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Ultimate Fighter: Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
Ultimate Fighter tells how a series of little-known technology programs coalesced into a 3,000-airplane plan-the F-35 joint strike fighter (JSF). As one of the first major aircraft programs to start from scratch in the era of information technology, the JSF virtually flies itself, while the pilot manages the mission with the help of very acute high-resolution sensors and displays. The F-35 is one of the biggest single military projects in history-but it was born as a compromise between the needs of three U.S. services in the budget-strapped post-Cold War era. Author Bill Sweetman chronicles the high stakes competition between two aviation giants, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to build the Joint Strike Fighter-the next generation fighter jet.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published November 20, 2004
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March 8, 2014
As good an overview as you'll find of the JSF competition and the early stages of F-35 development; you can see some of where the major program issues stemmed from (especially the Marine Corps insistence on getting the STOVL B version first, which delayed the other two variants and exacerbated the weight issues on the A CTOL model), but just as importantly, Sweetman captures the original vision for the program correctly, in a way critics now do not.
The JSF was designed as a bomber - around an F-117-like internal payload of 2 2,000 LB bombs, with the additional bays for AMRAAMs for self-defense. It's not an air-superiority fighter, was not meant to be a fighter, and in that respect a performance envelope not dissimilar from F/A-18 shouldn't be considered surprising. The criticisms about its weight, maneuverabilty, transonic performance and the rest - comparing it against F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s in that flight realm and mission set - would have been dismissed in 1998 by any program official with the comment that "air superiority, interception, and dogfighting are not the aircraft's job." But the curtailment of the F-22 and atrophying of the Navy's fighter/fleet-air-defense capability, and the enormous cost of the program led to F-35 being viewed by its critics as a tubby, overweight, failed fighter that it was never actually intended to be.
The JSF was designed as a bomber - around an F-117-like internal payload of 2 2,000 LB bombs, with the additional bays for AMRAAMs for self-defense. It's not an air-superiority fighter, was not meant to be a fighter, and in that respect a performance envelope not dissimilar from F/A-18 shouldn't be considered surprising. The criticisms about its weight, maneuverabilty, transonic performance and the rest - comparing it against F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s in that flight realm and mission set - would have been dismissed in 1998 by any program official with the comment that "air superiority, interception, and dogfighting are not the aircraft's job." But the curtailment of the F-22 and atrophying of the Navy's fighter/fleet-air-defense capability, and the enormous cost of the program led to F-35 being viewed by its critics as a tubby, overweight, failed fighter that it was never actually intended to be.
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