>We only have light bombers - F-35s and Super Hornets - and no proper fighter aircraft.
>Indonesia could shoot down the RAAF three times over.
>the nickname of the F-35 in the US Air Force is 'Fat Amy' - meaning that its pilots consider it to be a wallowing, useless thing that is mostly harmless.
>With its 42 Rafales and 24 F-15EX, the Indonesian Air Force is now technically superior to the RAAF.
>The Gripen can be turned around in 15 minutes by conscripts led by a sergeant. the F-35 might get airborne every second day
>Every nook and cranny has fuel stuffed into it. it is the Mitsubishi G4M of the modern era.
>The pilots say to fully refuel your flight of four, send No 4 home before you start.
@hakui Spoken to a lot of USAF pilots and ground crews. The general sentiment is that the F-35 is a giant piece of shit aircraft. However, it's not really meant to be a good aircraft. It's a weapons platform. That's all it is. It's meant to fly out to X range and engage targets beyond visual range or deploy smaller weapons platforms therein or command drones from afar like a miniature AWACS of sorts and then return home without having ever really seen or directly engaged an enemy. It's not a great airplane and it's a hangar queen (read: maintenance hog)---but, it allows---if you buy into the US military industrial complex subscription program---pretty amazing warfare capabilities.
@coded_artist He probably is right about being able to take down "stealth" aircraft like that. "Stealth" here only means stealth to radar, not to a lot of other emissions. But, the point is that the F-35 would be engaging you so far out as to not be within range of any of your air defenses or other aircraft. Beyond visual range. So, good luck targeting it with a camera. And, even if you could target it with some kind of visual targeting system, it would have to be on a big enough missile with enough fuel to get to the F-35 and then also not fall to countermeasures. For sure, the F-35 does hella suck as a fighter aircraft. But, it's not really a fighter aircraft---it's a weapons platform. @matrix
