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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the cool-new-toys dept.

Aviation Week reports:

As senior Pentagon editor, there are perks to being a scribe. May 26, I had the opportunity to witness aviation history with a small group of reporters invited to the USS Wasp amphibious ship to witness a few hours of the first-ever F-35B Operational Test (OT-1) trials off the coast of North Carolina. I'm posting some of the many videos I collected to give our readers a sense of what we saw on the boat.

During OT-1, actual Marines -- not test overseers -- are operating the six F-35Bs that embarked May 18 for the tests; this includes pilots and maintainers. During DT (developmental testing), we got to see firsthand the first vertical landing and short takeoff at sea, but in OT-1, the Marines are demonstrating a cadence to operations to gain confidence the single-engine, stealthy fighters can assimilate into an air wing onboard the amphibious ship, which will include other platforms: the MV-22, CH-53E/K, AH-W/Z and unmanned air systems among them. This is all leading up to the operational debut of the F-35B, slated in July.

The article contains an 8 minute video of the F-35B with an accompanying written overview of what is occurring at various points during the video.


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  • (Score: 1) by TWX on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:58PM

    by TWX (5124) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:58PM (#191771)

    I was under the impression that the fire-control system wasn't even close to done yet. I think the worst they could do at the moment would be to manually jettison dumb bombs or extra fuel tanks hanging from the hard-points under the wings...

    --
    IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
    and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.