seahawk said it well.

Second that! Basically seahawk is right with an annual budget of $75 million his suggestions sounds fair. The Albanians will drastically trim their air force but Albania still seems to be quite serious about NATO. They have been recieving rather generous Helicopter donations from Italy to replace their well worn Cold war period choppers. AFAIK there are plans to keep some of the old Soviet/Chinese fixed wing aircraft. This includes four An-2, three FT-5 trainers to maintain jet qualified pilots (according to AFM), one H-5 for target towing (according to AFM) and some four out of c.a. 20 PT-6 trainers. If the economic situation improves I suppose some of these still viable Soviet/Chinese made fixed wing aircraft may be exchanged for more modern eqivalents like the PC-9 or Tucano to supplement or replace the FT-5 and PT-6 and some light transport to replace the An-2 etc. I don’t know about the heavyer transports though. The fleet of F-6,F-7A interceptors and perhaps some of the FT-5/F-5 trainers is supposedly for sale. I don’t think Albania will be able to afford to replace these fighters with any high performance jets any time soon. My guess is the future Albanian air force will evolve along similar lines as the air forces of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia or the Cyprus National Guard Air Force with a modern two seat jet trainer trainer like the MB349/Hawk/Mako being the biggest long term ambition.

PS. There are a few funky rumors floating around about the Albanian air force. So I thought i’d list some things that the Albanian air force has not done and is not AFAIK planning to do:

1) It does not plan to upgrade the F-7A.
2) I am about 95% sure it did not lose three F-7A fighters to Yugoslav interceptors during the Kosovo conflict.
3) It does not operate ex Ukrainian MiG-21bis fighter.
4) It does not operate ex E-German MiG-23 fighters.
5) AFAIK. there are no plans to implement points 3 or 4 at a futura date.

Savage Rabbit… that doesn’t look like any Russian LGB I have ever seen… where did you get that picture?

I found it on a Chinese forum but with all the Photoshopping that seems to be going on these days one has to be careful so when somebody set up an ID-LGB thread I thought I’d use the chance to get some opinions. I think this is a Paveway II inspired kit made by NORINCO (scroll dow the page) fitted to a Chinese Type 500-2 bomb. At least the warhead looks alot like a that of a Type-2 series bomb but minus the removable low drag/retarded tail and nose mounted fuse unit you see on the unguided Type-2 munitions (the sides of the warhead are to flat for it to be an Mk.80 series). I’ve since seen what looks like some of these bombs fitted to an F-7M prototype and the Pakistane F-7PG’s also carry LGBs but those are real 250kg GBU-12 Paveway II bombs but it still makes me wonder what sort of spot tracking system they are using. They must be if they want to have hope of using these things effectively.

PS. I thought the Kab-500Kr-UPK/UNU was a training round?

Before this guess about the Twin Otter becomes one of the “accepted truths” about Central American / South American aviation . . . I thought I’d let you know about AVCOM (Aviones Comerciales).

Saludos!

Tulio

Sorry, didn’t mean to be offenive, I thought the Smiley would make it obvious that comment was not meant to be taken all that seriously.

Seems like a very good guess to me…

I used following links to find some trace on this one..

Scramble lists this aircraft as being Serial No. 774, so I had a look at the DHC-6 production sheet which lists No 774 as being used by Aviones Commerciales de Guatemala. What really bugs me is the delivery date which is listed as late as 19/06/1987. Looks like we got a five-year gap here…

I´m guessing they tried to cash in on the ‘war on drugs’ but didn’t get any sales so they rebuilt the demonstrator into a commercial aircraft and sold it with a discount to a commercial airline. Unless ‘Aviones Commerciales de Guatemala’ is a group of … now what is that fancy new word for merc******* …. oh yes … ‘Law enforcement contractors’ 😀 working for the DEA.

I’m going with drug buster. It may seem funny to arm an aircraft like this one but it seems to work for alot of small air forces in S/Central America. I used to have this cool picture of a Cessna Caravan/Cargomaster packing a Gatling door gun, rocket pods and a FLIR unit but I can’t find it any more :(! The Belize defence force operates armed Britten Norman defenders that carry rocket pods, gun pods and somebody mentioned an internal 20mm and a door gun although I can´t confirm that. They are definetly armed though and are used, among other things, to provide supression fire to protect helicoptes extracting the pilots of downed Ayres cropdusters that are used to spray defoliant on drug plantations for the American DEA. Here is one of the BDF Defenders:

Well here’s another one. Any bids? It don’t look like a Paveway to me.

canpark,
the Ethiopian Mig-21s are great! do you have more or, you know when the pictures were taken?
still from Mengistu time?

I suspect they are rather old. But the EtAF does keep about 30 un servicable Mengistu period MiG-21s in storage as a spares supply (according to ACIG IIRC), so theoretically these pictures could be quite recent. I doubt these are the MiG-21MFs refurbished by IAI, I’d like to get a look at those.

I pretty much agree – except that the Su-39 you’re talking about (with BVR missiles etc) isn’t going to really see service in any air force. But it does mean that if you operate only FROGFOOTs you have a very broad range of potential upgrades. Seems to make just as much sense as putting AMRAAMs onto a Hawk.

Well sticking BVR missiles on a Su-39 seems a bit over the top but putting AMRAMs on a Hawk makes no more sense than putting BVR on the Harrier uuuhh … oops! …. they did that already: