The F-35A Joint Strike Fighter landed in Australia for the first time earlier this week and today it took center stage at the Australian International Air Show at Avalon, with two of the US$100 million jet fighters making their first public touchdown some 15 years after the Government first announced it would participate in the JSF program. With Australia set to spend AU$17 billion on 72 F-35s, the first of which should be operational in 2020, the public was eager to get a glance at its tax dollars in action.
Running concurrently at the site is the Aerospace and Defence Expo, where all manner of flight, weapons and military tech is on display. Multirotors are certainly playing a larger and larger part in any air show, and they're out in force here.
The air show and expo are open to the public this weekend, featuring a ton of aerial and static displays of both civilian and military aircraft.
Jump into the photo gallery for a visual tour of 2017 Australian International Air Show.
That plane is poorly designed. They made it able to operate (poorly) in a variety of roles, as opposed to a single purpose aircraft that could be designed solely for a particular mission, i.e. carrier launched, ground-based fighter-bomber, VTOL, etc. Since it was made to be able to do all of those things, it can't do any one of them well.
In addition, we are entering the age of drone fighters. A drone can outperform a manned aircraft simply because it doesn't have a fragile human pilot. Those planes will end up getting shelved, at enormous cost, since we paid staggering sums for them, and then won't be able to use them, or our pilots will be dead meat against a drone that can pull higher G turns. Several someones need to be prosecuted.