Just wondering if someone could tell me why the Gripen is 800Kg’s lighter than the LCA?

who says it is 800 kgs lighter ?

Temperature is kind of konstant all over the globe at 28000ft.

so do you know at what altitude was the supercruise achieved ? How come there was no talk of supercruise when the Gripen flew in India ?

The thing that needs to be kept in mind here is:
Will the Indians be willing to pay the huge price of the F-35 (which ever model is bought)?

Remember how the Indian’s always sign up for buying things but take years to negotiate a lower price by which time the cost has come down anyway so they try to lower it further!

Will the US (who really need funds atm) be willing to lower the price of the lightning to allow India to buy any? Given the recent debacle of the old Russian Spy ring in the US (what a joke that was), would the us allow the Indian’s to buy their premier fighter knowing that the Russians would some how get a look at them and thus produce a competitive version at a cheaper price some time after?

Sure the US have started selling various military systems to India (the P-8 for starters), but that’s all low risk sales, the F-35 comes in as a high risk item and I don’t think the US are willing to go down that path. So while LM might be offering it, selling it isn’t in their court, it’s down to Congress who I would be really shocked if they said yes!

Seems like the US Govt has given the go ahead to LM to market the F-35 to IN since they’ve had multiple presentations on this with the IN and are going to respond to IN’s RFI. The US has also had NG aggressively marketing the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye to the IN. I’m not sure that they’d market these to the IN unless at some level they did get a go ahead. I know that its one thing to get preliminary agreements from the US Govt. to market a product with presentations but quite another to get full blown licenses, but how likely the F-35 will be for the IN will likely depend on how much technology access they demand. I find it highly unlikely that the IAF will take any interest in the F-35, since they have the PAK-FA’s FGFA, so that leaves a small purchase of 40-50 F-35s the most likely option, for which ToT and local assembly may not be required (as in the case of the MiG-29K). That should ease US concerns over technology transfer.

Don’t forget that the IN is the first international customer for the P-8 and the deal was signed in record time (by Indian standards). The P-8I will almost concurrently enter service in both USN and IN, which indicates that the level of trust on the part of the US is not as low as you seem to think.

Your points also don’t hold any water when one looks at the C-130J deal, for which the IAF took a specialized Special Forces version of the aircraft that costs more than what is being sold to most other countries..And apparently the follow-on options for 6 more will be converted soon too. The deals that are being signed through FMS don’t seem cheap by any standards and the now in the news C-17 deal also bears that out.

One more item- the F-35’s price is not as exhorbitant as many people have been made to think. From RAAF’s recent quotes, one is inclined to think that the F-35 will be a sub-$ 100 million fighter, albeit with export variants at lower levels of capability than the US versions. I’m aware that the RAAF version is the F-35A, but with large USMC and USN as well as RN orders, the F-35C and B shouldn’t be substantially more expensive, IMO.

Just how many non Indian sources actually follow Indian defence closely to a degree that they’d write anything worthwhile on any Indian program ? Aviationweek like well known magazines and even FlightGlobal tend to use Indian reporters to bring in the news about Indian programs..you’ll readily swallow any negative reports about Indian defence programs by Indian journos but if someone writes something good then they’re partisan ?

Tell me if everything good written by a particular nation’s people about their nation’s products is partisan then why do you so readily swallow up all the praise that Swedes and Swedish posters on this forum write about the Gripen NG ? How many non-Swedes write about it ? And why don’t I see you saying “bring non-Swedish sources for anything the Gripen NG” ?

Go to BR and read posts by members?

Give me one non-Indian source…

so a non-Indian is authentic in some wierd way, is it ? like if they praise something it must be worthwhile, else useless..sounds like you’ve got one massive inferiority complex.

cool Rafale porn !:D

As you are obviously better educated and know a lot more about the issue than I. How would you describe to someone like my self who is obviously so clueless that between generating the allowables and manufacture development something went a bit sideways?

Anyways its what the ether says i am just trying to distill the ether..

because there is always a whole lot of work that is being done by stress guys where zero margins are not desirable nor reachable. I am currently working on a civvie program where the biggest issue is weight reduction and the managers are hitting everyone over the head to get weight out of the structure. But the fact is that Finite Element Methods are not the most reliable (depending on how its used, for extracting loads it’s fine, but for extracting stresses or strains, not so) and classical analytical methods don’t exactly predict reality due to the obvious limitations of how to get unpredictable non-linear and variable factors into equations..and of course, people make mistakes, and if discovered late in the program its very hard to make any changes without impacting a bunch of other structures, all adding up to delays. For instance, we tried to optimize a part and found that the original analysis FEM was wrong, and when corrected, the part had to be instead beefed up.

Allowables are based on statistical methods to get to A-basis, B-basis and so on..but when you have a company that has had no experience with composites prior, and has had to generate its own database rather than simply going to a well known and experienced supplier like Hexcel then it’s a whole new ball-game. They’re manufacturing their composites at NAL themselves, rather than simply getting some highly reputable supplier to deliver it to them as can be easily done by any European or American company. Don’t kid yourself that this job is easy or that the guys doing it in India are incompetent.

The fact is that they deliberately stayed conservative just to make sure that if they had made errors in generating allowables or in their analysis methods, they’d have some margin of safety which would allow them to optimize at a later date when they have gathered enough data on how well the structure is performing..for instance, temperature knockdowns..if they got a design that had 1 percent margin and the temperature was higher than anticipated, the impacted structures could fail in flight, causing a possible catastrophic loss. But, if you over-design initially and then attach thermal sensors or plain temp tabs, then you can always go back and optimize the design after you know what the exact temperature is in all conditions of flight.

That is why the design is an evolutionary process. It is optimized over a period of time in blocks. As more and more optimizations are made, they are introduced into the assembly line and the fighter is improved.

if you thought that Saab made the best design ever in the Draken or the Viggen (their first true fighter designs) then you’re simply fooling yourself. Or if you thought that Boeing never had issues with its designs or that it doesn’t benefit from decades of built up databases, knowledge and experience, then again you’re simply kidding yourself.

Of course, from the outside its always easier to criticize. Only when you actually work on the problem do you appreciate the trials and tribulations of those who are going through the same on some other program.

The thing about the structure wasnt, whether people want to believe the ether or not is not for me to say or force if it is true no matter how much the fans would argue otherwise they could not make the plane lighter and get it into spec.

If you chose the right cf/epoxy,
If you do the testing as required for certification
if you do your structural testing as required at the top of the testing pyramid.

LMAO !!:D

what on earth is your education background in dude ? 😀

I can not see why you would feel the need to add a safety factor over and above what is mandated by JAR. unless you have a process deficiency and there is something that does not tie up between your coupon level testing and your actual structure.

😀

What is suddenly causing the knockdown that you feel the need to beef up the structure of the aircraft so much because you are scared that it could fail catastrophically?

whether you chose to believe it or not is upto you.

😀

you sound a lot like my manager..he generally speaks airy-fairy stuff like the para above, that we all laugh a lot about. clueless.