Maybe someone can inform us as to whether it’s normal to start operational-pilot training on a single-engine jet (as the JSF team wanted to do last fall before the DOT&E weighed in) before airstart procedures have been validated in developmental testing.

M Pomme-de-terre, he is, how you say, le fan du JSF… And the phrase “guaranteed price and delivery”, he does not translate into the language of le programme JSF.

S9 – The Norway report appeared to be talking about operating costs, not including acquisition costs, and I don’t know whether upgrades were included – possibly not as that cost is not related to the number of hours you fly.

The 2008 comparison between Gripen and JSF was IIRC based on through-life costs – acquisition, direct op costs, upgrades. The latter is what killed Gripen because the Noggies assumed a very high figure for upgrade R&D costs through life for Gripen, borne entirely by Norway and Sweden, while the JSF upgrade R&D was spread over a four-digit fleet.

Russians have a pretty good record for solving problems in ways that outsiders do not expect. One-piece canopy is pain in задница, because problems fabrication, distortion, weight, ejection, birdstrike. How much worth to find alternative solution, assure electromagnetic continuity across windshield/canopy gap?

“O this I have read in a book,” he said, “and that was told to me,
“And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy.”

– Rudyard Kipling,Tomlinson

The story by Le Matin – which has consistently been puffing anti-Gripen since Dassault lost – is about that well sourced, and the AvWeek quote is distorted.

Like I said….

http://www.air-cosmos.com/defense/berne-s-accroche-au-gripen.html

Tribes – If you read the SAR you’ll find that the 80 per cent unit cost increase is in base year dollars and inflation has been factored out, so your entire comment is off target.

Spud – So now I’m relying on GPS and INS and datalinks and passive IR ranging to cue the radar seeker? That’s a lot of fusion and potential latency – missile tells airplane where it is, airplanes are sharing complex target imagery and sorting out that Lead’s blob is the same as Two’s blob, while everyone’s moving at 1200 mph crossing speeds, finally airplane works out target location and tells the missile where to go next, and eventually the missile seeker turns on and hopefully the target is the only thing in the scan cone.

And nobody thinks it’s worth doing a couple of end-to-end tests with EO-DAS and a guided Amraam?

If you search around for the DAS FPA supplier (L-3 I believe) and ferret around a bit, you’ll find the megapixel thing. When the company was Cincinnati Electronics they proposed the same FPA for a business-jet EVS. If you root around more in FPA design and hit some of the technical papers, I believe you will also find out that IR FPAs are hard to make with more pixels in a given size. I’m ready to be corrected if you find that the EODAS is 4MP, but that’s still less than the rez of the sensor in your phone.

Tribes – If the Australian budget in 2002 contained enough fudge factor to cover an 80 per cent overrun in average, not LRIP, costs (whether flyaway or procurement) plus the acquisition of 24 SHs because JSF is late, then good on them.

Some people got excited about the $1.5 trillion figure, but not many – it was mostly dragged up by LockMart as a convenient straw-man.

The big cost issues today are procurement cost (can the program of record be executed within any probable DoD budget?) and operating costs, which are going to be much higher than advertised, although nobody can agree by how much. And on top of that we have no IOC dates, despite the fact that (on the original schedule) all three versions should now be operational.

Rii – I have had the Norman Dixon book for years. Excellent.

Aussie – You have an industry, which is probably one of the biggest marketing machines in the world, going head to head against the likes of LM etc.

Are you seriously calling the defense media “one of the biggest marketing machines in the world”? Ye GODS, man.

By the way, any reference I made to Concorde critics – Richard Wiggs, Andrew Wilson, Mary Goldring, R.E.G. Davies &c – as fanatics was quite ironic. They were gutsy people who called B.S. on the industry and took a hell of a lot of flak for it.

Sorry, not understanding what sort of “credible independent analysis” you want.

I’d say that anyone who was challenging the JSF cost and schedule as depicted before early 2010 counts as “credible” because they were right and the inside “experts”, the paid shills and the fans were wrong.

If you want the historical facts on Concorde and its opponents, they’re out there for all to find.

By the way, none of Concorde’s critics became rich or famous. If you want to make money in aerospace and defense media, boy, its “PA all the way”.