Adam Burch/hangar-b.com
Warzone/The Drive: This Is What A Boeing F-32 Would've Looked Like If Lockheed Lost The JSF Competition
To this day the X-32 is lambasted for its atrocious looks, but Boeing's final vision for its F-32 fighter was markedly different in appearance.
In 2001, Boeing's X-32 stood off against Lockheed's X-35 in a fly-off for the massively lucrative Joint Strike Fighter contract. Making a stealth fighter capable of carrying a significant payload while also having a version that can take off in short distances and land vertically was quite the task, and both companies went about solving the problem very differently. In the end, the X-32 lost to the X-35 for a number of reasons that we will get into in a future post, but many who were taken aback by the X-32's 'unique' looks didn't realize that Boeing had already planned a number of very significant design changes for their production F-32. Now, thanks to our friend Adam Burch over at Hangar-b.com we can take another look at what this aircraft would have become.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Cool Pictures.
1 comment:
In a parallel universe the US now has that plane and didn't embarrass itself for years with F35 failures and massive budget overruns and delays. This program has really endangered lives IMO as the money had to be found somehere. We're talking billions and billions and billions on overruns.
But then again. ..the US also buys helicopters with unit prices the equivalent of several tons of pure gold. It's just insane.
By the way. A fully equipped and staffed school to teach hundreds of children runs at 5 million/year - in other countries, including European countries with excellent schools you'd be looking at even less. One of these helicopters is worth up to 30 schools running a full year, teaching thousands and employing hundreds. Who again become productive and contribute to society.
The helicopter depreciates in value so fast. On top these things crash. So it's not just the unit value but you might lose up to 10% over 10 Years in total losses/full crashes, which are quite common in air transport.
And in other news: the pentagon cannot allocate hundreds of billions of dollars.
Oversight!
Post a Comment