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US military grounds all F-35 jets
The US military has temporarily grounded its entire fleet of F-35 fighter jets in the wake of a crash in South Carolina last month.
Inspections are to be carried out on faulty fuel tubes.
An official report questioned earlier this year whether the F-35 was ready for combat after dozens of faults were found.
[...] In a statement, the F-35 Joint Program Office said the US and its international partners had suspended flight operations while a fleet-wide inspection of fuel tubes was conducted.
"If suspect fuel tubes are installed, the part will be removed and replaced. If known good fuel tubes are already installed, then those aircraft will be returned to flight status.
"Inspections are expected to be completed within the next 24 to 48 hours."
The aircraft, which uses stealth technology to reduce its visibility to radar, comes in three variants.
The crash in South Carolina involved an F-35B, which is able to land vertically and costs around $100m (£75m).
The pilot in that incident ejected safely but the aircraft was destroyed.
The plane, manufactured by Lockheed Martin but including parts made in several other countries, has been sold to a number of nations, including the UK, Japan, Italy, Turkey and South Korea.
[...] The Ministry of Defence in London said the UK had decided to "pause some F-35 flying as a precautionary measure while we consider the findings of an ongoing enquiry".
But the MOD said F-35 flight trials from the aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, were continuing and the programme remained on schedule to provide UK armed forces with "a game-changing capability".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:48AM (1 child)
The quick answer, already proposed, is something that might be called the F-22B. We retrofit some of the non-disaster F-35 stuff onto the F-22 airframe. That gets us helmet-mounted cueing for sure. We might also get new-style air intakes (with fuselage lump instead of the gap and movable ramp), the cameras, and some parts in the newer materials. Being nuclear-capable is trivial and obvious, but we'd need to keep it secret due to annoying treaties.
One of the mistakes of the F-35 seems to be an assumption that vertical takeoff requires a horizontal hover mode. No, it does not. Consider the Falcon 9, which is incapable of throttling low enough to hover. It lands just fine. Consider the way Russia air drops tanks from cargo planes, with rockets to do the final bit. We could make a plane that used solid fuel rockets to do vertical take-off and landing. We could also make a plane that would hover while aiming vertically, along with some ground handling equipment to grab and release it in that orientation.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 12 2018, @11:27AM
Actually lack of thrust is the problem, as a 3G approach would be militarily helpful. Some jet aircraft exceed 1:1 thrust ratio and can theoretically hover under limited conditions for a short time but nothing out there can pull 3G.
Its very easy for a rocket thats burned 95% of its weight in fuel to burn its last drops of fuel at 20G acceleration if the vehicle can handle it...