– It was a russian helicopter and swedish armed forces had from day one trained warfare against russian invasion forces. Not a very good move to buy stuff from the country that is most likely to go to war against you is it?

Oh I see. Uncomfortable about potentially buying the gear from the “enemy”. That makes sense 🙂

– From what I reckon there were at least two things.
1. Apache was a nightmare to maintain compared to Mi-28. This might not be a problem for USA or UK since they operate out of “safe” bases during the Iraq war for example. But Sweden expected to fight it’s war in Sweden – and against Russia. So that would mean zero time for maintenance and rather basing helos in the battlefield.
2. The Apache failed badly on the firing range – they simply missed their targets. I’ve heard some explanations about this but I don’t know how true they are. One is about that they failed to calibrate their positioning system (so far up north you work in polar mode on gyroscopes (correct english term?), but the americans missed that fact).

– They were offered the Longbow variant, and they had access to the Hellfire.
1. The armed forces were explicitly only interested in the Longbow variant.
2. Sweden were at that time the only country buying american Hellfires which they modified and sold back to the US.

And btw, I wouldn’t believe that they would have bought russian helos with russian electronics. Most likely, Ericsson and Saab would have developed swedish radars and fire guidance systems for the helos.

Sorry for hijacking this thread!

regards,
Castor

cheers.

Daniel

Probably Turkey could select the A-129 but it will very likely need to compete with the Russian Ka-50 and Mi-28 and the American AH-1

I doubt the Ka-50 or the Mi-28 would be serious contenders. Not until the Russian’s commit to these types themselves and buy sufficient numbers to establish a solid support base is any other nation likely to buy them. Of course having them around is a good way to get a better bargin from the Euro’s and Yanks 😉

Daniel

mostly from reading tidbits here and there this page has some good info on it. navy matters has some good info on cvf costs and maintenance as compared to invincible class. To summarise it maintenence cost is mainly due to the crew size, and while smaller STOVL would be cheaper to build it still maintence cost is only slightly lower than cvf. Since it requires a complement of atleast 1000 where as CVF would require around 1200-1400 (depending on design).

thats big if,even on paper yak-41 wasnt close to matching mig-29 let alone its improved variants.

I though the CVF program was aiming for a crew of about 600? Maybe thats just ships crew with air group personel on top?

Daniel

Brazil has the ALX (Armed Super Tucano)

Also many nations use their turboprop advanced trainers in the weapons training role as well. The RAAF has a small number (4 IIRC) of its PC-9s in the FAC role employing smoke rockets for target marking.

Daniel

many allies of the US have their own helicopter carrier of sorts, so why hasn’t there been too much interest in purchasing used helo carriers i.e Iwo Jima, Tarawa, maybe Wasps.. from the US.. some of them, especially the Wasp, have pretty good carrying abilities.

Um probably because there are no Tarawa’s or Wasps on the used ships market with Globalsecurity quote anywhere from 2011-2029 for the first Tarawa’s to leave the fleet. Only the Iwo Jimas have been retired and we are talking pretty worn ships with fairly outdated systems and manpower intensive. Additionally at 40000t plus the Wasps and Tarawas are probably more ship than most medium sized navy’s are looking for.

Daniel

😀 That article is suggesting that Australia buy the $100m raptor to deal with the Chinese “threat.”

I would rate Australia somewhere behind Kuwait (more oil) as country China would invade. Be serious.

BTW, Kuwait has a good military relationship with China (the first buyer of the PLZ-45) and Australia runs a huge trade surplus with China.

Okay I haven’t followed the link but I’ll turn my ESP powers on and try and tune into it. Lets see, its written by Dr Carlo Kopp. He claims that Chinese and Indian Tu-22Ms will raid the North-West shelf oil and gas fields. That the F/A-22 is the only aircraft with the range and the ability to protect our northern expanses from such a threat. How am I doing. He probably also mentions the F-111 in there somewhere, maybe even his own pet Missileer project involving new radar, new engines (to give supercruise) and the ability to tote a dozen AMRAAMs. Honestly the guy has an agenda, ignore him.

Daniel

Oh dear, talk about egg on my face 😮 I followed the link. Its not the article I thought. However it is from Defence Today and Dr Kopp is a regular contribuor to that publication and the editorial staff seem reather enamoured of his opinions.

No hard feelings at all. Simply a misunderstanding.

