About That New Fighter Jet, the F-35

Canada is negotiating the purchase of 88 F-35 strike fighters.

The F-35 comes in three flavours - A, B, and C.  The B model is a vertical lift variant preferred by the US Marine Corps and Britain's Royal Navy and RAF.  The C model is supposed to meet the requirements of the US Navy - catapult launch and arrested landing.

Lockheed's bomb truck, depending on who is talking, is either the best thing ever or a colossal waste of money.  The Pentagon was all gung-ho on the aircraft but it's ardour has waned.  It seems the Americans want a stealth strike fighter but one that works as advertised. 

Canada is after the A-model, the "no frills" F-35.

The US war department has been handed more bad news about their underwhelming but costly fighter. The thing is supposed to be capable of supersonic speeds but that requires fuel-guzzling afterburner and, at least for the B and C variants, that's a non-starter.  These jets are restricted to just 50 seconds of afterburner per mission. Surely they'll fix that flaw. Nope. Too expensive.

An issue that risks damage to the F-35’s tail section if the aircraft needs to maintain supersonic speeds is not worth fixing and will instead be addressed by changing the operating parameters, the F-35 Joint Program Office told Defense News.

...at extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability.

“In this case, the solution would require a lengthy development and flight testing of a material coating that can tolerate the flight environment for unlimited time while satisfying the weight and other requirements of a control surface. Instead, the issue is being addressed procedurally by imposing a time limit on high-speed flight.”

For the F-35, as opposed to the F-22 where supersonic flight is baked into its tactics, the ability to fly supersonic is more of a “break glass in case of emergency” feature, said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Hudson Institute and a retired naval officer.

“Supersonic flight is not a big feature of the F-35,” Clark said. “It’s capable of it, but when you talk to F-35 pilots, they’ll say they’d fly supersonic in such limited times and cases that — while having the ability is nice because you never know when you are going to need to run away from something very fast — it’s just not a main feature for their tactics.”

In fact, going supersonic obviates the main advantages of the F-35, Clark said. “It sort of defeats all the main advantages of the F-35,” he explained. “It takes you out of stealthiness, it burns gas like crazy so you lose the range benefits of a single engine and larger fuel tank. When you go into afterburner, you are heating up the outside of your aircraft.”

That creates all kinds of signatures that can be detected by an adversary, Clark said.

50 seconds, cumulative, per sortie. When you're on your way home with a posse of long range, Mach 2 Sukhois in hot pursuit that leaves you short one Mach.

Now if the Americans were serious about keeping the F-35 in service for 50-years they would be working on a fix for this fatal flaw. They're not. No one else is either.