savage-rabbitI don’t see it as reinventing the wheel. One platform outperforms another in practically every aspect. If some measures can be taken so that one assembly line pops off LUHs and another assembly line takes those and adds some materiels and pops off ARHs then the Army will benefit (although sadly BELL won’t). I am trying to figure out just how much would have to change to see if this even saves money.
Militarizing civilian designs is something that has traditionally been done by a limited number of nations under special circumstances. The Nazi Germans for example were forced to build a plausible civilian use potential into their military designs because of treaty restrictions (the He-111 is a good example). The Spanish Republic militarized civilian aircraft because much of the time that was all they could get because of sanctions on arms-sales imposed by the league of nations. In South America you also have a long tradition stretching back to the 1920s of air-forces militarizing civilian aircraft for economic reasons or using trainers in combat (i.e. they couldn’t afford cutting edge combat aircraft). An advantage of of this strategy is also the fact that civilian aircraft or trainers were and to some extent still are easier to get ahold of during sanctions. This for example resulted in single seat fighter version of trainers like the North American T-6 being sold in S-America as well T-6 two seat trainers being bought and armed but used as attack aircraft while the USAF used them exclusively fro training. During the 30s many S-American nations also bought various sports planes (Waco’s were popular) or light transports and converted into two seat combat aircraft or bombers (the Junkers W.34 was a popular conversion candidate) by fitting them with a gun turret, bomb racks and possibly forward firing guns. Modern parallels would be single and two seat fighter/light-strike versions of trainers like the BAE Hawk, Aermacchi MB.339, Aero L-159 etc and hardened, militarized civilian helo’s or light military utility helo’s being used as gunships an example being the Rhodesian Aérospatiale Alouette III choppers who mounted large airborne operations carrying commandos and packing 20mm cannon. I doubt the designers of the Alouette III imagined it would be used in that role.
I very much doubt that any country that can afford to buy purpose designed military aircraft will opt for a militarized civilian design unless it by some coincident performs just as well as it’s purpose designed military competitors. Any cost savings due to the use of a civilian off the shelf design would be a bonus since for the military performance will always come before economy. In times of peace economy may win over but the moment the shooting starts that usually changes.
savage-rabbit:D:DGreat finds.
My turn, President Vo Minh Triet and his wife inside the cockpit of a freshly painted Su-22 recently arrived from Poland. Such a waste of money, instead they could’ve purchased more modern fighters.
The Su-22 can hardly be called a fighter, these days 🙂 it’s mostly useful as a CAS aircraft. If a mud-mover is what they were looking for the most one can criticize the VPAF for is not buying a more modern CAS aircraft in the first place. What was the unit price for the Su-22s? With those crates being obsolescent at best the VPAF must have gotten them really cheap.
savage-rabbithttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/03/ntyph03.xml
“Typhoon wins gun dogfight”
(Filed: 03/10/2006)
By Neil TweedieIn a scathing e-mail, a Parachute Regiment major commanding an isolated outpost described air support from RAF Harriers, which have no guns and rely on rockets, as “utterly, utterly useless”.
He contrasted their performance with the support offered by US air force A10 aircraft, which are equipped with a 27mm [sic] rotary cannon.
I suppose the Russians are right after all. Declaring the aircraft gun to be utterly, utterly useless on the modern battlefield is somewhat premature. 😀
savage-rabbitI’m guesing this is a passive covert radar system.
So again is it possible to put this in an fighter?
Kolchuga is an ESM system that uses triangulation to track aircraft that are emitting some form of radio wave. AFAIK the signal used by Kolchuga for tracking the target does not have to be radar. It could be a radio altimeter of some sort, a regular communications radio, a wireless computer network interface, an IFF transponder etc… Kolchuga uses three to four ground stations arranged in line-of-sight, which also limits detection range, to track it’s targets so I doubt you could create a practical airborne variant of it. Another thing to keep in mind is that stealth aircraft like the F-22 have been designed to operate in a way that limits the emission of radio waves to an absolute minimum and what radio waves they do emit are very hard to detect and identify. My money would be on IRST and computer backed optical sensors in general if I was planning to sink serious money into truly passive sensor technology for fighter planes. Until the Yanks manage to make the F-22 invisible to every type of optical sensor known to man they should be one of your best bets to counter stealth although like the human eye optical sensors are limted by visibility.
savage-rabbitFor that reason, I think what the PLAAF really wanted was a versatile strike bomber like the JH-7A but had to settle for the Q-5 because that was the thing that only was available.
