How was he thinking?

ELP has blooged and tries to convince everyone that the F-35 is inferior to everything out there.
What a load of jalabalou.
or?

Charts like these are popular among marketing people because they can be correct, if you make assumptions and only use special context. Context that favours your own baby, of course.
So, is it possible to find a context where this chart actually is correct? Yes, probably. Will it be the truth the whole truth and nothing etc… Probably, not.

Why can for instance the F-35 be inferior to the Euro canards in A2A against the SU-family?
Well, they have all got or will have the Meteor missile, and most of the F-35 customers have not, so if your simulations show that the SU-3x can outmanoeuvre the AMRAAM but not the Meteor you will get this result.

How can the F-35 be worse than the 4-th generation fighters in a DEAD mission against a legacy SAM system?
Again, maybe the other planes have more advanced missiles and therefore can attack stand off in a better way than the F-35, but I can’t think of how, on top of my head. But it is not I who shall defend this chart, I’m only trying to figure out how he was thinking.

The cost is again hard to analyse, I for one does not agree that the Gripen is more expensive than the SH, it is half the size and built to be cost effective! But if you leave out fuel economy, and look at hauling instead of mission rate, than perhaps you can twist the numbers to make this assumption.

Go on like this and voíla you have a chart that makes the F-35 worthless and everything else shiny and golden.

The thing is that even how much I hate to admit it, it is not the fighter airplane that is in center of the victory, it is the whole force and how it is connected.
My 5 cent.

The odd ones.. Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying pancakes

Sometimes there comes along an engineer who thinks out of the box and designs a concept that catches the attention. Charles Zimmerman is one of these guys. In the 1930:s he was thinking about ways to cancel the end effect of the wing, to eliminate, or reduce the lift vortex that substantially contributes to the airplanes drag. His idea was to put two huge propellers on the tip of the wing, rotating in opposite direction to the lift vortex and thereby cancel most of the drag. (At least that was his idea) and to minimise drag, a flying wing concept was preferred. It did not need to have a huge span because of the vortex cancelling, so the plane ended up looking like a pancake. Since it had huge propellers, it almost worked like a helicopter, and the idea was born for a vertical take off.

I can not go trough all the ideas and details here, but there is a book that describes the airplane in detail: “Naval fighters number twenty one Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying Pancakes” ISBN 0-942612-21-3 It is a short book, and the prints are not all that good, but as a sum up of an interesting airplane, it is OK.
I’ll end up with a quote from the book: “It is probably just as well that the F5U program was terminated when it was. The concept will live on as an unfulfilled dream rather than as the disappointment it would have probably become. The performance projections were undoubtedly optimistic and the actual and prospective shortcomings of the concept and design were being overlooked or minimized.”

The odd ones.. Westland P-12

Every now and then you come across airplanes that looks a bit... Unconventional. The reasoning behind the choosen design is always facinating, if you can come across it. Othervise you can speculate, and that is perhaps equally fun. There is all those "artists concept" were there isn't much engineering behind the design, but there are others that are genually designed and flown.

I'll present a few of my favourites.

Westland P-12:

It was supposed to be a strafing airplane, to shoot at the German troops when they landed at the shores of England. The origin is the Lysander with a shortened the rear fuselage. At the end they put a large turret. To balance the airplane with the heavy turret way back the tail plane had to be very large, hence the odd looks. Apparently it flew very well, and had good manoeuvrability but since the threat of a German invasion declined in the autumn of 1939 the development were stopped.