Well, we now have reports of Israel signing a contract to buy F-35 JSFs for $15.2 billion (see also here).
As Bill Sweetman notes this means that the JSF costs about $200 million a plane, well over the $80m claimed for the aircraft, and more than the fly away cost of the F-22.
As I’ve noted earlier, there was a Rand study modeling the F-35 against an upgraded Su-27, and it was allegedly clubbed like a baby seal (here and here).
This is unsurprising: with a thrust to weight ratio of about 0.85:1 in air to air configuration, and a wing loading of 108 lbs/sq ft, similar to the F-105 Thunderchief (aka the “Lead Sled”), this will not be a particularly agile aircraft, even with a state of the art flight control system.
It appears now that the USAF and Lochkeed Martin are claiming that Maneuvering is Irrelevant, as the fighter will have the Distributed Aperture System (DAS), a system of multiple wide angle sensors that will create a 360° view around the aircraft, and so it will be able to fly through at high speed and launch a, “high-off-boresight, lock-on-after-launch (LOAL) missile shot with any datalink-equipped missile.”
They said that the missiles would do all the work before Viet Nam too, and the USAF and the Navy had to start training their pilots to dogfight again.
BTW, Bill Sweetman (again), in writing about the 360 degree attack, notes that there was a precedent, the Boulton-Paul Defiant, and notes:
If the Germans had had an expression for “clubbed like baby seals” in 1940, the Luftwaffe would have used it.
My thoughts exactly.