and should not be  interpreted to be such  by any parties. It concentrates primarily on the history and flying qualities of the aircraft. Any attempt to present this article as an endorsement of the Super Hornet decision   will  be considered  to  be  intentional and mischievous misrepresentation.

"Hornet with four engines" was one I heard making the internet rounds

I've never met an F-14 maintainer that misses the turkey.  If F-14 sim gamers and fans could be taken back in time and enlisted as maintainers, the Tomcat hype online would die a very quick death.  They would be the first ones to crush anyone who touted F-14 capabilities with little regard for forum etiquette.

Aussie Air Power said the only thing that would work for Australia would be the Super Hornet, which would do well against the Flanker.

As soon as Australia said they're getting Super Hornets, the SH became a dog and easily defeated by the Flanker.  APA: SH vs Flanker

Russian Air Force doesn't even have more than a few dozen of the Su-35S at that.  Foreign operators other than India and China have precious few Su-30MK, ill-supported by Russia with contract changes, cheating, and blatant scams with replacements for major systems like radars, engines, missiles, critical avionics, etc.