That sounds about right, I hear the Q-5 is somethign of a widowmaker. Do they carry PGMs? I take it they will be rapidly replaced by the JH-7.
As for the F-16s, every grunt will tell you they prefer the A-10 to watch over their backs.
The USAF’s attitude towards the A-10 is funny. They have been “in the process of retiring the A-10” since the end of the cold war only they never quite seem to get around to finishing the process because pesky proof of the A-10s continuing usefulness always seems to get in the way. 😀
savage-rabbitThe Spitfire had a higher level-speed as the He-111 and the BF-190/Fw-190 against a Mosquito! But when you have to climb in full power to reach an intruder your climbing speed is well below that of the intruder high up. So in most cases you had run out of fuel to catch-up that intruder, which had used his advantage to distance from you at all.
But here the comparisons ended. With an excellent CGI you are able to position a MiG-25 into a firing-position. Through the related speeds/heights there were nearly no margins for small errors or misjudgments left.
To go OT just one more time:
First off let’s separate the problem of intercepting a Mosquito and an SR-71. Mixing the two up is not productive, they are problems from different technological universes. Secondly I did try to point out the difficulty of shooting the recce Mossie down. My comments were based on the real life reports of Luftwaffe fighter pilots and RAF recce pilots. Thirdly what makes you think Germans didn’t have excellent GCI capability for their time? (I’m assuming that’s what you meant with CGI). In a technological sense WWII was the first ‘modern’ air war. It saw the birth and deployment of jets and WWII was especially the first ‘modern’ air war in the electronic sense since we saw the birth and operational use of Radar, ECM, sophisticated ELINT, GCI data-links, remote controlled and self guiding munitions, etc… The Germans would have been able to track a Mossie coming in over Germany from Britain (contrary to popular legend the Mossie was not the first stealth aircraft it showed up on radar) and could have scrambled BF-190/Fw-190 fighters and positioned them in a favorable position to intercept the Mossie and this was regularly done even if the success was limited. The problem was that the Mosquitos usually had excellent visibility and as I said flew just below ‘contrailing height’ (c.a. 9000m or more but this varied according to weather conditions). This made the Mossie hard to spot but meant that it could see the German fighters from many kilometers away. The German fighters had to fly above the Mossie pretty close to their service ceiling to stand a chance of catching it so even if the German fighters had GCI and drop tanks the Mossie pilot and his second would have had to been asleep if they didn’t notice the German fighters. During WWII there were basically two kinds of Mossies that represented a kind of holy grail to German fighter crews. These were Reconnaissance Mosquitos operating during the day and Pathfinder Mosquitos active mostly at night. Other Mosquitos were valuable quarry but none even half as valuable as those two types since they (indirectly) did by far the most damage and the Germans fully realized this. German WWII soldiers are only idiots in Hollywood movies 😀 The Lufwaffe air defense command had excellent radar cover over most of the target areas of interest to recce Mossies as well as their pathfinder brethren and they also covered most of the approach routes. A Luftwaffe radar site would have been perfectly capable of vectoring a flight of BF-190/Fw-190 or He-219/Me-262 night fighters in on recce Mossies or in the case of the night fighters a group of Mosquito pathfinders. Hell, AFAIK it was the Germans who invented some of the first ground-radar-to-interceptor GCI data-links, primitive, but the first of their kind.
savage-rabbitAn analogy; There were many instances when the Supermarine Spitfire wasn’t able to shoot down that elusive German bomber, usually because of defensive fire from the bombers’s gunners, but if the Spit’s top speed was 10% less than that of a Heinkel He-111, well then we would have agree that the fighter has no hope in hell of shooting down the invader.
