"Will The F-35 Be The Last Manned Fighter Jet?" Topic
5 Posts
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Tango01 | 01 May 2015 11:05 p.m. PST |
"Earlier this month Navy Secretary Ray Mabus remarked that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter "should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly." This sparked a lot of discussion both inside and outside the military about the advantages, vulnerabilities, and ethical concerns of armed remotely piloted aircraft. I think Secretary Mabus is likely to be proven correct in his prediction because physics, physiology, and fiscal facts are on his side. First, the way air-to-air combat is conducted has changed. As my CSBA colleague, Dr. John Stillion, notes in a recently released report, Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority, "over the past few decades, advances in electronic sensors, communications technology, and guided weapons may have fundamentally transformed the nature of air combat." He goes on to write that for about the first fifty years of aviation, "pilots relied on the human eye as the primary air-to-air sensor and machine guns and automatic canon as their primary weapons." But the human eye can only spot an aircraft-sized target up to about 2 nautical miles in range, and aircraft cannon are only effective to less a nautical mile…" Full article here link But seems the U.S. Air force has a different point of view from the Navy Secretary… link Amicalement Armand |
John Treadaway | 02 May 2015 2:38 a.m. PST |
They'll be lucky if the FA18 isn't the last manned fighter the USN will fly. For Royal Navy substitute the word "Harrier" for FA18…. Sure, all fighters take a long while in development nowadays but the F15 took – basically – 3 years and its taken decades for the wings to start to fall off. The F35 is a pork-barreled disgrace of a project. John T |
Mitochondria | 02 May 2015 7:17 a.m. PST |
I hope so because we cannot afford another one of these bloated defense industry unicorn s to happen. |
Lion in the Stars | 02 May 2015 12:32 p.m. PST |
Will the F35 be the last manned strike aircraft? Possibly. Will the F35 be the last manned fighter? No way in hell. dogfighting requires far greater situational awareness and absolutely ZERO time between recognizing a threat and responding to it. The X47B cannot dogfight. |
wminsing | 02 May 2015 7:41 p.m. PST |
I suspect that post F-35 there be a generation of combat aircraft that will be 'pilot optional' (ie, has both manned and fly by remote options) followed by a 'control optional' generation (ie, has both fly by remote and autonomous combat options), then finally some sort of mostly autonomous system. So I'd anticipate the F-35 is at 'best' second to last in the manned combat aircraft category, and it might be longer. And given how long development times have grown (and how long aircraft are in service) I suspect that 'unmanned only' won't arrive until the 22nd century. -Will |
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