Yeah because only LM and Raytheon make claims about their BVR missile :rolleyes:

Sorry.

LM/BAe/Boeing/Raytheon/MBDA/Rafael/Vympel/Sukhoi/Dassault/etc powerpoint.

Happy now?

Defence aerospace companies have made a helluva lot of money over the years by selling supposed capabilities to air forces and governments that never bothered to actually extensively verify the capability!

If that’s the same article that published the elite Serbian pilots claims that NATO pilots were cannon strafing them as they came down on their parachutes then I wouldn’t put too much faith in its credibility.

I do not remember any such claims in the article.

By 2025 the F-35 will likely have 6 internal AMRAAMs or 6+ NGMs.

They will?

Is that at the expense of 2 IR AAMs?

If missiles work as advertised, you’re risking losing aircraft & pilots to direct hits.

The risk is extremely low.

Compared to the risk of going into a combat environment with a doctrine that could be based on foundations of quicksand… I know which I would rather do.

Any pilots that participate could be volunteers that sign off as accepting the risk.

I would rather have airframe losses in peacetime with time to replace/modify them and fix the doctrine than airframe losses in wartime when you have no time to replace/modify airframes or fix tactics and the systems behind the tactics.

Vietnam was a long time ago. Technology has got better.

Allied Force was not a long time ago. That is the main source of my discontent – the “Vietnam was a long time ago” line was trotted out in the early 90s. Didn’t stop AMRAAM failing abysmally in the late 90s though.

The BVR “proof” you point to is by airplanes designed in the 1960s and 1970s, which lack the technologies that resulted from ACEVAL/AIMVAL exercises. There have been over a dozen exercises where F-22 has participated and the results have always been overwhelmingly one sided in the F-22’s favor.

I don’t think you are taking in (or maybe wanting to take in) what is being said.

As you know fine well – an exercise is only as useful as the assumptions and boundary conditions used to construct it.

BVR missiles failed abysmally in Vietnam. I don’t have numbers for Gulf I so cannot comment, but did run the numbers for Allied Force years ago, and got Pks of under 10%.

Those weren’t exercises. It wasn’t assumed if you got lock you got the kill (or similar). Those were examples of wishful thinking running slap bang into reality and being bitten… hard.

As an aside – if I were in the shoes of any air force commander, I would do the following:
– Insist the missile manufacturer provide me with a number of fully functional missiles with no warhead. If the manufacturer is going to guarantee a Pk of X, it shouldn’t be a problem for them to put their money where their mouth is. If performance meets criteria, the airforce pays for the expended missiles, if not, the manufacturer pays for the missiles and must modify the missiles as necessary.
– Perform numerous combat exercises (inhouse only) – a mini-red flag if you will – where both pilots have these missiles on the rails, and can fire them. No holds barred, every bit of radar, ECM and ECCM is available. The exercises should be repeated every couple of years.

Then, and only after examining whether missiles got close enough for the blast cone to take out the target, will there be peacetime proof of BVR.

[As you can tell, I place no faith whatsoever in shooting down a few QF-4s.]

The JSF Partners are just that, partners. They get the same data on the JSF program that the US does (as long as it does not violate security rules).

Security rules are why the data is restricted in the first place!

Your sentence is a bit of a misnomer. If it wasn’t a security risk, it wouldn’t be relevant to F-35. Therefore to say all confidential data will br exchanged as long as it doesn’t violate security rules is a bit… well. 🙂

For instance, I need only point to the source code shenanigans with the tier I partner and thats public domain.

Later I got this confirmed by some Norwegian pilots, however they also added some other piece of information; they had a strong interest in the Typhoon before they knew what capabilities the F-35 would get. Once they learned more about the F-35 they rapidly lost interest in the Typhoon…

That is of interest to me.

However, I would like to see what they make of the comparison when they aren’t mere briefings on what capabilities might be.

What is the chances of an open fly-off between F-35/Rafale/Typhoon any time soon…

I would say practically zero.

Has anyone based a purchase of F-35 yet on anything but powerpoint and promises?

As far as “Significantly superior supersonic agility”: What is “Significantly ” and what is it superior to? To vague to be applied.

F-22 vs. F-15.

If you haven’t yet seen the sustained turn rate graphs in supersonic flight your jaw would hit the floor.