Unstealthy Tankers are Harming the F-35 Stealth Fighter
The Air Force has additional ideas for making its future tankers more survivable.
Here s What You Need To Remember: Stealthy drone tankers might fit with a ‘distributed’ refueling strategy in which multiple drones draw fuel from a large, conventional tanker ‘mothership’ and then zip forward into to provide refueling for stealth fighter in contested airspace. However, such a chain-refueling scheme could crash catastrophically should the un-stealthy mothership tanker be targeted by adversaries.
The United States has devoted billions of dollars to building stealth fighters, stealth bombers, stealth cruise missiles and stealth spy drones. Surely a stealth tanker for refueling aircraft midflight would be an extravagance too much?
Block 4 is also expected to include integration of country-specific weapons requested by foreign F-35 operators.
Here s What You Need To Remember: The forthcoming ability of a frontline F-35s to penetrate hostile airspace with little warning, and potentially deliver a tactical nuclear weapon will surely become a factor in any adversary’s military calculations, for better or worse.
After years of expensive development, the first fully combat-capable Block IIIF F-35 stealth fighter are due to enter service in 2019. However, the Pentagon is already looking ahead to adding dozens of additional capabilities to a follow-up model called the Block 4 an upgrade so ambitious, its already budgeted to cost a whopping $16 billion.
While the F-111 has been retired, a similar aircraft remains in use today.
Here s What You Need To Remember: The F-111 would return to the stage of world history in 1986, after the bombing of the La Belle nightclub perpetrated by Libyan agents in Berlin killed two U.S. servicemen. Reagan ordered an attack on Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s personal compound near Tripoli codenamed Operation El Dorado Canyon. It was an early attempt to assassinate a head of state by air attack.
The General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark was a low-altitude strike plane born out of a shotgun wedding between competing Air Force and Navy requirements with Defense Secretary McNamara as the minister. Despite its troubled adolescence, it grew into a capable high-tech night bomber that lasted decades in service, noted for its sleekly elegant profile.
The Berkut ended up pioneering several technologies which eventually found their way into the Su-57.
Here s What You Need To Remember: In the end, the Su-47 was never more than a privately-developed tech demonstrator one that ended up demonstrating that forward-swept wings were an idea whose time had not yet come. Instead, Russian fighters like the Su-35S multi-role fighter and Su-57 stealth jet rely upon thrust-vector control turbofans, which can tilt exhaust nozzles, to achieve super-maneuverability.
In 1996, the March/April issue of Russian military periodical
Air Fleet Bulletin published an innocuous-seeming photo of a meeting between Russian military chiefs and aviation industry counterparts. Sitting on the table before them were two model airplanes. One was an advanced variant of the by-then well known Flanker multi-role fighter.