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  #111  
Old 11-07-2020, 04:14 AM
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Hey, bumping up an old thread! Way to go! Now what amazes me in the todays we are living in nowadays, is that the Pork Chop and its less successful brother with the bulging chin, the X-32, were starting their tests in 2000. Twenty years ago. And how many F-35 Pork Chops do the Dutchyland Air Force have now stationed in Dutchyland?

Four.

Four. ( Let me say that just once more to let it sink in: four.)*

I remember when I was a short-legged airplane-crazy seven year-old laddy in 1977, learning about the F-16, that first flew in 1974. The Dutchyland Air Force was going to buy the F-16 to replace the royal bribe-promote stovepipe-with-wings that so conveniently made nice holes in our meadows. The F-16 was a very advanced plane for its time. Like, in tech standards in its own era. In 1979 the first batch of 18 planes was delivered, just five years later. Next year, another 14 were bought and delivered. In the next four years, another 61 were delivered. So, ten years after its maiden flight we had about 100 F-16's up and running. Now we're 20 years from the Pork Chop's maiden fight. And we just have four of them buggers up and flying.
That is a way to artificially brag about its loooong operational life.


*apparently we actually do have a whopping twelve (!!!!) Pork Chops but the eight other ones are stationed in the US. Of course, because why would we need them over here?
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Last edited by Paper Kosmonaut; 11-07-2020 at 04:21 AM. Reason: I changed some letters into others - or discarded them completely.
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  #112  
Old 11-07-2020, 09:20 AM
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I might have seen a couple of your missing F-35s. The Air Force base near me is a major training base for F-35s, and often trains pilots from other countries. I dunno if it's a rule from our side, or their side, but the "foreign" pilots are usually trained in planes owned by their country. DUring the last airshow there, they didn't have the F-35s on display, but they did have a line up of F-16s owned by the different countries that train there. The F-35s were lined up in the "out of bounds" area.
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  #113  
Old 11-07-2020, 09:59 AM
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RNAF does have a few planes in the States for training purposes like Murph said. They are a part of the international consortium on the Pork Chop. They have a couple of pilots that are instructors as well.
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  #114  
Old 11-07-2020, 11:45 AM
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I know, guys. And I think it is all right to use your own planes for training purposes. You wouldn't want to accidentally crash one of your friends' very expensive planes, now would you? But it also is better to crash in a largely unpopulated area - and that is something we don't have a lot of in Dutchyland.

But what I was trying to point out was that around 1980 we still had quite a well-equipped air force for such a little country.

About seven, eight dozens of new F-16's, just a little over hundred F-5's and a little less than a hundred F-104's, so enough to make some appropriate noise and pretend that with all those lawn darts we were a force to be reckoned with. Nowadays, we have just about 60 F-16s that are still more or less airworthy and just those four F-35s. We ordered about 80 of the chubby multitaskers but the delivery goes slow.

But maybe those four might be enough, though. (-; I don't know.

Now it might sound like I am very pro-army, but au contraire, mes amis, I am not. I even was a consciencious objector in my youth and did civil service instead. I just happen to love aircraft. Can't help it. It's the machine, the shape, the noise, the smell, the power...
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  #115  
Old 11-07-2020, 06:19 PM
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I used to read "Aviation Week and Space Review" magazine. The only people who could subscriber were people in the military-industrial complex, so I would have never qualified. I got them from a friend when he was done reading them.
I used to shake my head at the stuff that the various militaries ordered. They would announce some huge project, and at the end it would say that they actually contracted for 2 prototypes, 1 stress-test unit, and one avionics test-bed. WTF?!?!? What are you going to do with TWO of something??? What will you do for spare parts when ONE of them breaks? Just give up and use the other one?
Very rarely would there be an article about an actual production order. There were HUNDREDS of projects that only built 1 or 2 examples of a radar unit, or a quick-firing auto-cannon, or some other bizarre and useless doo-dad that someone wanted. It was nuts! They waste HUGE amounts of money on this crap.
Unless the F-35 can fight 400 aircraft at once, it is worthless. What will they do when a squadron of F-35's goes up against 500 Chinese fighters. Are the Chinese going to line up, so they can be dealt with one at a time? Not likely.
Just like the B-2 bombers. We have enough of them to deal with a war with Costa Rica. That's it.
(And Costa Rica doesn't HAVE a military. They disbanded it completely) But at least we can fly them around and impress people.
The F-35 is like a 3-wheeled Corvette. Looks good, but what are you gonna do with it now that you got it?.
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  #116  
Old 11-07-2020, 06:26 PM
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It's projects and costs like this that give you the freedom to post this.
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  #117  
Old 11-08-2020, 12:11 PM
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It's also about what the aircraft do. The expensive flashy few B-2s and F-35's go in and take out the enemy's radar and flashy fighters, then the fleet of B-52s and F-16s go in and wipe out everything else.

WHen ordering prototypes, they'll usually order one for performance testing, and one for destructive testing. One to see what it can do, and one to find out what it can't do. Much better to do it that way than to order 500 and find out none of them work.
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  #118  
Old 11-08-2020, 12:17 PM
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@ Biker Willy: You seem to forget that large amounts of aircraft, ships and tanks etc. aren't what warfare is about nowadays. It has very quickly become much more efficient. IIRC, one single Korea-era Douglas A1 Skyraider already could carry more ordnance than the bomb load of a single WW2 Boeing B-17 bomber. Alongside that, weapons too have become much more precise and less 'wasteful'. One single cruise missile can very precisely take out a designated target, a laser-guided bomb can penetrate a concrete bunker and destroy it.
So, waves and waves of expensive hi-tech aircraft won't be needed. Firing at several enemy targets simultaneously can be done by one single press on a button in one single plane, of which all fired missiles can seek out their own target and destroy it. Not necessary to scramble dozens of aircraft. Also, less equipment means less maintenance.

Now for those one-off or just two prototypes, that too is nothing new. There were just two XB-70 bombers. There were just three F-107's. two YF-23's, two YF-16's two YF-17's and so on. Sometimes, prototypes even are built with company money, like the F-20 tigershark. Often it isn't even meant to go into mass production. Test beds, proof of concept, trial and error, all those things can eventually lead to a genuine produceable item. But they have to be built, have to be tested and often improved.
Aircraft production (and other equipment too) depends a lot on how prototypes behave. And development always costs way more money than producing the actual orders of the definitive product. And yes, one-off aircraft are really expensive. Everything is hand-made, as it were, there is no tooling available.

That is why engineers often use exisiting parts of other aircraft like in the Rockwell XFV-13 where they used an A4 Skyhawk nose section and F4 Phantom intakes. Or like with the two built X-29s, where the airframe of two F5's were heavily modified. Those things aren't a waste of money, they are used to get to a final design.
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  #119  
Old 11-08-2020, 12:20 PM
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And now: back to the jokes, please!

How many F-35s does it take to change a lightbulb?

Three: One to change the criteria of changing a lightbulb, the second to undergo maintenance, and the third to tell the press the lightbulb has been changed.
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  #120  
Old 11-08-2020, 12:27 PM
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