"Thomas Schoene" wrote:

:"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message

:
: Yeah. I know. The claim is that reliability has improved so much
: over the past decades that it is now perfectly reasonable to adopt
: Naval aircraft with single engines.
:
:YM, readopt single-engine aircrfat. The Navy used to have no major problem
:with single-engine fighter/attack aircraft. Counting only jets, the service
:has had about as many single engine types as twins. And some of those were
:regarded as great aircraft (the A-4 for example)

We used to accept as routine much higher accident rates than we do
now. The F-8, for example (an incredible airplane for its day), had a
Class A accident rate of 14/100,000 hours and was regarded as a great
airplane. Note the criticism the AV-8 is taking with an accident rate
significantly lower than this.

: Needless to say, I'm not convinced. I'm even less convinced about
: that whole lift-fan drive train for the -C version.
:
:Just to avoid confusion, the STOVL version is the F-35B

Yeah. Brainfarts happen. :-)

: It may make
: transitions and hover easier - but only up until the first non-perfect
: moment of the hardware has. It strikes me as a smoking hole waiting
: to happen.
:
:True of any direct lift aircraft doing a VL, really. The Boeing design
:depended on having two long diverter ducts with various valves and gates
:working right. The McDD proposal depended on a second whole engine, which
:would have had to start reliably every time after cold soaking at
perational altitudes for a few hours. It's simply that VL is inherently a
:difficult regime to work in.

I still think the Boeing approach made the most sense, based on what
we know about this stuff. But man, that was an ugly airplane!

--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney