Hi,
I am searching for pictures of the landing gear, the wheel wells, the exhaust and and the cockpit of the J-7II. Do you have such photos or is it all secret?

The cockpit photo above is of a J-7EB. I have never seen a genuine J-7II cockpit photo.

The Navy has stated repeatedly that it wants nothing to do with VTOL jets so this line of thought is pretty much pointless….

With an accident rate for the Harrier that is 4 times higher than that of the F-18 even today I can see why. The Harrier is a b!tch to fly. Operating the Harrier would provide some uniqe capabilities but it would require really good pilots and complete commitment by the government to never submitting the Navy training establishment to financial cutbacks since cheaping out on training would result in a splraling accident rate. (Not that I doubt the skill of Brazilian naval pilots, I’d worry more about the latter problem 🙂 ) On the other hand the Harrier is a phase-out model that will be going out of service with the US/UK soon so used, zero timed or low time, AV-8 jets can in the future probably be had fairly cheaply as the US begins to stock up on the F-35. I’d certainly prefer the AV-8 to the British models.

A lot depends on improving the capabilities of the Afghan army.

I’d go further, the survival of any future Afghan government will depend upon the capability of the Afghan army for decades to come. That country has been way to badly mucked up by the US and USSR proxy war and later the Taliban. I’d say the Afghans are being pretty realistic about what a future central government will need to get (read as: force) the warlords to smile and obey. Those guys will only respect a government that has the hardware and the army with which to wipe them out if they annoy it to much.

SAAF Hawk Mk120

Damn….. now that’s desktop wallpaper material. Where did that come from and is there more?

MiG-21 Bison with J-7E style wings would be nice.

Shouldn’t that be a J-7D with J-7E style double delta wings packing the PL-9, SD-10 and a scaled down version of the J-10’s radar? Even then, being a new build airframe fitted with a reasonably good BVR missile, it would still be lower on my list than any of the original alternatives. The design is to old. On the other hand a single seat version of the FTC-2000 might have some potential.

P.S. Hamburger, I’d still like to know if and why the Mako program is dead. Or was that statement just something that came out of the south end of a north bound Norwegian bull? 😀

Das Verteidigungsministerium betonte am Freitag in einer Aussendung, es sei nicht daran gedacht, auf Komponenten des Vertrages zu verzichten: “Die elektronische Ausrüstung wird also wie im Vertrag vereinbart bei den österreichischen Eurofightern dabei sein.” Freund-Feind-Identifikationssoftware für die Flugzeuge sei “selbstverständlich” vorgesehen.

Source: http://www.networld.at/index.html?/articles/0506/30/104953.shtml

Translation:

The ministry of defense emphasised this friday in an announcement that it does not intend to dispense with parts of the contract. “The electonich outfitting of the Austrian Eurofighters will be implemented as stipulated in the contract. It goes with out saying that the IFF software will be installed.”

The most that article talks about is skipping PARTS of the IFF software, NOT all of it.

That last article:

http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1949272

At the top of this article there is what looks like an attendum:

Aufregung um den STANDARD-Bericht vom Freitag über Pläne des Heeres, auf für den Auslandseinsatz wichtige Teile der Luftstreitkräfte zu verzichten: Der Eurofighter werde nun doch voll ausgerüstet, versichert das Ministerium.

Translation:

Excitement about the report by the STANDARD from last Friday about plans by the Army to dispense with equipment vital to the air force if for participating in out of country deployments: The Ministry [of defense] now assures, the Eurofighter is now after all to be fully equipped.

It seems to me that some overenthusiastic Austrian bureaucrat decided to play aruound with the magic cost cutting sword and that whatever came out of that exercise has been filed away in the waste paper basket as far as the Typhoon is concerned.

P.S. Can somebody please point me to an source that claims BVR was to be scrapped for the Austrian Typhoons? I´d like to read the article just to get a good laugh. 😀

Not many countries will buy the Typhoon, when it is helpless against a F-22.

Those two are extremely unlikely to ever meet in battle. I’m wondering who will be able to afford them? There can’t be more than ten potential export customers for the F-22 and half of them is already commited to the Typhoon while France chose the Rafale. The F-22 is not exactly the affordable, sold by the batch like bananas, MiG-21 of our times. 😀 The Typhoon and the Rafale are only somewhat more affordable but still out of the pricerange of all but what??? two or at the most three doozen air forces on this planet? The rest of the (150 plus??) air forces on this planet will be taking a look at second hand F-16s, Mirages, Chinese F-10s or MiG-29’s or something even cheaper.