Reader furor kek tonicus – he of the awesome and ever-changing handle – posted a video in the comments to yesterday’s article about the God-Emperor’s epic attack raccoons, about the Joint Strike Flying Piano. Apparently, one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children was flying that $130 MILLION shitheap and got into a spot of bother with a KC-130J refueling aircraft, and… well, they both crashed.
The flying piano had a rather more rough landing than the tanker, though:
First things first – and I am genuinely sorry that I was thoughtless enough not to include this when I first wrote the article, as this particular paragraph is a later edit – thank God no one died. I am very thankful and happy for the fact that this was one of those landings that everyone could walk away from (well, more or less). Apparently the pilot of the Joint Strike Flopter ejected safely, which means that one more of Uncle Sam’s Misguided (and beloved) Children is still here among us and with his family.
And the tanker crew is, as far as I am aware, completely unharmed – again, praise the Lord.
‘m quite shocked that none of the international news outlets have picked up on this one, as far as I can see. I couldn’t find anything about it on RT, Breitbart, The Daily Mail, or most other international outlets. If you do a search on DDG for it, though, you’ll find plenty of hits from sources in the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed mainstream (((media))).
And judging by the appearance of that KC-130J tanker, as you can see from the thumbnail picture in the video, the “prang” (as the good folks from PommieBastardLande would have said, back during the days of The War) was extremely serious. Three out of the four engines on that tanker bird were wiped out.
Whatever the pilot of the tanker is getting paid by the US government, it’s about 10x too little. That guy knows what he’s doing.
Unfortunately, that’s about the best that we can say about this matter. The cost of this little mid-air love-tap is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The unit cost of the F-35B is $115 million, for an aircraft that I have criticised repeatedly, extremely harshly, and in no uncertain terms as a completely useless waste of time and money. The Marines wanted a STOVL fighter that could replace the aging AV-8B Harrier jump jet and perform the same mission roles with a more advanced set of avionics and much better performance. They got such a thing, sort of, but in the process the compromises that had to be made to the design of the overall aircraft family were so severe that they destroyed any hope that this flying turducken plane ever had of success.
And that’s before we get to the fact that the KC-130J itself costs about $71 million, each. While the tanker in question wasn’t destroyed outright – thank God – it isn’t going to be cheap to replace those three engines and repair damage to the airframe.
It gets much worse than that. As the Investors article that I linked to points out:
The F-35 program has come under withering criticism for its ballooning cost and repeated setbacks, including too much weight on the F-35B; glitches in the Autonomic Logistics Information System, which helps manage diagnostics, maintenance and supply-chain issues; problems with the ejection seat and helmet; and delays in the Gatling gun, among other issues.
Its effectiveness in combat has also been in doubt. In 2015, an F-35 reportedly lost a training dogfight to an F-16. Pentagon officials downplayed dogfighting criticisms, saying that’s not the F-35’s main mission.
Then the F-35 faced off against the Cold War-era A-10 to see if it could fully replace the older plane in close air support roles. The Pentagon hasn’t disclosed results of that matchup.
Critics are also concerned about the range of the F-35, especially as new missiles from China and Russia would force U.S. aircraft carriers to operate farther offshore, as well as the smaller interior payload capacity than older planes.
Note the passage that I highlighted above. This aircraft is supposed to perform ALL of the following roles:
- Combat aerospace superiority:
- High-speed interdiction and interception
- Beyond Visual Range (BVR) interdiction
- Close-range dogfighting
- Close-range ground support:
- Low-altitude bombing
- Tank destroying
- Terrain-hugging flying
- Carrier-based operations:
- Carrier battle group protection
- Long-range carrier-based strikes
It doesn’t take an aerospace engineer to figure out that these are mutually exclusive and contradictory roles. An aircraft designed for close-range ground support is simply incapable of being a high-speed interceptor and interdictor, by definition. It’s simply not going to happen.
That is why no one in his right mind would send an A-10 Warthog up against an F-16 in a dogfighting engagement at high altitude – the ‘hog would get absolutely slaughtered because it isn’t designed for that kind of role.
Likewise, nobody with a shred of the sense that God gave a honey badger would send an F-16 to “loiter” around on a battlefield for 4 hours and blow apart enemy tanks like tin cans – the F-16 is designed as a sleek, hot, rapier-like fast dogfighter that, because of its superb design, is capable of performing a secondary ground-attack role if necessary – the “Viper” wouldn’t be able to do it because it simply cannot carry that kind of ordnance, fly as slowly as necessary, and take the level of punishment needed at the hands of enemy infantry and SAM operators.
Now imagine trying to cram the mission design requirements for both aircraft into a single airframe. You’ll get a plane that cannot perform either mission and is in fact so badly designed that it is an actual threat to the pilots that have to fly it.
Furthermore, why exactly would the Pentaloons put the F-35 into a ground-support mission test – and then fail to report the test results? The only explanation that makes any kind of sense is that the F-35 COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY COCKED UP THE TEST and embarrassed itself thoroughly in the process.
