Interesting archived Flight article on Su-24MK buddy refueling with the UPAZ pod:

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1992/1992%20-%200424.html

For designing a LO airframe, they have.

For the engines…with all the LO compromises…well, that’s another story.

Sorry whilst Iranian material science development has been coming on leaps and bounds the last few years (their Science and University sector is one of the fastest growing the world) there is no way they up to design a full LO airframe as of yet. At most they might be able to do research and computer modeling on the subject to allowing incorporation of LO features into current designs but a full airframe is another thing. As for engines its the same old problem that any country wanting to develop indigenous ones … its VERY difficult. They are decades away from developing their own fighter engine core. At most they might be able to develop a reverse engineered J85 (something they have apparently been working on) and later maybe some form of augmented J79 using technology from the TF30.

Well considering the problems they had with the wingtip to wingtip refueling system that was outright dangerous I can see how they would see it as logical to adopt the western probe drogue design.

Technical details about western probe and drogues are hardly top secret so data would of been easily sourced also they had access to plenty of probes and maybe even some buddy pods from shot down or crashed USN/Marine Corp jets over Vietnam.

A&P group have docks big enough for that kind of work.

Nothing mysterious about it obligatory, any airforce with reasonable utilisation rates like Canada will have a pool of aircraft that they rotate between squadron use, maintenance and storage. If they didn’t aircraft availability would dwindle as aircraft need repair, it also helps maintain the out of service date by spreading airframe life evenly across the fleet by rotation between storage and squadron use.

Its something that detractors of the number of RAF Typhoons purchased don’t understand, the less you buy the sooner the out of service date is as utilisation is spread over a smaller pool of aircraft.

The site needs an overall history of the program exploring the politics and decisions that led to the ATF program followed by an overview of the YF-23’s development in comparison to the YF-22 through to the eventual selection of the Raptor. An overview of the engine development would be good as well…

Finally get rid of the visit counter at the bottom of the homepage they make sites look amateurish.

Oh thats easy!:D

“Waste of oxygen”!

Again, I wouldn’t disagree with you, but the same is true of both flavours of blue-suiters.
Could also debate some of the projects you picked, but that is not for this thread, or indeed forum

My key point in this respect is over the years I have seen thousands of newspaper column inches, web reports and blogs about the evils of the light and dark blue procurement bungles whilst the pongos seem to go under the radar!

Oh and I carefully chose that list:D each program was either late, over budget, technically flawed, under performing, unnecessary or cancelled after much money spent and officers kept in work! Yet I don’t see Lewis Page of the Register writing much reports about them…