Yes, the weights are higher.

However, they are also the only official weight numbers available on the Web, and note that the F-35C has the post-CDR wing size. AFAIK those are the most recent numbers to be released.

Why don’t you write to LockMart and tell them they are wrong?

Girls:

MBDA and the UK are talking four internal Meteors in total, not repeat not four per side. Any further discussion along these lines is plain silly.

Next question: Why is the cheapskate, cash-strapped UK MoD paying for this? After all, we already know that the F-35 has a 6:1 advantage over any adversary in air to air combat, because the nice people from LM tell us so.

Comment: The number of missiles fired in Vietnam-era engagements is irrelevant because in those days you could only fire one AIM-7 at a time. There is no combat experience where both sides were carrying active radar missiles. However, there has been a lot of simulation, with the result that most post-F-16 fighters have been designed around a standard load-out of 6-8 AAMs. If sferrin is right then all that simulation (including that used in definition of the F-22) is nonsense.

And whoever it was that said that you’d never fire an AAM with low Pk: If I think that scaring the other guy into a disadvantageous position will put me in the bar with a cold one tonight, rather than sitting in the desert with a sore **** eating snakes, I am not going to worry about how much the taxpayer coughed up for said AAM.

“Can anyone explain this in layman’s terms?”

It means “up the taxpayer’s bottom”.

So what, either way?

Half the order is already pushed back to the mid-to-late 2020s anyway, 13+ years hence – and what UK defense plan from 1997 remains uncut, intact and on schedule?

Warplanes of the Third Reich and Warplanes of the Second World War were Christmas and birthday presents (combined, I think – it was one advantage of being an Epiphany arrival, which offset having to go to church). My first pocket-money copy of FRI is dated 9/63. Not to mention the much-used copies of the Observer’s Book of Aircraft…

Our current aviation historians pursue their calling with much greater rigour than was customary in the 1950s and reporters have a less cosy relationship with industry. But Green and his colleagues were very good in their day.

However, what drew me to their work was style and content. They were enthusiastic about the whole enterprise of aviation, past, present and future.

They wrote with style, and often a dry wit, at a time when US aviation writing was largely unreadable (aside from quasi-fiction narrators like Caidin or Gann) and their British periodical rivals, at the time, wrote in a style that could best be compared to eating cream crackers without taking a drink.

They blended reporting with analysis, in a way that bridged the gap between the engineer and the non-technical public (or indeed, policy maker), usually without losing either group of readers. For a technology-driven publication, that is critical.

Their historical work was always accessible and readable. Was it balanced? Were Milch and the RLM as much of a collection of hidebound idiots as Bill thought they were? Not sure, but it made a good read.

But on the bad side, I guess now that I will never see Vol 11 of Warplanes of the Second World War…

I could not come up with an appropriate comment on this dispute….

…until now.

And here’s LockMart’s new vp of communications….

Is that Sousa’s Red White & Blue in the background to the helo flag flypast? Bloody cheek!