Fórum Defesa Brasil

AlbertoRJ escreveu:De 3 a 6 por cento dá uma boa margem de diferença, fora que é um dado histórico, sujeito a ser revisado.

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DATE:09/05/11
SOURCE:Flight International
Lockheed delivers 1st production F-35 to US Air Force
By Stephen Trimble

Lockheed Martin has delivered the first production F-35 Lightning II to the US military to reach a long-delayed milestone, but there remains no firm timetable for inducting the new aircraft into operational service.

US Air Force officials formally accepted series-production model AF-7 at Lockheed's final assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas, on 5 May. The aircraft was then flown to Edwards AFB, California, to complete an airframe-specific flight test programme.

The hand-over marks the delivery of the first production jet nearly 10 years after Lockheed won the contract to deliver 1,763 F-35As to the US Air Force, plus a total of 640 F-35Bs and F-35Cs for the navy and Marine Corps, respectively.

"Today we begin to fulfil the vision of our government and international customers," said Larry Lawson, Lockheed's F-35 programme manager.

The milestone has been delayed several years from the original timetable set after contract award in 2001, with a costly redesign adopted in 2004 and two major schedule delays announced since last February.

Until earlier this year, the air force had planned to stand-up the first operational F-35 squadron by 2016. The latest schedule, however, delays the end of developmental testing to the end of 2016, forcing the in-service date for the F-35A into at least 2017 or 2018. But the precise date has not yet been determined by the air force as of late April.

Despite the programme's cost and schedule setbacks, the F-35's leadership team points to a new wave of progress in manufacturing and testing.

Although last of 13 flight test aircraft remains in final assembly, eight production model jets from the first two lots of low-rate initial production (LRIP) have rolled out of the assembly line.

But the earliest production jets proved more costly than the government estimated, with Lockheed's bills running as high as 15% over budget for the first three lots of LRIP.

Ares
A Defense Technology Blog

First F-35A formally delivered
Posted by Guy Norris at 5/9/2011 5:59 PM CDT

The U.S. Air Force officially accepted the first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from Lockheed Martin at its Fort Worth, Texas facility on May 5. The milestone, which occurred with the formal acceptance of F-35A AF-7, comes just under 10 years since the F-35 System Development and Demonstration contract was awarded to Lockheed, and around 14.5 years since the signing of the original JSF development contract.


AF-7, officially on the USAF books, arrives over Edwards AFB (Lockheed Martin)

Following its handover AF-7 was flown on May 6 to Edwards AFB, Calif, to join the flight test program. Lockheed Martin says overall the F-35s have completed more than 865 flights since flight-testing began in late 2006. In addition to AF-7, eight more production-model F-35s have rolled out and are being prepared for delivery. Under current planning, the Air Force is expected to acquire 1,763 F-35As.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/de ... d=blogDest

soultrain escreveu:Operational pilots should be thrilled with the F-35’s performance, Kelly said. The F-35 Energy-Management diagrams, which display an aircraft’s energy and maneuvering performance within its airspeed range and for different load factors, are similar to the F/A-18 but the F-35 offers better acceleration at certain points of the flight envelope.

“The E-M diagrams are very similar between the F-35B, F-35C and the F/A-18. There are some subtle differences in maximum turn rates and some slight differences in where corner airspeeds are exactly,” Kelly said.


Ahahaha, o F-35 é muito similar ao F/A-18 em performance...A boa noticia é que é bem melhor que o SH.

F-35 fighter faces range shortfall -pentagon report
Fri May 13, 2011 5:27pm EDT

* Pentagon report says F-35 modifications being considered
* Lockheed Martin, Pentagon withhold comment
* US developing aircraft with eight other countries

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON, May 13 (Reuters) - U.S. Air Force's F-35 fighter, due to form the bulk of future U.S. tactical air power and to be bought by allies, may be able to fly only 85 percent as far as originally projected, a Pentagon document shows.

The radar-evading aircraft's "A" model is currently estimated to have a combat mission radius of 584 nautical miles, just short of the required 590 nautical miles, a Dec. 31-dated report to Congress said.

Program officials originally estimated that the F-35A would be able to hit targets 690 nautical miles away, unrefueled, or 15 percent more than now, the Department of Defense's "Selected Acquisition Report" showed.

The current combat radius prediction is based on estimates of the amount of compressed air diverted from the engine to run onboard systems as well on aircraft performance and fuel capacity that are not yet fully known, the report said.

"Current estimates have built-in margin that may not be realized," it said, adding that aircraft modifications were possible to add fuel capacity that would boost the range.

The F-35 family of fighters is the Pentagon's costliest arms purchase, projected to total some $382 billion over the coming two decades for 2,443 aircraft. Three models are being built for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and allied countries by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N).

The Pentagon report appeared first on the Dew Line, an aerospace blog.

Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the military's F-35 joint program office.

The Air Force is scheduled to buy 1,763 of the conventional takeoff and landing "A" models to replace F-16s and A-10s and to complement the F-22, the premier U.S. dogfighter.

F-35 early-production models are powered by the F135 engine built by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp (UTX.N).

As a "stealth" aircraft meant to appear as small as a bird on enemy radar, the F-35 carries no external fuel tanks and all of its weapons are carried inside a bomb bay.

Even as the F-35A's combat range may be shrinking, the costs for F-35 early-production models have been creeping up, straining a program for which affordability is meant to be a hallmark.

Range estimates have been cut for all three F-35 versions because of a growing expectation that they will need to "suck a little bit more power out of the engine" to run internal systems, including cooling, said Dave Majumdar, a pilot who is air warfare correspondent for Defense News, a trade publication. He said the "A" model had been affected the most.

Any engine-related performance questions could boost efforts by some U.S. lawmakers to revive a competitive engine program formally canceled last month by the Pentagon as unnecessary and wasteful.

"It certainly stirs the pot," said Winslow Wheeler, an F-35 critic at the private Center for Defense Information, citing what he called "more cost, less performance" of the aircraft.

The U.S. House of Representatives' Armed Services Committee voted 54-5 on Wednesday to require the Pentagon to let General Electric Co (GE.N) and Rolls-Royce Group Plc (RR.L) continue their joint development of an alternate engine for the F-35, as long as it was done at no cost to the government.

Eight countries have joined the United States to co-develop the jet -- Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway.

Competitors for foreign sales include Saab's Gripen, Dassault's Rafale, Russia's MiG-35 and Sukhoi Su-35 as well as the Eurofighter Typhoon made by a consortium of British, German, Italian and Spanish companies.

Another competitor is the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet built by Boeing Co (BA.N), which lists a combat radius of 500-plus nautical miles carrying three 480-gallon external tanks and four 1,000-pound bombs. (Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Thomson Reuters

AU/ACSC/BOWMAN/AY08
AIR COMMAND AND STAFF COLLEGE
AIR UNIVERSITY

Scorecard
A Case study of the Joint Strike Fighter Program

by
Geoffrey P. Bowman, LCDR, USN


A Research Report Submitted to the Faculty
In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements
Advisor: Mr. Budd A. Jones
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
April 2008