2016-03-19 By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake Our visits to Pax River provided insight into the East Coast team, which is completely integrated with the West Coast team at Edwards Air Force Base; the legendary home of the Right Stuff air combat innovators. In his seminal work about US military…
2016-03-19 By Robbin Laird The Williams Foundation hosted a seminar on new approaches to air-land integration. The terms of reference for the conference were as follows: Air forces need to be capable of delivering air and space power effects to support conventional and special operations in the land domain. Air-Land…
2016-03-07 Developmental testing is a fact of life for operational fleets. As one test engineer commented during our visit to Pax River, “we continue to do developmental testing on the Super Hornet here at Pax.” And with more than 50,000 flight hours on the F-35 fleet and an operational squadron with…
2016-03-10 By Robbin Laird When the first F-35 crossed the Atlantic from Cameri, Italy, to NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, the plane had been assembled in Italy and had only 15 flight hours illustrating the confidence of Lockheed Martin and the Italian Government (and Italian pilot) in the maturity of the…
2016-03-08 The F-35 is a first generation information age combat aircraft. The USAF is training with this in mind, and has started the process of preparing the Air National Guard as well for the transition. According to a piece published February 16, 2016, by Airman 1st Class Andrea Posey, the…
03/08/2016: F-35 Heritage Flight Team qualified on March 6th 2016 during the Heritage Flight Conference to join the Air Combat Command Air Force Heritage Flight program. The program features modern USAF fighter aircraft flying alongside WW2, Korean War, and Vietnam-era aircraft in a display of airpower history. The F-35 Heritage team is from…
2016-02-28 By Edward Timperlake The skillfulness and success of fighter pilots in aerial combat is an extensively researched yet modestly understood and fundamentally complex concept. Innumerable physical and psychological factors along with chance opportunities affect a pilots facility for success in air combat. Perhaps the best narrative of the intangibles…
The F-35 is already part of the USMC combat force. It will join the USAF later this year. And next year the F-35C will come to the carrier air wing. In contrast to the constant barrage of chants from the Greek Chorus of program critics, the program is rapidly maturing.…
