So what? The Navy also kept buying the LCS. Haven't you figured out yet that the current DoD is highly dysfunctional?
That is kind of my point, but the question is: is it worth looking into and exploring the exact details of what went wrong to gain understanding ore just blindly repeating the same tropes over and over again like an Ensign on his 3rd beer?
if we want to repeat the same "hurr durr! PW sucks! ...well the thing with the F-14 was, we knew it had a lethal engine, so it was ok to like lose 175 airframes and a lot of crew-- I mean at least its not the F-35. that thing is like super buggy. Hell we should bring back the Tomcat.... Screw Cheney!!"
Compared with what? Aircraft reliability in the old days wasn't quite as it is today. Try reading about the McDonnell F3H Demon.
A disaster of an aircraft which led to the highly successful F-4 Phantom.
Well the TF30 engine in the F-14 was shit. But the thing is it was originally designed as a bomber engine anyway. So it wasn't meant to be used with that kind of performance envelope of a fleet interceptor to begin with.
The thing is the Navy needed that kind of capability as in the F-14 against peer opponents. And they lost it when Cheney killed the F-14.
The F-14D already had basically most of the issues fixed. And more stuff could have been added if necessary.
Electronics back then in the 70s were highly unreliable. And the F-14 had a lot of them.
The Soviets did a Su-27 prototype. It was shit. They dumped it. Then they made a new one from scratch. Tis no excuse.
Ah this is bullshit. It had a design issue and was unreliable. The claim you could just solve that with more spare engines is a massive simplification. It would have made the whole thing way less cost effective.
Maybe we should just get done with it and convert to Soviet style State Capitalism since monopolies are way more efficient.
So they did. And that is why the costs ballooned.
And get this. It had a radar but it was kind of worthless. With a worthless radar guided missile.
Radar and missile technology only improved later.
The late 1970s were simply too early for multirole. They only got it working properly like that in the 1980s.
It is what you get when you cut corners and use the engine of a low level bomber on a high altitude interceptor.
I hope it is better than Boeing's Starliner test harness. Which kept failing but they decided to build the capsule anyway. And that kept failing, but they decided to launch astronauts with it anyway.
They should be doing a 5.5th generation instead of going for the 6th. But that is just me I guess.
I feel like you pretty agreed with just about everything I said.
my entire point is that the teen series had plenty of troubles. you told me they got "fixed."
I then brought up how they were not really fixed or took drastic and long term work and you agreed that they were indeed all garbage until they were re-engined, upgraded, new avionics new generation of missiles, and finally decent in the 1980s or in the case of the F-14 the 1990s.
hence the comparison.
its interesting that we went from "well the F-15 and F-16 got fixed!" to "And get this. It had a radar but it was kind of worthless. With a worthless radar guided missile. Radar and missile technology only improved later."
so it seems like everything has always been kind of garbage? but at least the F-35s don't fall out of the sky like F-14s and kill their crews in disturbing numbers?
Fun fact. the exact same Tomcat that killed one of the Libyan Fighters in 1981 crashed in a landing attempt by the first female F-14 pilot killing both her and her RIO. That was the F-14, the amazing and the horrifying all in the same package.
It is questionable if they would not have been better off with a separate aircraft design for ground attack.
they had A-X (became A-10) but remember the A-10 was never exported, F-16s certainly were and multirole was essential, and frankly a big part of the F-16 success. the F/A-18 built on the same notion.
