Japanese means getting it past their parliament, whilst in theory their defence industry can export weapons they always block it.

So unless the Japanese have a major change of heart it has to be an up scaled version of another submarine. To me the Navantia S-80 scaled up is the most promissing option.

Dassault has been invited to submit a new proposal to supply Switzerland with Rafale. What advantages and disadvantages do people see in 16/17 Rafale v 22 Gripen?

Better availability and life cycle costs, which would be an interesting challenge considering those are two areas the Gripen is very good at.

The range comparison was based on public statements by Dassault and BAE on the aircraft’s respective performance, and this remains true. I couldn’t see any range numbers in that document. Nobody ever said Rafale’s nose was “too small”, all that was said was that it has a 55cm radar aperature. As for active cancellation, it’s not been proven to work, and if you’re going to assume it does in that manner, then we’ll just have to assume Typhoon has laser cannon turrets 😀

Also no PIRATE IRST on German Typhoons IIRC

Which for me raises the wisdom (or lack of it) of sending German specification Typhoon on important sales drives like the Swiss and Indian fighter programs. By all means have the Germans lead the sales drive if they want but when it comes to actually sending aircraft to be tested send those which have been fitted out to the most advanced standard! It would be galling to find the Typhoon lost points purely because the airframe didn’t have equipment fitted!

The only lower spec version of Typhoon is the Austrian examples…

As for MMI, frankly I regard its as a rather subjective matter. Gripen, Typhoon and Rafale all have very good MMI that is better then that of the aircraft they are replacing.

Indeed the Tu-95 is more then adequate as a ALCM/CALCM platform, considering how new the airframes are (they were all built in the 80s and early 90s) they should remain in role for many years to come.

I was online the other night just going through some sites concerning Russian Military Aviation and one of the sites I read mentioned that the Tu-95 Bear has no ejection seats. And it continued saying if the Bear is going down then the pilots would have no choice but to jump out of the plane through the doors!!! I found that unbelievable!!!

http://englishrussia.com/2011/10/29/russians-call-it-white-swan-americans-call-it-black-knave/

Its not really that surprising, adding ejector seats or a podded crew escape system would add significant weight, cost and risk for the crew. Whilst the Tu-95 is fast and high flying for a propellor driven aircraft its flight regime is within safe paramaters for a normal parachute jump. Nevertheless the Tu-95 does have a rather unusual escape system for crew in the forward fuselage (the tail gunner has to bail out in the old fashioned way). On the floor of the flightdeck, there is a conveyor belt about 3 feet wide and 7 feet long. In the event of having to bale out, the escape hatch in the nosewheel bay (landing gear lowered obviously) is opened which starts up the conveyor belt. The crew are supposedly to role out of their seats onto the conveyor belt which then ‘conveys’ them to the hatch and out of the aircraft. The picture below shows the escape conveyor, I have no idea if it has even been used:

The 52 does provide ejection seats for all crew members albeit a couple are the rather dangerous downward ejection variant:

http://www.ejectionsite.com/b-52.htm

So its width vs length then.

Flying test labs are useful. Just like the Frankenstein 757 used for the F-22 program. However, they cannot simulate the environment of thermal conditions (of which the F-35 has many concerns), vibration, and of course a different performance envelop out side of that of a 737 (CatBird).

Oh man why does it always have to be a negative when the F35 is involved.