Yes, the F-22 is the one that works. It works well enough the US is not selling them to its allies, but they are selling the F-35 (to anybody stupid enough to buy them).
You mean many of the elite militaries on the planet? Israel for example is not known for buying non-working trash as a primary to defend its skies with. Over time the majority of the best militaries will all fly the F35.
Turkey must be a joke according to your premise, that's why they're so eager to get their hands on the F35. No, in fact Turkey has a top ~20 military in capability.
"Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom currently are in formal partnership with the United States on the F-35 program. Israel, Japan and South Korea have made orders through the foreign military sales process. Belgium also recently signed on to purchase platforms." [1]
The F35 is the second best fighter that can be purchased, behind the F22. Its technology platform is superior to the F22 and far beyond anything anyone else has. Russia can't get their 5th gen planes to operate properly or get them into volume production (despite numerous failed declarations of such, and 20 years of development). China hasn't demonstrated that capability yet either. They're both two decades behind the US in 5th gen planes. The other European powers aren't even on the map when it comes to producing domestic 5th gen, they can't step up to that level at all.
Over time the majority of the best militaries will be shooting F35s out of the sky with 40-year-old fighters. That's assuming the F35s can even take off, given how they need an ALIS download before they can fly, and that's dependent on a working Internet, and assuming they don't break up in flight due to excessive G-forces, and assuming the pilot doesn't have to eject, because lightweight pilots have a 23% chance of dying during ejection because of the heavy helmet. And assuming the F35 didn't run out of fuel before the battle, because it doesn't have enough range for real missions.
So yeah, I'm saying all those militaries buying F35s are either stupid or desperate.
Turkey won't be buying F35s because they bought missiles from the Russians. This is going to be a very good thing for Turkey's national security in the long run; they just don't know it yet.
If the following reports are to be believed, the F35 is overdesigned, overpriced, doesn't work, and cannot be made to work. It's a piece of absolute crap. Are all these reports wrong?
ALL new military hardware has flaws. All. Pick any and I can guarantee there were some "major" flaws.
Let's take the beloved A-10.
> When A-10 full-rate production was first authorized the aircraft's planned service life was 6,000 hours. A small reinforcement to the design was quickly adopted when the A-10 failed initial fatigue testing at 80% of testing
> Fatigue testing for the new target quickly discovered serious cracks at Wing Station 23 (WS23) where the outboard portions of the wings are joined to the fuselage. The first production change was to add cold working at WS23 to address this problem. Soon after that, the Air Force determined that the real-world A-10 fleet fatigue was more harsh than estimated, forcing them to change their fatigue testing, introducing "spectrum 3" equivalent flight-hour testing
> Spectrum 3 fatigue testing started in 1979. This round of testing quickly determined that more drastic reinforcement would be needed.
This BS went on for a while.
> A fourth, even more drastic change was initiated with aircraft #582, again to address the problems discovered with spectrum 3 testing.
582 aircraft built and they were still fixing major problems!
Let's take another one. F-16.
> Its actual first flight occurred accidentally during a high-speed taxi test on 20 January 1974. While gathering speed, a roll-control oscillation caused a fin of the port-side wingtip-mounted missile and then the starboard stabilator to scrape the ground, and the aircraft then began to veer off the runway. The test pilot, Phil Oestricher, decided to lift off to avoid a potential crash, safely landing six minutes later.
> One change made during production was augmented pitch control to avoid deep stall conditions at high angles of attack. The stall issue had been raised during development, but had originally been discounted. Model tests of the YF-16 conducted by the Langley Research Center revealed a potential problem, but no other laboratory was able to duplicate it. YF-16 flight tests were not sufficient to expose the issue; later flight testing on the FSD aircraft demonstrated there was a real concern. In response, the area of the horizontal stabilizer were increased by 25% on the Block 15 aircraft in 1981 and later retrofitted to earlier aircraft.
F-16 seems to have been more smoothly than most as it was designed to be cheaper to build and maintain, smaller and simpler than other aircraft used at the time.
I will not include the F-14 because this would turn this comment into a book. Even the F-4's classic look is due to issues they discovered during wind tunnel testing.
So chill out. When you are trying to design a system thats way more capable than the predecessors you are bound to run into issues noone has encountered before. Same thing when you are trying new designs (see the Osprey).
You may complain about the costs, and if you are a taxpayer that's fair. It doesn't mean that it's crap. It definitely isn't. The radar alone is worth it.
