The U.S. Air Force’s chief of staff wants the service to develop an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of aging F-16s and complement a small fleet of sophisticated F-35 stealth fighters. But an affordable, lightweight fighter is exactly what the F-35 was first conceived to be.
That's what happens when you try make a 3 in 1 aircraft. The A variant is supposed to be a multirole fighter, the B variant must do vertical take offs and landings, and the C variant must be a carrier aircraft. There is no way it can do all three
There’s a solution to this. You build three different aircraft. You build a plane for the Air Force, you build a plane for the marines, and you build a plane for the navy. When you make them all the same, you get an inherently bloated project with too much inter service conflict
I mean, the EU managed to make the Tornado, which has its flaws but is better than the F-35 in every way.
Also swing wings = cool
Still mad about the F-35 killing our beautiful F-111s. (I mean, it's good because now Indonesia can beat us hands down in a war :aus-delenda-est:, but plane pretty.)
The f-111 was also really fucking shit
Im referring specifically to the F-111c, which is really fucking good if your use case is a long range escortless heavy strike fighter.
The Aussie version? I guess but it wasn’t a fighter. It was just a tactical bomber
I'd define it as a strike fighter/fighter-bomber. Standard armament carried Air to Air as our F/A18s couldn't keep up with them in speed or range, and most fighters were not really a match for it until SU30s started filtering in, aside a few F-16s that may or may not have been airworthy.
Ah. Most of the stateside F-111’s didn’t carry air to air.
The F-111 is basically the 1960s version of the F-35 with all the development and teething problems it had lol. But it does look cool, and the ejection capsule was a nice Idea.
Depends what you want to do with it. If your goal is to start in Sydney and put a full weapons payload down in Jakata ASAP (and you're getting them a decade later after the issues are ironed out) its the type of aircraft you want