Actually it would have. Even if the bomber and fighter had similar top speeds the fighters still stood a chance of catching the bomber if the fighter had a height advantage and could dive on the bomber. This was common practice as early as WWI which goes some way to explain how a Pfalz D.III managed to shoot down a speed demon like the D.H 4. That’s also how many of the Me-262s the Germans lost in combat (and weren’t shot down on takeoff or landing) were shot down by much slower piston engined allied fighters. Of course it helped a lot to have a GCI link with a radar station that vectored you into a favorable position. The Allies didn’t have radar cover over Germany so they simply saturated the battle field and especially German airfields with their slower fighters. The same interception pattern pretty much applies to the Bf-109/FW-190 vs the Mosquito. The Mossie pilots had the luxury of being able to fly most of their mission just below contrailing height so when the German Bf-109/FW-190 fighters climbed above them in order to gain the diving the speed they needed for interception the Mossie could see the contrail and bug out. Shooting down a recce Mosquito was a really tough proposition in a piston engined fighter and so was, for that matter, shooting down a recce Ar-234 in a piston engined fighter because you had no speed advantage and also because only the very best pilots were selected to fly these recce birds. Shooting down fast recce aircraft was actually harder than shooting down fast bombers. The recce pilot had to be asleep at the controls but that happens more often than one would think. It wasn’t until the 262 came along in 1944 that the Mossie really began to become a target because here was finally a fighter that could gain on it in level flight. I can see why shooting down a SR-71 would be tough even in a MiG-25 but one should not assume that the Russians were lousy pilots, they were simply confronted with a really difficult interception scenario and they did well considering the odds. If the situation had been reversed the Americans would have had the same problems and the same chances of success.
savage-rabbitI’ve heard that some 5-6 MiGs are in good shape, and the rest are being used for spare parts. Those MiGs must fly till 2011(optimisticaly speaking), so maybe they are saving some flighht hours on them…
If they are carving the upgraded aircraft up for parts the fiscal situation must be really bad.
savage-rabbitHasn’t the Croatian fighter force been reduced to a measly 12 upgraded MiG-21’s?
AFAIK yes.
And also is the upgrade up to full Lancer standard, or just a SLEP type program?
Croatia went through a confusing series of announcements about 28 MiG-21s to be upgraded to ‘Bison’ standard in Russia (presumably the price of the upgrades was to be deducted from Russian debt) then they were talking about Israel and finally that there would be a LanceR type upgrade in Romania. For budgetary reasons this appears to have been downgraded to a major overhaul of 8 single seat MiG-21bis fighters and 4 MiG-21UM trainers. The upgrade included the installation of some new avionics including navigation gear, communications equipment and presumably Nato compatible IFF. AFAIK the Croats haven’t even upgraded their MiG-21s to carry Sidewinders although that should be pretty simple and easy to do; all I see their MiGs carry these days is rocket pods and R-60s/AA-8 Aphids. Does anybody have reliable reports of what the MiG-21’s status is today?
Also isn’t Slovenia contemplating acquiring fast jets and/or anti-tank helos? Any updates on these?
Can’t help you there.
savage-rabbitand if u want aviation here it is: Croatian UAV’s
That’s the stuff….. just what I wanted…… have any more? Some snaps of the mobile ground control station perhaps? 😀
What’s the story behind this UAV? I heard it was used during the civil war…
savage-rabbitI do not like aircraft from the 1905 to 1936 i feel i like more bicycles than aircraft from pre-1936
Dude… you should be kicked right off this forum in a big parabolic arc for saying something so mean-spirited and downright cruel. 😀
Say what you will these don’t look worse than bicycles, they look like sharks to me as any good fighter plane has to do to qualify for being beautiful in my book.
1910s
Albatros D.III
1920s
Nieuport 52
1930s
Hawker Fury
savage-rabbit…and the scary thing for me would be to mimic the Italian Airforce pre world war 2 when it was considered the best equiped airforce in the world with the latest aircraft until the war started that is and they found they they had become a bit obsolete but couldnt afford new aircraft.
