Lockheed's more coventional looking plane (but with the highly unconventional lift fan) has beaten out Boeing for the JSF contract. Good for the Fort Worth job market; not so good for Seattle.

Bad for St. Louis too. Boeing has a lot of operations here. This is really a disaster for Boeing.

Neither planes are very attractive. But at least the Lockheed isn't butt ugly. I still think the F22 looks much cooler than either JSF designs. In the air anyway, on the ground it looks pretty akward.

I think the F-35 is a realistic compromise. It also represents a way for other underfinanced countries like Australia to update their fighter inventories without sending the nation broke.

I could never see Australia buying the ultra-expensive F-22. Australia's only other alternative was to switch to F/A-18D/E's or the Eurofighter.

Sheesh. First the M's get dogged, and now this. What is next?

Excepting MS, Seattle's really been getting sucker-punched lately. Then again, losing Boeing is the region's own fault for the horrid local road system.

They implied that the choice was mainly made on performance and cost. Boeing going with a lift fan seems like the biggest thing to me.

Seattle strikes back!

"Boeing's pilotless fighter could make JSF obsolete."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134358942_beyondjsf26.html

Har har. Modern war's going to get even wierder.

The problem with RPV (remotely piloted vehicles) is the lag.

"How the fuck am I supposed to win this war with a ping rate over 200ms? Now it's flashing 'connection problem' on my HUD!"

It was Lockheed that went with the fan. The Boeing had, like, vector nozzles that could point strait down. It looks pretty cool when they take off. Managing to stay level when all the thrust is coming from the rear of the plane... All the vector nozzle stuff is spiffy, though. Ever see a modified F-16 fly backwards?

As for computer flown UCAV... We'll see. It's all starting to look like Macross Plus! I bet Lockheed's got an unmanned fighter that transforms into a humanoid mecha on the way.

Personally I'm opposed to unmanned combat vehicles for mainly philosophical reasons. How can you justify taking a life in combat if you aren't willing to risk the lives of your own men? Simply put, if something's worth killing over than it should be worth dying for.

Brad Grenz
-unnecissarily wistful

Heh. While I see your point, I think there is something to be said for fighting without the risk of loss of life on our side. Men have already proven that they're willing to die for their country. But, if we can take out that aspect, wouldn't it be worth it? It's roughly the same as using tanks against an army of infantry that you know has no anti-tank weaponry. It's not that you're not willing to risk your life, but why do so unnecessarily?

That being said, I'm extremely wary of unmanned vehicles, even for fighting purposes. Most planes can fly and land themselves, but we still have pilots up there...There's a reason for that. The last time a plane was designed to override a pilot's decision, many of them malfunctioned, crashed, and killed the pilots in test-flights. Oddly, some of them still fly...

I'll be very surprised if we're ever without manned (er, personned) fighters. There are just too many reasons you may need a human in the equation.

The talk of an air force filled with all UCAVs reminds me of all the cool aircraft programs killed in the early 1960s (TSR.1, Avro Arrow, etc.) because everyone thought missiles would completely obsolete fighters.

Plus UCAVs are only as good as their link to command-and-control.

I'm sure we'll use UCAVs in the future. But manned fighters will remain anyway. If not for technical and strategic reasons (of which I think there are many), then because the Air Force Fighter Mafia will never give up that role voluntarily.

As for the X-35 win, I'm disappointed for purely aesthetic reasons. :-) The Boeing JSF was so much uglier it was cool. And ugly planes excel -- see the A-10, the Phantom, the Buff, the A-6, the A-1 Spad, and just about every jet the Brits ever designed...

The X-35, on the other hand, just looks like a 75%-scale F-22 with the second engine left off...

"The X-35, on the other hand, just looks like a 75%-scale F-22 with the second engine left off..."

I read somewhere that the resemblence to the F-22 was a quite deliberate decision by Lockheed. They figured it would give the plane an aesthetic advantage. Looks like they were right.

'I'm sure we'll use UCAVs in the future. But manned fighters will remain anyway. If not for technical and strategic reasons (of which I think there are many), then because the Air Force Fighter Mafia will never give up that role voluntarily.'

Obviously, but recent air power in the US is pretty much manned, reusable cruise missiles. Fly there, drop bomb, come back home.

We'll still need pilots for everything but bombing missions, but *everything's* a damned bombing mission lately. When was the last "dogfight?" Korea?

