Interview with Justin Paines on the X-35 JSF 

The RAF are expert ultra low level fliers to this day. I'm glad you got given warning so you could keep an eye out, great experience!

That's pretty awesome

Glad you found us!

As an aviation nut since a kid am 56 now its my favourite channel!

VALHALLAXE wonderful story! Nice privilege you had back in the day!

Haha good story.

I had almost the same experience when I first saw V22's. You'll wonder what it was even if you have been reading about it since grade school.

Use to fly, almost weekly, out of STL. It was a joy to see the 18’s and 15’s depart using their special departure procedure. I believe it was rotate accelerate and pitch straight up 90 degrees, climb to 10,000 then on to normal climb.

VALHALLAXE I miss the little parking lot at the end of the runway where you could bring a date and watch the planes takeoff and land.

Thanks very much and great to hear you enjoyed it.

Thanks very much, great to hear you like the water conduct interviews.

Matt Thornton We are really glad you enjoyed it, Matt and your welcome :) it was a brilliant day filming and it was a privilege to meet Justin.

Thank you. We will do :)

David Baker you're welcome

Cheers!

Cheers Patrick.

+Matty mo Cheers Matty

Glad you enjoyed it, Frederic.

Cheers David.

Thank you Alan for the kind words. Great to hear you enjoyed this episode and the channel as a whole.

Hi Dan. I am glad you discovered us and I hope you enjoy what we do :) thanks for the sub too.

Most of the RAF folks are. It seems to be a different culture to other airforces.

Thank you. I would love to and I have been in the case for a while but it’s proving a little difficult to tie a pilot down atm, but I’m sure I will get there!

Thanks!

RN Sea Harrier, NOT RAF Sea Harrier- the crabs killed the SHAR, don't give the heroes in light blue credit they don't deserve! The muppets are experts in manipulating politicians into shagging the other two services right up the Gary Glitter. The RN still don't have a fixed jet in front line service thanks to their shenanigans.

I am working on it :)

The 32 was too far ahead of its time. One of my favorites!

Not, it wasn't too far ahead of its time. The design had HUGE issues. The X-32 had a massive central inlet which the Navy doesn't like from past experience with planes that had inlets like that. They tend to ingest foreign objects which causes FOD (foreign object damage) which can destroy multi-million dollar engines easily! The other issue with deck handling is that these type of inlets can easily create a suction force that can suck in a full-grown adult male into the engine. People got killed all the time by aircrafts with these kind of inlets -- A-7, F-8 had low-slung, centrally mounted inlets that sucked people into the engine and ground them up like hamburger. People have to be very aware of where they're walking on debt and they have to do deck sweeps looking for screws and slivers of metal that can damage the engines. If you already have a low-slung inlet or an engine inlet system like the Harrier, the chances of getting FOD in the engine increase. They had an incident with a Harrier engine on a Royal Navy ship in the late 1970s or early 1980s that was totalled because the crew of the ship it was based on were not diligent enough with their FOD deck sweeps. I also have a hard time believing that inlet was the stealthiest design possible but I admit I could be wrong there. I do know from reading articles and just my own common sense that the low-slung inlet has a number of issues with the design. A "splitter-type" inlet duct like the F-35 is probably better for stealth and also reduces the chances of FOD on-deck compared to the low-slung centrally-mounted inlet duct. The other issue with the X-32 was that it was way overweight for VTOL configuration. The X-32 that was modded to do V/STOL had to be partially disassembled to lighten it up enough to take off in VTOL mode! That was with an engine in excess of 37,000 lbs thrust afterburning and it was still too heavy unless you removed sections of the airframe. That doesn't look good to people doing these evaluations and how you play these things in demo/evaluation is at least as important as how the plane actually functions. I'm sure the X-32 took marks against its design for the fact that the tech demonstrator/prototype was already overweight as well as having design features that at least one of the services that could potentially using the plane wasn't crazy about. It's not all about how the plane looks or what you think is going on with politics. If the flight and engineering team already screws things up before the final decisions get made, they're not helping their case with the services and people at the Pentagon who are looking at the weapons systems to buy for the next 20-30 years.

The X-32 was a real bastard of an engineering design and not elegant in the least. I think ultimately the X-32 was so bad that it took Boeing out of the jet fighter business.

Three Camels hahaha that’s what everyone says about failed designs. The Boeing program was stuck in the past, taking conventional approaches to solving unconventional problems. That’s exactly what the Skunkworks does best time and time again - it isn’t much of a surprise that they won. If you do some more research into how Boeing handled the program you’ll see that it was basically amateur hour compared to the Lockheed guys. LM certainly had an advantage, but Boeing was their own worst enemy.

With a lot of the newer models they can just download everything and computers imput data and updates etc. What is expected normally happens once teething troubles are filtered through. Post this planes are now just mobile computers, everything is now all about data and situational awareness. Even combat noadays is simply proceedure...