Tests earlier this year demonstrated conclusively that the most expensive weapon in history, the F-35, is dead meat in a dogfight; proving no match for the 1970s-era F-16 pitted against it.
The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.
Thanks to Pentagon efforts to acquire a plane that can do it all, we have a plane that can't do anything. It can't bomb, it can't provide close-in air support to ground troops, and it can't defend itself against air attacks. The F-16 Block 40, by the way, is one of several planes that the F-35 would supposedly replace.
Oregon's National Guard flies the F-15, and they're remarkable killing machines; pilots from other forces arriving here for training swear that ONG does a better job of maintaining the jets than the federal military does. Up here on the mountain, we get pairs of them passing over the house several times a day, either coming home or heading out to the coast, and it's easy to tell without even looking - the engines' sound is completely different from the domestic flights.
And talk about maneuverability! I got to see that front and center a couple of weeks after 9/11, when the airspace reopened: some idiot refueling his plane over in Scappoose made a joke about flying it into the tallest building in Portland. That comment was reported, and all hell broke loose. We had F-15s blasting around here on afterburner, seemingly just a couple of hundred feet above the house. Those babies can turn on a dime.
You don't see stuff like that at an air-show; those pilots were dead serious.
As it happened, the idiot never ventured into Portland airspace; he had a private airstrip on his property a few miles east of Scappoose. Not that it does him a lot of good, these days; they tracked him down and among other things, impounded his plane and stripped his pilot license.
