I’ve yet to hear anything about the F-35 that impresses. It’s ugly, delicate and loud—pretty much every man’s description of his ex-wife.
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Ha! Don’t be talking bad about fat Amy.
I wish that they would make the D, which would be the A with wings from the C. Internal gun plus longer legs.
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LOL!
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Loudest thing I ever heard was Columbia going subsonic directly over my head at about 25k feet on (what turned out to be) her final landing in 2002.
Literally sucked the air out of my lungs.
However, that was brief, not sustained. The DC-8’s 4 turbojets from the 1960s or whenever was the loudest jet I’ve heard. It SCREAMED on takeoff at a very high frequency.
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Dang it @chipwich you’re making me nostalgic! 
There was NOTHING that sounded quite like a J57 when the water injection hit and those guys SCREAMING off the runway belching black smoke. When they had MITO training or an alert scramble, the whole base shook! Don’t even get me started on the SR-71. That was another one that you cannot forget the sound or feeling of.
Fat Amy is probably my favorite fighter, but that made me actually laugh out loud.
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I think the F35 gets a lot of unfair criticism… it’s too slow, can’t dogfight a F16 etc etc…and yet:
In its first Red Flag, the F-35 achieved a 20 to 1 kill ratio in aerial engagements against adversaries. In other words, F-35s destroyed 20 simulated enemy aircraft for each F-35 “lost” in simulated combat. No other aircraft, aside from the F-35’s F-22 cousin, performs at this level of effectiveness. Maj Emanuele A.Mar 29, 2021
I’m thinking it is more effective than some would like us to believe… I wouldn’t want on be on the wrong end of one.
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Found the article with the sound measurments.
Again, google translated.
So, as you can see in the table, the levels and difference between F-16 and F-35 vary a lot with location.
What’s clear, to me, is that people that are used to hearing F-16 react because they are now subjected to higher noise levels.
It reminds me of a story I read about a family living close to the old Oslo Airport, Fornebu. Arguably one of the prettiest airports in Europe, situated in the Oslo fjord, surrounded by the city.
On the first morning after the airport was closed permanently, the entire family overslept…
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I mean the F-15 is 104-0 in real combat, I’d say that’s pretty effective too…
I know totally different comparisons, but I wanted to give some love pretty much the ultimate 4th gen fighter.
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Sorry for the OT: My dream is to see a Typhoon dogfight an F-15.
Not for the outcome- on the long run I think it’ll equate a 50/50- but for how differently the two birds would fly.
And I specify Dogfight as in furball, not WVR exchange of heaters.
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I wonder how many of the 20 in the 20-1 ratio happened to be F15’s? There is something about the Eagle though. Still a lethal bird after an almost 50 year career.
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I have come to the conclusion that there’s something about all the aircraft that we dreamed about as kids…
The newer ones can’t quite live up to the hype that was in our adolescent minds.
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As a sidenote, a few RAF Tiffies are visiting up here…
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Still one of the most prettiest birds, in a very Shark-way.
It’s not as shapely like a Tomcat or alluring like a Rafale- no, the Tyhpoon is all business. Meant to hunt and kill, like a Shark.
And its cockpit it’s just so great… it just all makes sense. 
EDIT: (yes, yes, yes, I am indeed counting the days until the DCS module releases… and if I die before it happens- please make a thread about how much you like it -or not- and tell me all about it. I still think the afterlife must have Wi-Fi or something)
EDIT 2: sorry for the sombre thought. It’s one of those part of the year.
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It is. But hey, I’m Swedish. Canard aircraft are coded in our DNA, I think…
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@PaulRix, for sure the numbers don’t lie. I am looking at it from more of a romantic perspective. Something that’s beautiful and fun to fly. The MiG-29 is beautiful and fun to fly. But it’s been dead before it got off the runway since about 1985. What appeals to me would wreck US national security.
What killed me was a conversation with an FO a few months ago. He said that they typically fly 20 miles apart. Why does that bother me? Well of course I have zero right to be bothered. But the classicist in me thinks wingmen should be within sight of one another. That’s the image I’ve had since I was a kid. The radar is so spectacular on the F-35 that it is a waste of a platform to fly them visually close to one another. It’s a bit like a driverless Ferrari. Sure it might rule the world. But no one is ever going to write poetry about it.
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I believe this happened when the Super Hornets replaced the F-111 (@Bogusheadbox) at Amberley - the pigs used to basically just coast in while the Hornet operates in the circuit at relatively high power settings.
Again, more a change in the character and duration of the noise than the peak volume
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If all fighter encounters were in the middle of the Pacific with no ships in the area, you could look at fighters in a pure A2A perspective. However, the biggest threat to planes for the past 50 years is the SA threat. AAA and SAMs of all types are the big threat, a decades-old SAM took out an F-117 on a flight that wasn’t planned intelligently, no late model Su or MiG did that.
The F-35 is, besides the F-22, the most survivable platform in a dense SA environment which makes it de facto more effective than a 4th gen (or older) plane that has to worry about dodging and evading.
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