The F-35 Can't Beat The Plane It's Replacing In A Dogfight: Report

We’ve heard of significant shortcomings before with the fighter jet that’s supposed to be America’s future, but this is just as bad as it gets. The F-35 performed so dismally in a dogfight, that the test pilot remarked that the it had pretty much no place fighting other aircraft within visual range.

And it’s even worse than a mere maneuverability issue. At one point, the pilot’s helmet was so big he couldn’t even turn his head inside the cockpit.

That’s according to a scathing report obtained by our friends over at War Is Boring that details the results of visual range air-to-air engagement tests between an F-35A and an F-16C. The F-35, which the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines are expected to rely upon, in addition to the air arms of militaries across the world for at least the next few decades, was supposed to be better than its F-16 predecessor in all respects.

The F-35’s ability to compete against other fighter aircraft in a close-in dogfight, even against the decades old designs it looks to replace, has always been a contentious issue. Long ago, the F-35’s maneuverability was planned to far exceed that of fourth generation fighters. Over time, those claims eroded to the point where the troubled stealth jet is described as being “about as maneuverable as an F-16.”

The fact that the F-35 can carry its weapons and fuel internally was of course the major deciding factor in being able to make such a claim.

Keep in mind, all of this is anecdotal, but testing reports over almost the last decade have supported the fact that the F-35 was not nearly as nimble as many would like it to be. Still, all claims regarding its performance against other fighters in a dogfight remained largely academic, with only bits of data to compare in a vacuum.

Which is why the candid report described in the War Is Boring article finally gives us a good first hand account as to how capable – or incapable as it may be – the F-35 is in the within-visual-range fight.

The test pilot flying the F-35 makes it very clear that the new jet, even in its ideal configuration without any external stores, was no match against a Block-40 F-16C in a less-than-ideal configuration with a pair of under-wing fuel tanks:

Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement.
In dogfighting, energy is everything, and if your enemy has more kinetic and potential energy for maneuvers than you do, then you’re toast.

The report even goes into what is akin to a fairly desperate move usually only used in one-on-one air combat maneuvers, known as a rudder reversal, that the F-35 is apparently decent at performing at slow speeds. The fact that this was even detailed in the report as a useful tactic is telling. In reality, using such maneuvers means you are probably going to die if any other bad guys are in the area as it rapidly depletes the aircraft’s energy state, leaving it vulnerable to attack.

Another area that the test pilot highlights on is the F-35’s abysmal rearward visibility. David Axe from War Is Boring writes:

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.
The report goes on to make other telling remarks about the F-35’s air combat maneuvering performance. It should be noted that the aircraft’s flight software can probably still be tweaked to offer a little wider envelope for pilots to traverse during a hard turning dogfight, but seeing as this test occurred this year (almost a decade after the first F-35 flew), the amount of extra agility that can be squeezed out of the F-35 is most likely marginal at this point.

All of this also reminds us of the fact that we cannot believe the information coming from the program itself, which is troubling. Only as the aircraft continues to enter the fleet (which is a whole other ridiculous story) will we begin to hear more honest reviews of its performance, as in the past we have had to rely on unclassified congressional watch dog reports and other unbiased sources to identify trends and key data points.


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The fact that the F-35 is maybe not really a good fighter at all is reminiscent of the question that we’ve been asking for years — if you don’t really need competitive maneuverability, than why do we need a fighter at all?

How, I wonder, would an F35 fare against the best the Chinese have. Pilot-skill notwithstanding.

Clinton gave them the F35 plans in the '90s.

Oh goody. The Chinese have had 20 years to develop a counter to anything the F-35 can do.

senhower, and others to some degree, did warn us gravely to beware of the military-industrial complex, I supposed of which the F-35 is the poster child.

A single piloted F-16C with a loadout of GBU-32 JDAMS is a so much more capable strike aircraft than the A-6 ever dreamed of being it's not even funny, and the same aircraft is light years ahead of any F-14 variant in air-to-air capabilities, both BVR (beyond visual range) and in close BFM.

