The USAF does most of it’s work at night now. That’s why the shadowy dark paint on it’s aircraft. I dare suggest that an F-35 or any multi-role attack aircraft training base will be quiet in the day and fire up at night. Most enemy opponents have not yet mastered the dark, so they are sitting ducks on the ground for us at night.

What the airforce will not tell you is that most of their ground-attack work these days is so safe it can be done with a cargo plane. There is little need for this F-35 aircraft with all the new drones and missiles and such in the development pipeline. McCain stopped the F-22; too bad he didn’t stop the F-35 also. Responsible spenders would keep flying the F-16 a few more years. It is still cutting edge, still being build brand new and sold to our friends.

EDITOR NOTE–You won that round Rick, but I still own the DELETE button! FYI, your comment count is now 140.

Monty as far as your numbers go take offs yes, landings no,fly by’s no.. you dont land at mil power.. most touch and goes dont use burner either..
We are all guessing really…since none of us have seen the -1 (yes it’s called -1) for the acft we have no idea what V1 or V2 speeds are or what alt and airspeed burner comes off… we do know 250kias is max in an aerodrome so they cant stay in burner or even mil power long and stay under the 250k speed limit

EDITOR NOTE–GUYS!! Please contribute some facts, cut the speculation and the tech stuff. The rest of us grasp only a tiny bit of it and it not really part of the topic. It’s like having someone talking loud on a cellphone in a restaurant about who rude Aunt Martha was last week.

Timothy Hogan, PdD studied the economic impact of bringing the F-35 to Luke AFB in Arizona and concluded that the noisy jet would depress home prices in nearby El Mirage and exact a cumulative toll of $200 million in lost taxes and lost development over time. http://www.azcentral.com/ic/community/pdf/luke-air-force-base-noise-study-0414.pdf

Extraordinary noise is not the only reason to say ‘no’ to the F-35. Remarkably, the design of the F-35 is a kluge of conflicting goals and, if history is any indication, could collapse under the weight of its own extreme cost overruns like several previous jet projects have. The insights of defense analyst, Winslow Wheeler, are useful: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wheeler/a-tale-of-two-pigs_b_402103.html? The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program bears a striking resemblance to a legendary fiasco of the 1960s, the F-111 Aardvark. In the Afrikaans language, ‘aardvark’ means ‘ground pig’ a fitting description for two of the most over-priced, under-performing weapons systems of modern times.

The recently-released F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review verifies Wheeler’s conclusions that the F-35 is seriously flawed. The head of military procurement assembled a secret panel of experts to assess the F-35 and found thirteen flaws—not the least of which being that production is in gear before the design has been tested in any meaningful way: http://www.pogo.org/resources/national-security/f-35-jsf-concurrency-quick-look-review-20111129.html If Detroit built new cars the way the F-22 and now the F-35 is being produced they’d think up new designs, model them in software as best they could then crank up the assembly lines, looking to catch mistakes when customers started driving the new cars. If our F-35 pilots are going to serve as test pilots for a half-baked aircraft design they should get a pay raise.

No less a military hawk than Senator John McCain drove a stake through the heart of the F-35’s predecessor, the F-22 Raptor when he and Senator Les Aspin led a move in the Senate to cut off funding for the F-22. The F-22 was conceived and executed in much the same manner as the F-111 and now the F-35. When unit costs for the F-22 ballooned to $350 million PER PLANE, Defense Secretary Gates and a small group of senators with backbones said ‘enough is enough.’ Despite a $65 billion price tag for the program not a single F-22 of the 188 produced has flown in any of the recent wars America has participated in.