descender wrote on Jun 30, 2015, 10:20:
The ability of the F-35 to "dogfight" is really irrelevant, it simply isn't designed to do it. Of course it failed to keep up with an F-16, a plane that was designed to dogfight a MiG.

The last official "confirmed" dogfight that I can find happened in 1991, most aerial combat now happens "beyond visual range" at distances of over 80 miles. This is the new war, face to face combat is going the way of the dinosaur.

That is not to excuse it from the clusterfuck of funding and technical problems it has had of course... It would literally have been cheaper to write every person who has worked on it a $1million check than to design this plane we really don't even need anymore. Good luck getting the breadbasket of this country (US) to stop building military hardware though lol... they'd all be out of work.

That's all good and fine until you are given an order to obtain a visual IFF before engaging. Or until Russian and Chinese stealth tech prevents BVR attacks. Etc.

- The brand new F-35 lost to a 40 year old design saddled with two external fuel tanks.
- The F-35 helmet is so bulky, the pilot couldn't turn his head to see if the F-16 was behind him.

The F-35 has so many design flaws being designed to do too many different roles. There should have been 3 different planes for 3 different roles: a stealthy air force fighter/bomber, a stealthy naval fighter/bomber, and a vtol/vstol fighter for the marines. Not even sure that last one is necessary. So many tradeoffs are required for vtol that it severely hampers the performance of the aircraft. The F-22 was expensive and a boondoggle as well, but at least it does what it's supposed to and very well too.