Monday, August 27, 2018

F-35 Needs To Be Protected From Lightning Strikes

Two F-35B Lightning II aircraft with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan.Cpl. Aaron Henson/US Marine Corps

Warzone/The Drive: Marines Need Special Lightning Rods To Shield Their F-35s In Japan From Storms

Lightning strikes remain a serious danger to the stealthy fighter jets that could hamper their operations from bases without adequate protection.

Among a number of residual issues that remain with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the matter of the jet’s defenses against lightning strikes, or lack thereof, continues to be a particularly vexing issue. For the U.S. Marine Corps and its F-35B variant, thunderstorms are still such a problem that the service is buying special portable lightning rods to help shield the jets when they’re parked outside at bases that otherwise don’t have the necessary infrastructure, which includes Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan.

On Aug. 8, 2018, the Marines announced plans to purchase 14 lightning rods through a sole-source contract to LBA Technology, Inc. of Greenville, North Carolina. According to the contracting notice, which the service posted on FedBizOpps, this is the only company that makes systems that the U.S. Military’s main F-35 Joint Program Office has approved for use with the aircraft.

Read more ....

Update: The F-35 Lightning fighter can't stand up to real lightning, so Marines ordered specialty rods to keep them from going up in flames (Business Insider)

WNU Editor: It makes one wonder if the F-35 can survive an EMP event?

Update #2: More F-35 problems? .... Is the F-35 In Trouble Again? (Jared Keller, Business Insider/Task & Purpose).

2 comments:

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B.Poster said...

If it can't survive a lightning strike, as an EMP event would be far harder to survive than a lightning strike, then experiential common sense would seem to suggest that it cannot survive an EMP event. The F-35 appears to go from bad to worse every time the program is examined.

This does assume the EMP threat is real. "Experts" are divided on this. Given the propensity of US officials and those "experts" typically utilized by US leaders to overestimate our abilities, underestimate the threats, overestimate our abilities to deal with them, and underestimate the abilities of adversaries and potential adversaries to harm us, the working hypothesis should be that the EMP threat is real. In fact, it should be assumed however bad we may have been told the threat is it is likely far worse than we have generally been led to believe even by those "experts" who take the threat seriously AND if this plane cannot survive a lightning strike there is no way it is going to survive an EMP event as lightning strikes are mild compared to something of this magnitude.

US officials have been lucky enough to be able to survive in spite of their general stupidity. In other parts of the world, not so much. As such, it seems the first question a potential buyer would have asked is "can this plane survive an EMP event?' If it can't, there would be no reason to go through with the purchase as this is the FIRST thing that should have been addressed before ANYTHING else. I've long been puzzled as to why anyone actually wants to buy this piece of useless junk.

I think I have a hypothesis. 1.)The US pays out massive amounts of foreign aid putting us further in debt. 2.)This foreign aid is then used to purchase F-35s. 3.)The US spends money it doesn't have to build this crap, the buying country gets an asset paid for by someone else for less than the foreign aid they received. 4.)The buying country then uses this excess money either to develop military aircraft of their own that work or to buy such military aircraft from other countries that actually work. As foreign governments typically aren't stupid, this seems to be the only thing that makes sense.