I was disappointed in Lockheed's win as well (and I live in Dallas); with Lockheed centered on the F-22 market, I thought it'd be a good idea to have another company for the JSF, and maybe down the road the two can compete again for the general joint purpose/utility aircraft down the road. However, Boeing is a bit more poised than Lockheed to take a loss I think; Boeing still has a lot of things to do in the civilian and military aerospace industry and who knows, you may see the X-32 still fly yet.

There's talk of having Boeing share the workload, which local representatives of course are saying it'll never happen or over my dead body. Both of our senators and some of our representatives are of course morons, but unfortunately they are also powerful in the committees that matter the most.

> When was the last "dogfight?" Korea?

Uh, no. There were a number of real guns-style dogfights over Vietnam, not to mention all over the Middle East in the various Israeli conflicts, all the way up to 1982. A number of air-to-air encounters occured over the Balkans in 1995 and beyond.

--- Alan

I'm not happy about the decision either. It's going to be a lot harder for me to get a job in St. Louis when I graduate in May.

"I could never see Australia buying the ultra-expensive F-22."

I don't see us selling anyone the F-22. Btw, I've heard that they're having all kinds of problems with the stabilizers cracking on them.

I've got a friend that's a programmer on the UCAV project (which btw is being developed in STL not Seattle) In fact, most of the military stuff the Boeing does is over here. Anyway, UCAV's primary mission is SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defences). They take out AAA and SAMs. I don't think they're meant to be remotely piloted, but instead are supposed to be semi or fully autonomous. So concerning the not risking lives issue, it's about not risking lives on the most dangerous mission there is. Maybe that will make ppl feel better about that.

Actually, they should just develop a MMOG where ppl log into a server and are given control of a vehicle and given a target, with overrides in place so they can't do anything stupid. I'm completely joking of course. :)

It drove me nuts hearing the media call Boeing's design the radical one. They're not the ones with a fan spinning with the torque of a battleship's propellor sitting right behind the pilot. I hope that place is well armored.

"There were a number of real guns-style dogfights over Vietnam"

Yeah, the inital versions of the F-4 Phantom didn't have a gun because at the time they thought missles made guns obsolete. I think the G model was the first to have a gun put in when the realized that mistake.

Whoops, I guess so:

http://archive.nandotimes.com/Kosovo/story/general/0,2773,45240-73004-527477-0-nandotimes,00.html

"I don't see us selling anyone the F-22."

Nope. As a general policy, the US doesn't sell stealth technology to any other country. It's kind of our trump card.

"Men have already proven that they're willing to die for their country."

No one ever won a war by dying for their country, they won by making the other guy die for his country first.

Or something like that. I haven't see Patton in a while.

A Seattleite's perpective:

First off, you need to understand that the city infrastructure was never meant to support a population this size. People from all over the country, especially California, have been flocking to move here. A lot of it had to do with the high-tech market, which was booming until recently. With Californian real estate priced out of range of damn near everyone, hordes of workers flocked to the northwest, which at the time was comparatively affordable. The cost of everything skyrocketed.

Washington state's dirty little secret is that, aside from too-cool Seattle and a couple of choice suburbs, the working population is primarily comprised of blue-collar workers who are one generation away from being hillbillys. The lucky ones work at Boeing. The unlucky ones work wherever they can.

Thanks to the high-tech jobs, the average salaries were increasing, which caused more people to move here, which drove the number of jobs and salaries higher, and so on. Young 20 and 30 somethings were making lots of money for mostly useless work. Foolish spending ensued.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure started showing its strain. Taxes rose, often several times a year. Yet the services our taxes were supposed to be paying for never materialized. Transportation began to truly suck and, thanks to the population density, there's no way to expand. At one point, I-5, the main way into and out of Seattle (unless you count the crumbling and collapsing Alaskan Way viaduct) is reduced to two lanes - pretty much guaranteeing a traffic jam. Buses work, sort of, but they're subject to the same problems as cars. Light rail is being touted as an alternative, but despite our city government having blown FOUR BILLION DOLLARS on the project, nothing has been built. There's nowhere to build it! Think Japan, but roomier. Every square inch of Seattle and the key suburbs are occupied by something, which would have to be destroyed in order to build light rail.

Back to Boeing. Boeing, along with other key businesses, had been complaining for a while that they're being affected by excessive taxes. This is partially true, especially since Boeing had to pay Washington employees more to keep up with the cost of living. However, it should be noted that Boeing has an interesting cost saving strategy. Every year, right around Christmas, Boeing lays off several thousand employees and rehires them the following February or March when a new contract arrives.

