interesting vid! think price negotiations are still required! other rumor is that IAF wants another 80 aircraft and may ask the other aircraft manufacturers to re-bid!

LCA Mk. 2 is a different beast. Same engine even! As I wrote well before the downselect, Gripen’s fate in the contract depends entirely upon how much faith IAF/MOD have in the LCA program. And now we know: they have enough.

Far stretch you cant say the IAF have faith in the LCA because they did not buy the Gripen! Also I do not think the IAF needs faith in the LCA they need faith in the Team doing the work on the LCA MK2! Its the same team so…

you cant compare the MK2 to the Gripen NG, again the Gripen NG will be somewhat ahead of the LCA MK2!

a couple of things:

– why IAF doesn’t consider cost? because their job was to asses what platforms are suitable for their need from the capabilities PoV, nothing else

– you can be certain they have sources of information that surpass googling by orders of magnitude in every aspect

– gripen is suitable for their needs in saabs view (obviously) and some fans as well. IAF who reviewed saabs offer says otherwise

this whole defense of the IAF makes no sense! to say that IAF doesn’t consider cost is an excuse to spite the purchasing process because they did not get their Miraag when they asked for it.

If they have better information then google then its all the more irresponsible of them to not have added that to the decision matrix!

LCA mark 1 is not really worth thinking about, lets see what happens with mark 2.

What i dont understand is if the IAF know they will need to beef up sqaudron numbers why did they not consider cost when down selecting from different aircraft?

They have internet in the IAF it would have not been too difficult to rank the aircraft by cost and include that attribute in what ever decision matrix they had.

Well lets see what happens, for me they missed a chance working with SAAB to guide them to build a Gripen NG suitable for the IAF needs.

They are taking so long in announcing the deal I wonder if they are contemplating its cancellation.

the farce has gone on for so long I wouldnt be suprised if they did. As they have in the past witht he artillery.

the news paper on the day of the floating of the indian built aircraft carrier said that it was only taken out of dry dock to make way for a comercial project or ship. The ship will be put back into dry down once the work on the comercial ship or boat has been finished.
it was basically a non event…

The production of critical components is done by computer, not by some artisan out the back with a turret lathe and deft hands.

one of the positives of computer controlled manufacturing of precision parts is that the computer and the machining tools are a synchronised team of idiot savants. They will produce 3 complex widgets or 30,000 complex widgets without any deviation in meansurements and tolerances. If someone wants to argue that computer controlled precision machining is not as good as fred nurk out the back with a hand lathe and a good eye, then there’s not much more can be said. we do it for subs, we do it for aircraft, we do it for missiles, we do it for ballistics. tolerances are king.

even carbon fibre based components are within tolerances of .005 of their defined manufactured weight due to computer based builds. autoclaves press and pop those components with positively refreshing regularity and without going on strike, getting sick or being late for work.

this made me laugh (i mean that in a nice way not a put down way) thanks very much for such a vigorous and robust defense… I wish life was so easy.

Unfortunately the computer can only do what is fed to it by other more falable species called humans, anyway .. I wish the world were as easy as you said it but more often then not it is the computer software that causes the problem and as a manufacturing engineer you wish that the designers realised that just because they couldnt draw something doesnt mean it couldn’t exist…

anyways i am sure a lot of engineers will recognise the eternal design vs manufacturing tussle that has to exist for products to be balance in most senses.