The Italians big mistake was to bet that extreme maneuverability even at the expense of armament would be the deciding factor in future air to air combat rather than raw power, speed, climb performance and heavy armament as embodied by the Bf-109, Spitifire, P-51, La-5/7 and &Co. As a result they didn’t produce powerful aircraft engines with good high altitude performance and direct injection like the Germans did. Once they did fit German DB 601 and DB 605 engines to fighters like the G.50, M.200, Re 2000 and gave them something heavier to shoot with than 2x50cal peashooters these aircraft turned out to be every bit as good as anything the allies could throw at them. Unfortunately, by then, it was beyond Italy to produce enough of them. Of course that doesn’t mean the IAF can’t make similar misjudgments but the analogy was rather flawed. I would worry about the IAF investing in to many designs rather than the wrong ones which would result in a poor logistics situation. If India has any sense it will concentrate on a home grown backbone design like the LCA and buy any advanced heavy air superiority fighter design with advanced in country assembly and technological exchange as one of the guiding principles when deciding what to buy. The intention with that strategy would of course be the same as with MiG-21 license production deal back in the 60’s which back then was to be able to design and build a world class entry level tactical jet fighter design them selves. Only this time around it would be building a world class heavy air superiority fighter them selves rather than an entry level design which they have already mastered.
savage-rabbitPretty boring stuff. Some systems, some combat manuevres. Nothing really “confidential”. A manual only is of value if one can assess the performance of an aircraft by it, for example range and speed with particular load, turn and climb performance. Or one can see detailed technical solutions, engineering considerations, etc.
You won’t find that in these Sim-Manuals, which are a first class dust-catcher.The “aerodynamic manuals” given out by airwar.ru are actually of a useful class. OK, some people will miss the funny pictures, but with some knowledge you can figure how tight a MiG-23 can turn and what the excess power at 30kft and 4 missiles attached really is. It even doesn’t hurt too much that it is in Russian. 😀
Well I did stipulate it took me less than 60 seconds to find with a simple search and I emphasize simple search. Personally my interest in combat aircraft manuals starts with aircraft some 30 or 40 years old or older which is why the only item in the above posted list that even mildly interested me was the MiG-21PF manual and don’t tell me that is still sensitive information vital to Russia’s national security. I suppose the next part of my fiendish plan will have to be learning Russian so I can read the thing. My problem is usually that the manuals I am interested in obtaining have long since been fed to a paper shredder rather than that they are classified. A friend of mine, however, collects much more current manuals off the internet as a hobby. His example has taught me that you can get some amazing stuff off the net if you just invest some time in learning to use the advanced features of search engines like google. He also tours military surplus and scrap sales which yield a great deal of ‘hard to believe they don’t securely dispose of it’ type equipment. There is actually a guy in the USA who built several US military helicopters that usually aren’t for sale to the public from parts he bought at scrap sales. He uses them for film work.
savage-rabbitValid points savage but look at the tradeoffs . There is huge cost involved in setting up the damn infrastructure to maintain these jets , secondly these jets cost a lot interms of per flight hours $$ , thirdly they dont have enough life left in them to justify spending millions and millions of dollars in aquiring infrastructure etc etc , and what tradeoff do they have ? wait another 6-7 years and get the f-35 which should offer f-16 type maintaince cost and would be more induction freindly and a better long term asset to have , the F-35 will be more survivable then the F-117 which is basically a night fighter ( although we can say that newer paint and what not can convert it into a day fighter but look at the disadvantages ? , it is slugish , cannot defend itself and sending in defenders means alerting the enemy) . For now the surprise attack on syrian instalations using F-15I’s is a much better option , they have enough EW equipment to GUNK out the current syrian situational awareness.
Well I do agree with that. The F-117 won’t be sold to Israel. Realistically I would say that the F-35 is all the Israelis are likely to get in terms of stealth. Of course the US leadership might start smoking funky Mexican ‘tobaco’ and do something totally unexpected in this regard so let’s leave the question of the sale of a handful of F-22’s to Israel open (although I doubt it will happen any time soon). Since the Israelis usually get aircraft at discounted prices I don’t think cost will be a as big an issue as one might think at first. Any F-35s the Israelis get will be sold either at cost or even lower than the cost price and that will probably also extend to support and spares costs. As usual in these military aid packages the US Govt. hands out the difference between sales price and actual price from the manufacturer will be shouldered by the US taxpayer and I am sure John and Jane Q. Public will pay those billions of dollars with big, big smiles on their faces.
savage-rabbit… I would also very much appreciate if anyone could point me to flight manuals … f-16 block 50/52/60 … :diablo:
Here you go 😀 …. ok, its only an F-16A MLU and not being an F-16 fanboy I don’t know how authentic this material is. But it took (literally) less than 60 seconds to find on Google which quite frankly is midly scary since this aircraft is still in service with a number of countries.
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