Variable-sweep wing

oh look another person that dosent understand the f-35 again

Pls stop shilling, lockmart guys

>Hurr durr ebbrybuddee whoo leik F-35 iz shill durr

The f-35 is a piece of shit that doesn't deserve (nor qualify) to replace the A-10 or even the f-16
Make the A-20 or something, ANYTHING but the 100million dollar flying brick (f-35)

>da A-10 iz da besht plane evar and noting can replace it hurrr
fuck off pierr sprey

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Swing wings are cool, but not efficient anymore.

F35 should be replacing the hornet, harrier, and falcon. It's an improvement on all of them.

It should not be replacing the warthog for danger close CAS. It should be protecting the warthogs from enemy air threats while delivering precision ground attack munitions.

>It should not be replacing the warthog for danger close CAS. It should be protecting the warthogs from enemy air threats while delivering precision ground attack munitions.
It should be allowed to retire gracefully before it kills more pilots.

If only we'd have known we could have floated the Soviets some loans, kept them on their feet.

Here’s my insight on your fourth point. COming from someone who used to be a Naval aircraft maintainer. Navy squadrons receive more maintainer billlets (positions) if they document more work. Example: squadron has 8 aircraft, documented 500 man hours per A/C per month. This data gets sent to big navy, Who in turn look at it and say “why indeed, this squadron needs more/less people because of the amount of hours they have.” What that translates to is the right amount of maintainers for the right amount of work. That’s the theory at least.

The reality is, far different. People get sent to temporary duty, pregnant, or they just plain suck so they get sent to do shit work instead of working on aircraft. Unfortunately these people still hold an active billet in your squadron, so big navy won’t replace them or send you more people if this happens. Case in point: before deployment our detachment had 5 airframe mechanics of which 3 were fully qualified to sign off paperwork stating maintenance was performed correctly and the aircraft was legal to fly. Of those 3 one got pregnant, couldn’t make deployment. The one of the unqualified people was a piece of shit so we were down to 3 people for 2 aircraft. Way below minimum. You can’t say “hey big navy, one of my people Is preggo, one is a moron can I get replacements?” Because your squadron has the max amount of airframe mechanics already.

The Navy doesn’t care about man hours, it isn’t a civilian employer. We all get paid regardless of how many hours we work a day. So we became slaves for the first 3 months of that deployment until our command rotated the shit people out to a different detachment and we got replacements. What they DO care about is parts. If the aircraft has a high component failure rate then they actively work with the manufacturer to develop solutions. I’ve handled parts that were smaller than a baby that cost a million dollars a pop. This is the hill the Tomcat died on, which is

That it didn’t matter how many outstanding maintainers worked on it, it was just so ancient by the time it retired that it was failing in different ways. I’ve worked with a lot of maintainers who previously worked on Tomcst and they all said the same thing, it kept on finding new ways to break. I had heard that even on its last cruise the Grumman tech reps (civilian contractors on navy ships usually many years of working on whatever platform they were responsible for) were astounded at the new ways components were fucking up.

Tl;dr Navy doesn’t care about maintainers, most likely they had enough people to work on those complex aircraft. The real costs they factor in are structural and component replacement costs.

Well, Maintenance Hours per Flight Hour are a pretty easy way to compare how much breaks and how much effort it takes to fix it on average per flight.

Im the guy you responded to. USAF aircraft maintainer, well, retried now. Was Electro Environmental, got cut trained on a fuckton of other tasks because I wanted to plow through phases without waiting for people.

The navy doesnt care about money like it should, but the airforce model for ORM and Goldflag is based off the Navy. We do a lot of root cause analysis and it came to be that parts are expensive, but manhours dictate mission availability. Manhours turned out to be more expensive than parts over a length of time which was MTBF, mean time between failures. I was on the team that helped construct the HPO concept. "high preforming organization" TL/DR: I dug my own fucking grave by determining what the minimum VIABLE amount of man hours each task needs is. Not a theoretical pool of manhours, but functional "this person has no red X conditions for maintenance"

We ended up determining failure points within the team, and seeing what teams of maintainers had downtime. The shopchiefs were kindly grabbed by the balls and made to understand participation in "The big team" was mandatory, and there were no more "small kingdoms or mafias". Saw a few SNCOs get put on permanent closet guard detail. We took the people who had the most inclanation towards other fields and educated the the best.

The only shop that escaped the great cut train program of 2009 was Egress, because no one wanted to die in egress. Also AGE, but mostly because E&E handled GOX and LOX carts already, and the crewchiefs and hydro handled the Hydro carts, so they just saw a lot of their dudes vanish on deployments and then get orders to new bases and places without replacement. Fuck AGE. Also Airforce Ammo troops are probably illiterate.

The F35 has killed pilots already?!

Interesting. I bet you weren’t too popular after that. I’m not entirely sure how it works for the AF but in the navy cross training to perform maintenance other than what your rate (MOS) is allowed to do is very rare, and usually is done prior to making rank in order to look good on Evals and very rarely put into practice. Sure, if I as an airframer had downtime we’d help the avionics guys install boxes and vice versa, but I couldn’t sign off any documentation stating so because it would be illegal. To this end in the navy that culture of “my job is done, time to jump on my phone and fuck off until the other maintainers finish theirs” is still rampant, but occurs simply because no matter how many people you end up throwing at a job, there will ultimately only be the worker and inspector who can sign it off.

Have a nice deployment pic. Here’s from the night they uncovered an ISIS training camp And launched an alpha strike (all available aircraft on the carrier participating) on it. The entire hangar bay was packed with JDAM. I think I’m on a 2k pounder

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>Will they make a comeback?
No.
>What's stopping them?
Design's inefficiency.
>Any major cons?
Weight and mechanical complexity.
>I miss F-14 (and other variable geometry wings).
You have never had anything to do with F-14. Watch that Tom Cruise movie again, jerk off and calm down.

No, fuck off you disingenuous tool.

Stay mad.

Hey, the A-10's killed pilots for using the as-designed attack profile. The F-35's the first zero-crash fighter program ever. I think it's you who's mad here, Spreyfag.

Oh no, people died in war?!

Grow up.

Only thing that should replace the A-10 for CAS and COIN is the Bronco variant with the vulcan turret.

The difference is that the A-10 by design is hugely vulnerable when attacking any way but "exactly the same as any multi-role would."

Why does it sound so whiney, when you say that?