I’ve heard many different things about the situation, and my last post is pretty much what I understand to be the case. I’m not sure about this optical guidance method seahawk is talking about. I don’t see how you can manually guide something as big and unmanuverable as the SA-3. Seahawk where did you actually hard about this manual guidance system?

Semi-Automatic Command Line of Sight (SACLOS) backups have been quite common on Russian (Soviet) missiles. Re the SA-3/S-125 not all references I’ve seen mention such a system but some do

A PRV-11 (NATO designation SIDE NET) 180 km range 32000 m altitude E-band height-finder radar is also used. All target data generated is passed onto the SA-3 battalion’s organic trailer-mounted fire control radar known by the NATO designation LOW BLOW. Maximum acquisition range is 110 km and tracking range of the I-band system is between 40-85 km depending on the target size, altitude and operational conditions. It can track six aircraft simultaneously and guide one or two missiles at once. For operating in a heavy ECM environment, late production LOW BLOW radars have been fitted with 25 km range TV cameras to give the fire control team the same data as from the emitting radar and allow a command guidance interception only to be performed.

This is from one of my posts earlier in this thread:

Quote:
Yugoslav PVO (Anti-Air Defense) radars tracked and locked-up NATO combat aircraft right up to the 78th day of the air campaign…

Please note that during this 78 day air war NATO had at its disposal large amounts of combat aircraft and support assets of every kind you could wish for. Now if we assume the F-22 vs. MiG-31(M) scenario is occuring over Russian air space then try to imagine how long it would take to destroy all those ground based radars. Factor in, if you want, the fact that the Russians have at their disposal technology that is generations ahead of that of the Yugoslav PVO. Maybe you’d like to revise your comment now.

This is a symptom of my pet peeve with these threads. A complete lack of definition of the situation upon which the comparison is based. Much of this thread has focused on the threat posed by the Russian fixed IADS to the F/A-22 while this is talking the very different remant Yugoslav capabilty. Sure a fully operational and alerted Russian IADS could pose a very significant threat to a US attack. However that system is dependant on a lot rather vulnerable nodes, large, fixed radar sites, fixed comms nodes, large airbases for operating MiG-31s and A-50s and any EW support that may be available etc. All of these largely peripheral targets are likely to the targets for the first strikes following the “kick the door down” philosophy. Sure the Russians have mobile systems and alternates to cover some losses but wether these are capable enough and numerous enough to recreate the sort of closely integrated network of sensors and weapons systems needed to withstand a further US assault using its “stealth” platfroms along with its usual AEW&C, EW support and more conventional assets is doubtful.

Anyway back to why I really posted

The answer is simple. I wanted to point out that comparing single pieces of equipment is pratically worthless.

Agree. I would humbly suggest that before anyones anymore of these this v that threads they actually take the time to think about what it is they looking to find out and try and define the situation. That way maybe we can avoid a dozen different people making arguments based on two dozen different starting assumptions. Don’t get me wrong, as a member of the Harpoon DB2000 database team I find these threads useful as the adversarial style seems to drive folks to dig out a lot of websites and info sources. However the ammount of crap generated also makes them very difficult to mine for that elusive piece of new data.

cheers

Daniel

[QUOTE=Puffadder]Yes but also before that. But as I said, things have changed.

Um okay. Just to be clear here is the original statement

Quote:
Originally Posted by Aurel
In favour of the Rafale is the MICA IR as medium range IR-missile. Unknown factors are the effectiveness of their respective ECM/ECCM systems.

Indeed true. The same goes for the AMRAAM which to date has been used against aircraft piloted by 2nd banana pilots belonging to the 3rd banana airforces of 4th banana countries.. I’m keen to remind you that originally the RAF were fairly underwhelmed by it’s capabilities. Obviously it has been improved over the years. When it is used against a trained opponent we’ll know more.

So you’re saying that the true effectiveness of both AMRAAM and Mica in a high ECM combat environment is unknown. Okay I’ll accept that but whats with the bit about the RAF though. The problems with the AMRAAM in RAF service have been due to the aircraft not the missile, namely the Tornado F.3 lacked a datalink to enable the provision of mid-course updates, thereby severly limiting the missiles engagement range and/or making the missile a threat to nearby freindly aircraft. This deficiency has now been rectified. To reiterate this was a platfrom fault not a missile fault. The only other concerns I’ve heard of was the slight range advantage held by the Skyflash over the early AMRAAMs and some comments about the added safety from the man-in-the-loop SARH.

Daniel