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Poduzi clanak o F-35 na Aljasci
Citat:The Intricacies Of F-35 Operations Over The Frigid Alaskan Frontier
Now with 54 F-35s on hand, Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska is fine-tuning how it operates its fleet and how it projects power abroad.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-intricac.....n-frontier
Citat:F-16 Versus F-35
“The F-16 is still a great platform and a great asset that we get to use and need in the Air Force,” said Worrell. He used an automotive analogy to compare the two.
“So you could have an awesome ‘69 Mustang that is a blast to drive. It goes fast. Makes a lot of great noise. It still does the job extremely well. But then you can compare that to a Tesla, which is a newer, modernized, more computer-based system and some of the things you're doing are less about driving the car and more about managing the decisions that you're making.”
The F-35, he said, “brings a lot more sensor [situational awareness] and a lot more automation into how the sensors provide information to the pilot so that I'm no longer running the radar. I'm no longer trying to manage where my radar is looking to get the correct aspect on something. There's still some pieces to that, but it's much more about what decisions the pilot making in the cockpit now. That has changed how we started to train our four-ships and our wingmen.”
Another major difference between the F-16 and the fifth-generation F-22s and F-35s is the ability to work together while being much further apart.
Instead of having a wingman who is a mile away, “he's now five to 20 miles away,” said Worrell. "He needs to be in position, making the same decision for what the four-ship is intending to do. And the jet really enables that from a sensors perspective and the awareness that he has around the battlespace.”
Berkland said that when he came over to the F-35 program after flying F-16s out of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, he thought it would be an easy transition.
“Honestly, I kind of scoffed at it and I thought, ‘hey, this will be easy,’” he said. “It's a Lockheed jet. Single-engine. Side-stick. Got some buttons and switches on the throttle. And eventually, it'll be easy.“
But Berkland said that what he didn’t fully grasp, “was the fundamentals of what makes a fifth-gen airplane, a fifth generation. And those would be two things - stealth and the sensor fusion that VooDoo talked about.”
Though the F-16 “is the love of my life,” Berkland said that it “simply can't go places that the F-35 can go” because it does not have the same advanced sensor capabilities.
“So when you look at different AORs and the anti-access area denial capability that certain adversaries are fine-tuning, the F-16s can’t get into some of those places. The systems the F-35s are using …enables a degree of situational awareness that you just really, really struggled to get in a fourth gen platform.”
Dogfight Dilemma
While the F-35 was not renowned as a “dogfighter” it does have advantages in air-to-air combat, Berkland said.
“It comes down to the pilot and having the awareness of exploiting your advantages while taking advantage of what the bandit is doing, and may be doing,” he said. “It's a very capable platform from that perspective and very fun to fly.”
One advantage, he said, is the ability of the F-35 to have a high angle of attack - the angle at which the chord of an aircraft’s wing meets the relative wind.
“Coming from the F-16, just to talk strictly pilot terms, the angle of attack (AOA) capability of the F-35 is pretty cool. The ability to pull lots of AOA and put your nose on something, whereas in the F-16, you weren't necessarily able to do that because of the AOA limitations on it, so that's a cool capability.”
Another advantage is the engine.
“The engine is great,” said Berkland. “At least in terms of thrust, it's got a lot of thrust. You can go very quickly. Certainly to Mach [Mach 1] you'll get there probably faster than anybody. And then once you get the Mach, you know, the F-22 will probably pass you by and keep going. But it's a great airplane that works very well out here on the JPARC, I can tell you from flying at low levels, as well as doing a lot of high-altitude stuff. Across the board, it performs great.”
Interesantno sta su trenirali, odeljenje od 4 F-35, 4 F-22, 3 Growlera i Avaks.
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