Right around the time Boeing had announced it would be looking for a new corporate home, Bush Jr., then on the campaign trail, was seen meeting with Phil Condit (Boeing's CEO) several times. The cynical and conspiracy-minded among us have said that in exchange for moving to Houston, Bush would persuade the government to ease off Boeing, then under investigation. As you know, Boeing moved to Chicago. Personally, I think Boeing's losing the government contract was governmental retribution, but what do I know? I just live here.

Anyway, it is indeed bad news here. Everyone's looking to see how many copies of XP sell because, right now, Microsoft is one of the only companies not affected by the recession. But house prices are dropping, high-tech layoffs have laid off a good percentage of the population and, best of all, the taxes are still high. And with the city owing an outstanding debt for the new Mariners and Seahawks stadium, well, they probably won't be dropping any time soon.

So what's Bellingham like?

--- Alan

---

Quote:

So what's Bellingham like?

---

I was very disappointed to hear about Boeing losing the JSF project as well. My dad is a security chief in their military aircraft division and had been working on designing a new system for the unique security that was going to be necessary for a contract this large. Now, well, he's just hoping they don't order cutbacks. Doubtful he'd get caught in any Boeing cutbacks, due to his position, but you never know in corporate America these days.

Boeing shouldn't have much trouble surviving as a company right now though. Between the unmanned craft division and the commercial division (which should rebound in a few years), they should be a viable company for a long time to come.

On a side note: Boeing was looking at building an assembly plant here in Omaha...until our city government showed them a 2.8% unemployment number. There was no way they would have been able to fill the 3k+ jobs that were going to be generated by the plant being here. Durn logical corporate planners. We have nothing but space in this state and would have built a small subburb around whatever they built here.

Nah, have heard Bellingham was a nice place and thought about moving there eventually, down the road sometime.

--- Alan

Read in the NY Times this morning that most analysts seem to feel that Boeing was in a much better position to weather the loss of the contract than Lockheed-Martin. This doesn't minimize the damage to St. Louis and Seattle, of course, but the point was that Boeing will still be a defense aviation player, with the F-22 and unmanned plane business among other things, while Lockheed might have been out of the defense business altogether if it had lost, leaving the US with only a single bidder for future aviation business. The article didn't explicitly say that was a factor in the decision, but I wouldn't be surprised.

"Boeing will still be a defense aviation player, with the F-22 ..."

Actually Lockheed has the F-22, too. So now they've got contracts for the F-22 and the F-35. My thoughts are that Boeing should move forward with their design and try to sell the F-32 to other nations.

We can't export our stealth tech, though, can we?

I'm a bit concerned because if Lockheed becomes the only real producer of military aviation, we're getting away from the whole reason for outsourcing production to the private industry -- competition. It might be better to just have the government build the weapons if there's no real competition.

I haven't been impressed with the way the big military contractors have been guilty of cost overruns and odd pricing for some parts. I'm not sure we're getting the benefit of the free market system.

That's the reason why there has been talks to still fund the F-32, or allow Boeing to share in the F-35 manufacturing, similar to many WW2 diversification programs.

Plus, as I said, there is also the possibility of a joint-utility aircraft for CV use in the works, but that is probably 20-30 years down the road.

--- Alan

The Navy's new DD-21 hi-tech destroyer program also apparently got canned today as well. Apparently they are now looking at a program to build a series of more specific ship designs to do each of the things the DD-21 was going to do. Another disappointment...

--- Alan

"We can't export our stealth tech, though, can we?"

The JSF compitition wasn't about stealth technology. It's about building a three-in-one plane, or a plane that has three different variations: carrier, normal, and vertical take off/landing. The reasoning is that if there were one body type for all three services, it will be cheaper to produce. I think the LM F-35 just resembles the F-22, but doesn't have that planes' stealth charecteristics.

"The Navy's new DD-21 hi-tech destroyer program also apparently got canned
today as well. Apparently they are now looking at a program to build a series of
more specific ship designs to do each of the things the DD-21 was going to do."

Yeah, it looks like sort of the opposite of the JSF approach. Here they've decided it's not cost effective to try to have one class of ship fill all these roles. At least it appears that all the potential contractors involved in the DD-21 project are going to stay in this revamped project.

'I haven't been impressed with the way the big military contractors have been guilty of cost overruns and odd pricing for some parts. I'm not sure we're getting the benefit of the free market system.'

I'm pretty convinced of that. I can't believe Boeing's gotten away with bribing foreign governments:

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0008/features-anderson2.shtml

JSF was supposed to be stealthy, but that wasn't a very high priority characteristic, as opposed to the ATF (YF-22 vs. YF-23) where stealthyness dictated more of the design.