I've been out of the cockpit of the F/A-18 for 17 years so I'm not the most current. I know very little about the F-35 beyond what I've read in the media and that's so full of slanted BS like the posted article that I put no faith in any of it. I've fought enough F-16's to know they're a great airplane, I've also fought a few F-14's and know that their days are long past, the fourth generation fighters are a huge leap forward in capabilities. Sooner or later all aircraft are rendered obsolete, you can't keep retrofitting them with new avionics forever. Eventually it gets to the point where you have to invest in new aircraft. Capabilities change and missions change, theater commanders, the JFACC, have certain needs that they build their plans around and if you don't bring those capabilities to the theater then they don't want you around. I saw that in Bosnia in the mid-90's, an aircraft carrier would pull into the Adriatic & the F-14's were essentially useless to the JFACC because they couldn't self designate for the laser guided bombs like the ROE required. They were glad to see the F/A-18's, but the Tomcats were pretty useless because they didn't bring any capabilities to the fight that the JFACC needed. I shake my head at all the A-10 crap posted on this forum. There are reasons the Air Force wants to get rid of the A-10's but for political reasons Congress keeps insisting they be kept around. That's just what we need, a bunch of political hacks telling the warfighters what they need. Keeping Congress out of the military's business ought to be the goal, not demanding that they push an obsolete weapons system on the commanders that say they don't need and don't want any more.

There are reasons the Air Force wants to get rid of the A-10's but for political reasons Congress keeps insisting they be kept around. That's just what we need, a bunch of political hacks telling the warfighters what they need.

Sorry but not drinking the F-35 koolaid especially in ground attack mode.

I have no F-35 koolaid to peddle, I already said I know very little about it. The last briefing I had on it was in 1997 when it was still called the JSF (joint strike fighter) program and they hadn't decided between the boeing version and the lockheed version.

I'm just pointing out that an article written by a bunch of left wing hacks on an anti-military blog is likely not a reliable source upon which to hang your hat. There may or may not be any credible science behind global warming but I know for sure that when Al Gore starts pitching it I automatically dismiss it as BS because there's a political agenda behind it. It's the same with this, the source isn't credible so the story is suspect.

RAND Corp and others have already run simulations. The F35s are blown out of the sky in minutes; they don't stand a chance against even two generation old MiGs.

I wouldn't be surprised if our idiot government traded the plans for the best fighter plane designs to China for the plans to what became the F-35.

Its just the sort of thing our ignorant politicians would do.

So the question I have is, how realistic is it that we will find F-35's in a visual range dogfight? I thought the whole idea of stealth technology was to avoid visual range dogfight.

Now I'm no pilot, but I read a report where a US Pilot flew a Mig 29 and he said a good pilot in the Mig 29 would probably chew up a F-16 mainly because the gun on the Mig is slaved to the radar and you can actually lock up the gun. Again, just something I read and I don't know how solid that is. For visual range engagements, the Russian aircraft are quite formidibile, but I still think it's going to come down to the quality of the pilot...and the big IF of ever getting into a visual range dogfight. I don't care how good an aircraft is, I wouldn't want to get into a visual range fight with an F-16 against a US pilot. It's probably the ultimate dogfighting aircraft.

And I would think that the F-35's radar would allow someone to avoid detection from 4th generation fighters until the point to where they can choose when and where to engage in a visual range fight.

Oh and shall we not forget, we still have 186 F-22's, which will chew up ANYTHING.

GG, are you old enough to remember when all the "smart" aerial tacticians boldly said there'd never again be a need for a gun on a fighter? That "wisdom" evaporated when our all-missile F-4s kept getting on the tails of Migs over Hanoi - with no way to shoot them down because they were inside missile armup range. Or the missiles just flat failed, which is where dependence on technology can get you.

Lastly, that quote about "slaving the gun to the radar" try and visualize how one could POSSIBLY "slave" a gun that is fixed to the fuselage. Think about it....