After all, if this whiz-bang platinum-plated Swiss Army Knife, which is in reality just a Platinum Sled which proves the age-old engineering principle that, given a big enough engine, even a brick will fly, was actually any good at its ground-support role, the Fruit Salad Brigade would be absolutely trumpeting the results, right?
But no. They’ve gone all sorts of ominously quiet about it. Which tells you everything you need to know, really.
Back to the main point – I fear that this F-35B incident is but one in a long line to come. The entire line of aircraft already has serious reliability and maintenance issues. Its software is known to be extremely buggy. The USAF’s version of this shitheap can’t even shoot straight.
The US military has gone all-in on this disaster because it is the mother of all gravy trains for all of the hogs in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel and the military contractors who have a very sick symbiotic relationship with them. By far the best course of action to take with this aircraft is to simply cancel the entire program outright.
It’s not going to happen, obviously. The F-35 program is probably the world’s biggest jobs bank – Lockheed was extremely clever in the way that they tailored the manufacturing process for this thing. Basically, the manufacturing process is distributed all over the USA and indeed the world – which makes any attempt to cancel the program so politically costly that no politician would ever want to contemplate the idea.
Even the God-Emperor of Mankind, who came into office back in 2017 threatening to cancel the F-35 program, has not touched the notion since then, because he knows that if he ever tried, his hopes of accomplishing anything of any note would be utterly destroyed. The F-35 program is that important as a sacred cow.
Of course, sacred cows have a nasty habit of getting turned into cheeseburgers eventually – almost always in very messy fashion. If the USA ever goes to war flying these pianos, you’re going to see them dropping out of the sky in a very big hurry.
8 Comments
This video almost immediately came to mind. (10 sec. Not sure how to embed it).
https://youtu.be/KuuJr6i9mcA
That one’s going straight into the Monday compilation with full credits.
Didact
Three out of the four engines on that tanker bird were wiped out.
while it’s not impossible for debris from the starboard impact to have ejected forward and then get eaten by the outboard port engine, my working assumption is that between the gear up landing and the port wing low landing position that the outboard prop was eating tillage.
that’s why the 4 remaining blades are all short. i don’t see how one piece of shrapnel could have destroyed all 6 blades, and a large quantity of shrapnel going right to left should have ripped a bunch of holes in the fusilage.
note also that Blancolirio is wrong in his assertion that 130J has 5 blade propellers. you can clearly observe all 6 blades on the inboard port engine right there in the youtube preview pic.
ps – i keep checking the box to save my name, it never does
Makes sense to me. If that’s the case, and the landing gear was affected by the collision, then I’m doubly impressed by the Herky Bird pilot. He did an amazing job under dreadful circumstances. Thank God no one died.
I’ll take a look at the settings for comments, there may be some setting or stupid widget causing the issue.
pps – i knew you had a warm place in the cockles of your heart for this story
Yep. Watching pianos falling out of the sky is always great comedy – or at least, it would be comedy if not for the fact that each crash is hugely expensive and potentially deadly.
Well, look at the bright side. When the economy flops and the government sells decommissioned military vehicles and private jets, you might be able to buy one at a bargain price 😛 In all seriousness, I’ve always wanted a passenger ride in a Blackbird.
Lockheed, in the small chance that you might be reading this, please stop the f35 and give us the Blackbird 2.0. Or just fire the 17 layers of management that every mega corporation has and let the engineers do their thing.
I know where you’re coming from, but in reality that would be extremely uncomfortable given the highly cramped secondary cockpit that was built into the Blackbird. It would be like sitting – not lying – in a coffin while wearing a spacesuit.
You know what’s REALLY sad?
The technology used to build the Blackbird is from the 1960s, and was absolutely incredible for the time. You would think that with the advances made in the last 55-60 years, we would be able to recreate – not replace, just RECREATE – the Blackbird easily.
We can’t. It’s too hard to do. The original tools and techniques used to create the greatest aircraft ever made have mostly been destroyed. We’d have to redo it all from scratch.
I’ll give you a really simple example from Ben Rich’s superb book, Skunk Works. An engineer was drawing on a piece of titanium with a cadmium-based fountain pen, only to discover that the cadmium reacted with the titanium and ate through the metal like an acid.
Unless they remember their chemistry really well, many aerospace engineers might not realise this problem very quickly. And that’s before we get to the huge thermodynamic problems involved in keeping a cockpit cooled and operable while dealing with thousand-degree temperatures on the outside skin of an aircraft flying at such high altitude and insane speed.
(If you’re a fan of the Blackbird and the old Lockheed designs, get that book. I’ve read it like 10 times in my life. It’s absolutely brilliant. You’ll learn a lot about the U-2, the Blackbird, the F-117, and a lot of other projects that the Lockheed Skunk Works teams worked on over something like 40 years.)
The Blackbird was an absolutely incredible aircraft, maybe the high point of human engineering. I don’t know if we’ll ever see anything similar ever again.