The A-10 and Su-25 frogfoot are great planes but I have three competing designs somewhere in my mind 😀 which I wish this esteemed forum to weigh on. The basic parameters are:

1. Has to be single engined as part of a wider military-industrial plan.
2. Rugged, STOL platform
3. Low cost, cheap, easy to mass produce.
4. Has to run either on diesel or gasoline

Your requirements are poor.

1 & 2 are not mutually exclusive, but are diametrically opposed.

As for 3 – the cost of fast-jet pilot training was about £6 million ($9 million) per pilot 15 years ago.

If you insist on using an aircraft for CAS in contested airspace… then F-15E or Su-34. Both are man enough to hold their ground in an A2A fight without immediately resorting to being a mission-kill and have a non-negligible A2G persistence.

I have been watching this SABRE engine for a few years now… eagerly watching at that.

Its pretty much why I have little interest in the SCRAMjet stuff DARPA have been working on. SABRE will* make it obsolete before it ever becomes useful.

*assuming SABRE is brought to TRL8/TRL9 on a reasonable timescale.

For COIN operations, you’d be safer flying a large number of blimps at 40 kft with a large loadout of PGMs than getting particular (relatively expensive) jets to perform the same role (bomb truck).

The grunts call through to the controllers asking for and perhaps designating for any particular PGM in any particular area. The controllers drop them as requested.

No fuel, no pilot, great persistence (there is already work on cargo blimps capable of carrying ~30 tonnes… fancy 250 SDBs up in the sky at your immediate call?)

[Your SDB range from stationary at 40 kft would be ~90 km given a vertical descent to 30kft to gather speed (~200m/s = 450 mph) and then a glide profile at 1:10 ratio to the target]

Time to impact ~ 10 mins from first call…

Question: Why do we need extra airport capacity ?

Because the number of people looking to fly is exceeding the capacity of the aircraft currently designated to the available aircraft slots.

2 high-level solutions:

– Mandate bigger aircraft
– Increase number of slots available

Why do we need another Hub.

That is a question for the airline planners. What are the passenger flight patterns into out of the various airports?

I personally think a proper fix is needed, not the “band-aid” option of another runway at heathrow.

Those making the decisions need to man-up and make a hard decision – expand Gatwick and/or Stansted or another new airport somewhere. All of which need equipped with high speed rail links that run to the city centre and integrate with the subway system.

It’ll be expensive – the bean counters will be very quick to point that out. They won’t be so quick to point out the price of not doing it.

It’s a nice idea, but I think it looks like UK hasn’t the resolve or capability to make its own fast jets any more.

Hmmm… I would dispute that.

The airframer still exists (BAeS), the engine manufacturer still exists (R-R), the systems groups still exist* (Marshalls/Thales/Eaton/Goodrich/Marconi/GKN etc).

*By this I mean the valuable engineering knowledge in design offices within the UK, even if the companies are international.

I believe the talent and knowledge exists within the UK to still design a cutting edge fast jet, in pretty much any guise.

But, the political will is simply not there – and to be honest, as a UK taxpayer – I wouldn’t want to see my money wasted on it.

How many Joe Public are interested in the type of plane they are going to fly on when they book? Not many I would suggest.

Because right now there are no general safety concerns (in the minds of the public) about any particular commonly used aircraft.

A few more high profile issues and that can change. Would you have happily taken your family on a DH Comet in late 1954?

Take say, a nightmare scenario that hopefully won’t happen; the lightning strike protection fails and there is a 787 lost with all on-board. That will be on top of the battery problems and electrical issues. There won’t just be the usual public panic from the tinfoil hat crowd… many quite knowledgeable folk will start thinking Boeing have cut one corner too many in getting the 787 out. Once you get a few talking heads on the news saying its not safe… well… good luck selling (many) more of that particular plane.

The PDF on a 777 is very easy to understand and no one else has complained about it:

I don’t think understanding is the problem – I think its a question of not paying attention to the primary flight parameters. Getting distracted by the myriad other information presented.

Hence my thinking of putting them somewhere, permanently, where they are simply too intrusive in the pilots eye-line to be ignored, or rather, not observed.

probably not jointly develloped with the Marines as much as was the F35.

I don’t believe the USN would be that stupid twice in a row.