Wow… well, the civil forum is going places!

[I guess if it doesn’t have missiles hanging off it, our pubescent forumers aren’t interested :highly_amused: ]

Anyhoo. For those that care:

– Nothing yet from Emirates.
– A330 regional sale to Saudi Air. 4 more 330ceo to Eva Air.
– No A380 neo, now talk of a stretch + re-engine. I suspect they’ll add moveable wingtips/winglets to push up the aspect ratio at the same time.
– No MoM launch.
– 11 777 classics sold
– No MRJ orders
– No CSeries orders (or cancellations from Ilyushin), improved performance as specified, with another ~5% in the works for 2018.
– No CS500 launch.
– Embraer selling 190E2 and 195E2, but no 175E2. Have sold a number of 175 classic.
– Boeing says Leap on target
– Nothing on any schedule changes on A320neo (GTF)

Star of the show to date is probably ATR to be honest.

What happened to European mil aviation?

Sold to the Americans a long time ago.

I beg to differ.

You can beg all you want. 😉

Although it is true that the RCS is more than a single value, the head on RCS has been used as a reference for quite some time now.

But it (“the single value”) is virtually meaningless beyond power point presentations.

Move a couple of degrees off on the horizontal or vertical planes and “the single value” is not even close to applicable.

Nor is it applicable if the wavelength of the interrogating radar is different from that used to determine “the single value”.

As other members have already commented, there are RADARs out there now that already can track a target of that RCS in respectable distances.

Radar cross section is a function of radar wavelength as well as orientation of aircraft to radar emitter and receiver. It is not a function of distance.

For a search radar in the VHF band, the radar cross section of all fighters is significantly larger than for an X-band.

some DD/MM/YY.

no no no no noooo….

YYYY/MM/DD

Then you can date your electronic files and they are properly chronologically organised. 😉

Yes. But the Russian air force wants a interceptor which meets Mach 4 plus. Pak-fa is never going to do this

Well, I gather the Irish Air Force wants an interceptor that can do Mach 7.

Guess what? Just like the Russians, they aren’t getting one.

Suddenly struck me that what they tried to do sounds more like software project management than hardware project management. What a disaster.

Yeah, but the carrot is you potentially have the equipment in service use quicker, if you have no big problems.

Of course, they should have realised how marginal they were on various matters early in the program and changed their philosophy accordingly.

There was very little usable flight testing in the X-35 programme for the F-35. X-35A flight testing lasted a grand total of one month with 27 flights.

http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=23

That link tells me nothing about the flight test fleet.

Is it separate from the 90 odd airframes delivered within 2007-2011?

All new aircraft need reworking, what makes you think PAK FA will be any different.

I don’t. Indeed, I think the PAK-FA will require more re-work than F-35 as it seems to be further from a production example and further from being built on a production-grade assembly line than F-35.

When did Lockheed began making production F-35s? Did they not carry out sufficient testing beforehand? What’s the T-50 production schedule?

As I said, from 2007-2011 Lockheed built ~90 airframes. The first flight was Oct 2006. Therefore, they definitely did not carry out sufficient flight testing before-hand.

I’ve no idea what the T-50s production schedule is. Does the Russian defence industry or military make distinctions between PAK-FA and T-50? i.e. is the current program PAK-FA (prototypes) and the production stuff T-50?