USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Vivek Ramaswamy and others are right...
If USA wants defense, and doesn't want to go more bankrupt than
it already is, it will have to completely cancel all its current corrupt
engorged MIC arms companies for new startups that
would love to compete with China et al on tech and cost...


The F-35 Lightning's Vulnerability To Lightning Is Both Ironic And Unforgivable

Authored by Mike Fredenburg via The Epoch Times,

That the F-35 Lightning II has been prohibited from flying anywhere
near lightning is ironic. That the F-35 has been under development
since 1994 and that the Pentagon “doesn’t have a path forward” to fix
the F-35 is unforgivable.

That a plane that’s supposed to be the foundation of American air
supremacy has an Achilles heel so easily exploitable is a glaring
example of how our military procurement system wastes taxpayer dollars
while failing to provide the weapon systems needed to meet our
national security needs.

Yes, the F-35, the aging “wunder plane” that the U.S. Air Force and
Lockheed Martin have been assuring us for decades is just that one fix
away from being ready for full-rate production, isn’t allowed to fly
within 25 miles of a thunderstorm.

So far, the indefinite restriction has been publicly announced as
applying “only” to the Air Force’s F-35A. But given the F-35 Joint
Program Office’s history of hiding and “managing” bad news, it would
not be at all surprising to find out that the same restrictions are in
place for the Marines’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C, but have not yet
been made public. That having this unpublicized policy in place could
make sense was demonstrated in July 2021 when two F-35Bs flying out of
their airbase in Japan were forced to execute emergency landings after
they both suffered millions of dollars worth of lightning damage in
the same storm.

This restriction is even more crippling than the F35’s restrictions on
supersonic flight, as not being able to fly within 25 miles of
potential lightning activity will allow an enemy to use lightning
proximity as cover for air, ground, and sea operations knowing that
the F-35s will not be flying overwatch or be able to be scrambled to
areas where lightning threatens them. That this is the plane that’s
slated to be the replacement for F-16s, A-10s, AV-8B Harriers, F/A-18E
Hornets, and F/A-18F Super Hornets is a decision that needs to be
re-evaluated.

On the face of it, it seems as if it shouldn’t be that hard to design
a plane to do what planes have been doing for many decades. Each year
commercial aircraft worldwide are struck tens of thousands of times by
lightning. And every commercial plane is struck about once or twice a
year on average. As is the case with commercial aircraft, military
aircraft, while instructed to avoid thunderstorms if possible, are
expected to be able to fly through them as necessary. And they’re
expected to be able to take lightning strikes and complete their
missions with no problem. For example, a single 1950s-era jet fighter,
an F-106B Delta Dart, was struck over 700 times by lightning while
flying test flights for NASA and maintained flight worthiness. Of
course, that’s an extreme example, but it does demonstrate that
lightning strikes need not cripple or destroy a fighter.

So, why was the most expensive airplane/weapons system development
program in the history of the world unable to come up with a plane
able to do what pretty much any other plane can do? We don’t really
know, because the F-35 Joint Program Office won’t reveal the problem
specifics due to “operational security reasons.” But by looking at the
F-35’s design history and the basics of lightning protection for
aircraft, we can come up with a couple of possibilities.

Possibility one comes out of the fact that planes with composite
skins, such as that of the F-35, rely much more heavily on their
on-board inert gas generating system (OBIGGS) to keep their fuel tanks
from blowing up than do planes with metal skins.

The OBIGGS pumps nitrogen into a plane’s fuel tanks as they empty to
ensure that the oxygen content in the tanks never reaches a level that
will support combustion (about 9 percent). That way, even if lightning
does arc through the fuel tanks, the fuel vapor will not have enough
oxygen to combust, and the plane doesn’t blow up.

So, if the F-35 OBIGGS can’t generate enough nitrogen and or evenly
distribute that nitrogen through all the F-35 tanks, the F-35 would be
vulnerable to a lightning strike. Still, one would think that properly
sizing an OBIGGS unit would be a no-brainer for F-35 designers.
However, the F-35 isn’t your typical airplane, and since the beginning
of its development, it has been dealing with severe weight problems,
and in 2004 it went through what many would describe as a draconic
weight-cutting exercise.

Did the F-35 design team, in their eagerness to drop weight, perhaps
cut it too close in estimating just how much oxygen the OBIGGS system
would have to deal with for a plane with truly massive fuel tanks and
a super big fuel fraction? And did they take into account just how
much dissolved oxygen would be forced out of the fuel when it heated
up as it provided cooling for electronics, avionics, and radar
equipment—far more cooling than for which it was initially
specificationed? This could be the case, but the other possibility
that has yet to be mentioned publicly is even more insidious.

The other possibility is that the F-35 is so stuffed full of sensitive
electronics gear that the foil/mesh embedded in its composite skin
isn’t thick enough to effectively conduct lightning strikes around the
exterior of the plane. Hence a lightning strike could damage the
sensitive electronics housed in the interior.

This vulnerability may also have stemmed from a design process in
which every ounce mattered, and that the weight of metal embedded in
the F-35 skin necessary to conduct the lightning ended up being
inadequate for the task of protecting more electronics than was ever
before crammed into a single-engine fighter, or any fighter for that
matter.

That this could be the issue jibes with the previously cited incident
in which F-35Bs damaged by lightning didn’t blow up but did suffer
severe enough damage to require landing immediately. Of course, the
exact nature of the damage was never revealed, but if it was the
electronics that were damaged, that would be very bad news as a fix
would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive.

Either both, or one of the above, or maybe even none of the above,
could be why the F-35 has to avoid lightning. As the Pentagon is
keeping the specifics secret, we don’t know for sure. Regardless,
having our main source of future airpower unable to fly in rough
weather is flat-out unacceptable, and unless this critical problem can
be remedied, continuing to move forward with the F-35 is actually
damaging, not enhancing our national security.