We went to Laage, Germany in the mid-90's and flew against the Mig-29's there. The helmet mounted sight in combination with the AA-11 Archer is a formidable combination. It's not all the helmet mounted sight, the AA-11 was a much better IR missile than our Aim-9M sidewinders we were using at the time. The AA-11 had a much higher off boresight capability than we had so they could slave the seeker head to us using the helmet mounted sight long before we could get our sidewinders on them. The AA-11 also had a much shorter arming distance after it came off the rail than we did so their minimum engagement distance was closer. The Mig had a very good thrust to weight ratio also, it's turning performance was very similar to fighting an F-16 in that regard. In a BFM engagement the Mig had an advantage against us mainly because of the AA-11 missile.

Everything else about it was junk. The workmanship on the airplane looks like the russians were drunk when they built it. The germans had a hard time keeping them running. The avionics were probably equivalent to what we had in the 70's, the radar was junk and our jammer was very effective against it. A fighter is just a moving platform for a radar, 95% of the ability of the aircraft is housed in the radar. People like to talk ACM/BFM because they watched Top Gun too many times and it's sexy, but the reality is you radar work is where you make your money. A Mig-29 should never make it to the merge against a section of F/A-18's, F-15's, or F-16's, that's the reality.

The main reason some non-hornet guys bag on the hornet is because we don't carry much gas. The navy lives and dies around it's deck cycle time on the carrier and the hornets messed that up because they couldn't stay airborne as long as the others. Things had to be rearranged when the hornet came along and it pissed off all the old school guys. The Mig is twice as bad on gas as the hornet ever was, they carry very little gas. Part of that is by design, the Mig-29 was conceived as a point defense fighter and at the height of the cold war they didn't want their pilots defecting with them. One fix for that was to not give them enough gas get to the west.

I agree, Pugs the Rules of Engagement can handcuff even the most effective system. If ya ain't allowed to shoot the fookers, ya cain't kill 'em.

It was true in my war, it was true in your war, it's true in the current war, and damned if it won't be true in the next one.

It ain't the ones with people in 'em I would worry about.

Good summary. I did the same set with us in VAQ-209 and VMFA-321 and found the same things (and the beer and sausages rock over there. The evenings with the Germans crews were epic )

Most excellent summation indeed. BUt.. Definitively count me as one of those old hornet Haters and not just the deck cycle issue because of the gas. We also had to build an entirely new air defense of the Strike Group Architecture because of the Hornet's short legs, a radar that was at the time very susceptible to 60s era SPS 141 repeater jammer used by the Soviets, no IFF (NCTR SUCKED) and until AAMRAM not so good BVR. With the Tomcat (which BTW in the A+, B & D models could easily handle just about anybody out there) We could extend the "Chainsaw" Air Defense way past 600 miles, way past. Nope and I'm not even a fighter guy, but the way ahead should have been the Tomcat 2000. Lastly, when the Tomcat boys finally sucked it up and became a bomber, it proved to be a formidable platform, if for no other reason than an extra pair of eyes at the merge, and longer loiter times in the CAS role in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Hornet and their follow ons have hamstrung carrier aviation but I'll take it over that POS 35 anyday.

GG, are you old enough to remember when all the "smart" aerial tacticians boldly said there'd never again be a need for a gun on a fighter? That "wisdom" evaporated when our all-missile F-4s kept getting on the tails of Migs over Hanoi - with no way to shoot them down because they were inside missile armup range. Or the missiles just flat failed, which is where dependence on technology can get you.

The one thing that worries me about the F35 and the F22 is their heavy reliance on stealth. The enemy only has to make a couple of technological break throughs and a major aspect of these aircraft will be rendered obsolete very quickly..

I suspect that is why the F117 was with drawn from service rather abruptly..

Yes I remember that, but this isn't 1965. In 1965 the Sparrow hadn't really been tested in war, and the Sidewinder while the best missile in the air, was still very new and had a lot of room to grow.

