The Su-30MKI makes no sense for the RuAF. They already operate the Su-27SM, Su-30M2, Su-34 and Su-35S. Btw does anyone know about the state of the remaining 4 or so Su-30s?

The older ones? There are 5 at Lipetsk.

Judging a fighter on weight is flawed, and even more flawed if you come to the conclusion heavier=better

Hurricane was heavier than Spitfire, but was it the better fighter ?
P-47 was twice as heavy as P-51, but was it a better fighter ?

I’ve already addressed the p-47/p-51 thing, but either way, really, WW2 fighters are completely irrelevant in this discussion.

I’ve not read anything to indicate they’d be any different?

Anyway, the Mi-28N crash is sad news – any idea of the name of the deceased, and the identity of the aircraft?

Re: Su-27SM: Neither have I , but the idea was floated by a number of posters around the intrawebs. I believe it has merit considering Su-27SM improved (engines for one, AL-31MF1 was not around in the first examples) during the production for the first two polks, and generally that has been the trend with recent Russian aviation (Su-34 gets slightly improved with every batch). Of course, the change could be non-existant or some small software thing. I am hoping for new radar, after all these are not “upgrades” of old airframes.

Re: Mi-28.
http://russianplanes.net/ID36977 The aircraft.
RIP to the commander 🙁 . At least the other crew member did not suffer serious injuries.

We already discussed this in the other thread, but…

Apparently they want the finished array (1064 element, already flight testing) to have 200km range. Pretty damn good if achieved.
The 130km figure is wrong anwyays, even the old, smaller array achieved 150km tracking range for a fighter sized target- detection range is naturally higher.

http://russianplanes.net/images/to38000/037167.jpg

Very interesting. Supposedly 4 new Su-27SMs were spotted over Novosibirsk, part of the 12 ordered at MAKS 2009. Potentially more advanced than previous SMs.

http://vpk-news.ru/articles/7128

Yet another mention to the potential Su-30MKI order for the RuAF I mentioned earlier.

http://arms-tass.su/?page=article&aid=92826&cid=25

Tu-204SM deliveries to customers expected in 2012.

You might want to tell somebody that in the IIRAF that, they’re still flying them, 35 years after deliveries began, and 32 years since technical support from America dried up.

Yeah but how many and how much? for all we know the past 2 decades have seen the F-14 fleet perform very few flight hours, and most of the fleet cannibalized to support the few fliers.

That was the claimed unit cost in the latest batch ordered. Of course, we don’t know any details or what was included in the sale, so looking it at “per-unit” is perhaps inaccurate.