Red Sea / Houthi rebels situation

Egypt may be unhappy, but it's surely unlikely they'd attempt to kick off a full military response. Unless Eritrea joins up they'll seriously struggle to deploy their forces, apart from anything else.

A little russian “pixie dust” and it should all turn to anarchy..
 
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Absolute rubbish. British defence reporting still competing for worse in the world. (and with a healthy lead in that category)

Why disrupt CSG24 deployment, F-35 training, pay the support costs of sending the carrier across the world for a short mission, which is perfectly familiar to the typhoons at Cyprus which have been carrying out the same mission in Syria for years?

Also they mention that the Yanks have a carrier in the region, so whats a 2nd one going to do? We are there so the yank's don't look like well...Team America world police, that's it.
 
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F35 has an 8000 hour life, so 1200mph cruise.. 3000 miles, means 3 hour run time each way (including any taxi/refuelling etc) so not really a problem for the aircraft. More the pilot.
Just checking Do you mean 8000 hours between service or 8000 hours till it’s scrapped?

Because that seems short if it’s time to scrappage.
 
Just checking Do you mean 8000 hours between service or 8000 hours till it’s scrapped?

Because that seems short if it’s time to scrappage.

Good point. Flight time between overhaul/mods/major service. Scrappage - i think most designs/airfames are 25+ years service life. So I’d expect them to be overhaulled/upgraded numerous times before then.
 
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Lots of the air activity in the region is flying in from quite a distance - often loads of tankers up spread about the region as stuff comes and goes from operations, etc. so I don't really see it a big deal in that respect, but it is one area where ideally we'd have a carrier available.
 
Cant just send a carrier unprotected, need a full on strike group and its no secret UK navy and armed forces in general are lacking manpower. Flying sorties from Cyprus with voyagers is no big deal, the cost argument doesnt stack up, sending a full on strike group out there wouldn't be cheap.
 
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F35 has an 8000 hour life, so 1200mph cruise.. 3000 miles, means 3 hour run time each way (including any taxi/refuelling etc) so not really a problem for the aircraft. More the pilot.
UK has F35B, the range is significantly less than the F35A or C variants and the typhoons, would need refueling in the air more often. Also its not 3000 miles to Yemen from Cyprus, more like 1600.
 
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UK has F35B, the range is significantly less than the F35A or C variants and the typhoons, would need refueling in the air more often. Also its not 3000 miles to Yemen from Cyprus, more like 1600.
Either way it’s not taxing compared to the paper’s noise!
 
I would have thought that they would want to give the F-35s some operational sorties but as others have said it doesn't seem necessary to send a carrier and support vessels at the moment.
 
F35 has an 8000 hour life, so 1200mph cruise.. 3000 miles, means 3 hour run time each way (including any taxi/refuelling etc) so not really a problem for the aircraft. More the pilot.

For clarity (pedant mode ON :D) - It would be about 1/2 of that as they cruise at high subsonic speeds around 550-650kts, which would double the time to a 6 hour transit which would be very tiring for a single seat pilot (no-one in the back seat to talk with like Tornado), especially when you start to include the huge ramp up in stress at the halfway point over Yemen. To reach 1200mph (1042kts) it'd have to use afterburner which is extremely fuel hungry and, on the F-35, is time limited to roughly 60 second long bursts to avoid destroying the "stealth coatings".

Additionally, you were correct above when you mentioned that 8000 hours is the total life of the aircraft, not just between updates as you later wrote, so after 8000hrs the current plan is that they get scrapped. However, the F-35 has a lot of health monitoring sensors which constantly checks the stresses on the airframe which means that there may be a point where that 8000hrs gets extended or reduced based per aircraft on what those sensors say. Just as an example of typical aircraft life, most individual fast jets generally only tend to fly about 3-5 hours a week at most for day to day stuff (training etc) if they can stay serviceable for that long, but there's always the various deployments/exercises/operations which ramps up that weekly flying time significantly but generally 8000hrs is a long time in aircraft life.
 
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