Today we have the AMRAAM that has been used in combat (a little), and has never missed. Tests have show it to be nearly 100%, pilots call it the slammer. And the latest all aspect sidewinders are damn near foolproof as well.

Now I'm not saying take guns out of aircraft, that's just dumb. I'm just saying if ever there was a time where a gun means much less, its now.

Most excellent summation indeed. BUt.. Definitively count me as one of those old hornet Haters and not just the deck cycle issue because of the gas. We also had to build an entirely new air defense of the Strike Group Architecture because of the Hornet's short legs, a radar that was at the time very susceptible to 60s era SPS 141 repeater jammer used by the Soviets, no IFF (NCTR SUCKED) and until AAMRAM not so good BVR. With the Tomcat (which BTW in the A+, B & D models could easily handle just about anybody out there) We could extend the "Chainsaw" Air Defense way past 600 miles, way past. Nope and I'm not even a fighter guy, but the way ahead should have been the Tomcat 2000. Lastly, when the Tomcat boys finally sucked it up and became a bomber, it proved to be a formidable platform, if for no other reason than an extra pair of eyes at the merge, and longer loiter times in the CAS role in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Hornet and their follow ons have hamstrung carrier aviation but I'll take it over that POS 35 anyday.

The unnamed pilot also wrote that “the helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.”

Pentagon officials said that the particular plane the test pilot flew did not have its special stealth coating, a Harry Potter-like “invisible cloak” that renders it invisible to radar. It was also lacking the sensors that allow “the F-35 to see its enemy long before it knows the F-35 is in the area,” the officials said.

Finally, it didn’t have “the weapons or software that allow the F-35 pilot to turn, aim a weapon with the helmet, and fire at an enemy without having to point the airplane at its target.”

Air Force Maj. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian said in the Pentagon’s statement. Its main advantage is its stealth, he said, the ability “to operate in threat environments where the F-16 could not survive.”

This:
"The clear implication of the RAND study is that the F-35 is very likely to wind up facing many more “up close and personal” opponents than its proponents suggest, while dealing with effective beyond-visual-range infrared-guided missiles as an added complication. Unlike the F-22, the F-35 is described as “double inferior” to modern SU-30 family fighters within visual range combat; thrust and wing loading issues are summed up in one RAND background slide as “can’t [out]turn, can’t [out]climb, can’t [out]run.”

And it sounds like the "Chick" standards were applied to make it look better:
"The second issue that deserves especial mention is that key aerial combat standards have been lowered, following initial tests. All F-35s will sit at 5.0g or less sustained turn performance – a figure that places them in a class with 1960s era planes like the F-5 or F-4 Phantom, instead of modern designs like the F-16. Acceleration is also poorer, compared to a reference F-16C Block 50 with AMRAAM missiles on its wingtips zooming from Mach 0.8 to Mach 1.2.

The USAF’s F-35A dropped the most, from an expected 5.3g – 4.6g in sustained turns. Acceleration will take 8 seconds longer than the F-16."

I must be psychic... or a woman; I foretold this HERE years ago. The plane is a pig and like Rocky says "waiting to be roasted"...

Yup. I have a compressed neck nerve that gives me vertigo thanks to just a standard helmet and mask. And I only pulled 5 Gs or so as an instructor pilot, often on two flight s day, however. Fifteen or 20 5G events a day is rough. I also got a hernia from it, but that's not the helmet's fault.

My analogy of the gunless fighters of 1965 wasn't so much about guns, but GunGeek's comment about all future combat being Beyond Visual Range.

That might be the idea and the ideal, but EVERYTHING in combat turns to ohsheet no matter what you planned. If the F-35 is indeed a pig in a dogfight, sooner or later, an F-35 jock is going to find himself trying to turn with an adversary - and becoming roast pork.

But the role is CAS, not air superiority. And apparently the F22 is the new undisputed world champion in that arena.