Its not at all far fetched to assume if the plane suddenly rolled at its maximum rate that it would pull the pilot's spine apart.
It's not software, relationships, rivalries, cost, or maintenance. It's obsolescence.
By the time there's a full wing of F-35s in regular service, there will be drones capable of routinely shooting them down. The advantage of not needing to coddle a pilot and having all possible G-forces available will make even cheap drones distributed by corrupt Chinese or Russian backchannels superior to the best fighter jets in the world within ten years.
And a whole wing of such drones will soon come cheaper than a single F35.
Obama should do the same to the F-35 as he did to the F-22 and cancel it before it wastes more money.
The biggest advantage that drones have is a tactical one. And perhaps a manufacturing/logistical one if they can be produced in greater numbers, though at present that is not the case. Tactics only apply if there is a logistical balance sufficient to allow for a roughly even battlefield.
Traditional SAMs aren't quite the same thing and serve different purposes.
Humans are very slow. Humans are also squishy, fragile, heavy, and can't take G-forces very well. (Really, at all.)
> the Mark 1 eyeball has some advantages over other optical systems
These are rapidly going away with machine vision research.
> and drones rely on a passive electronic environment
Only ones with a human pilot. The air-to-air drones that will be deployed at the tail end of this decade will be completely autonomous after they receive their orders.
There is ridiculous amount of progress in a-to-a drones at the moment. Very nearly everyone who used to build/design fighters is now concentrating on drones. There will not be a seventh-generation manned fighter, and the sixth-generation ones will be outclassed very rapidly.
Not to mention that building a drone with capabilities similar to a manned fighter is a very hard problem and you can be quite sure that US's rivals (China, Russia) are decades away from fielding one.
The pilot sits very close to the roll axis of the plane. I find it hard to believe just rolling very fast would seriously hurt the pilot unless the plane could roll insanely fast. A pilot can really hurt him/herself by doing severe pitch and yaw changes, but I don't believe the g-loads (and the g gradient) during roll would be that high.
