In August 2011, the JSF program was 10 years and 10 months into its test flight programme. For PAK-FA the corresponding date will be in Nov 2020.

Nonsense. The F-35 is somewhat different from the X-35, when did the X-35 ever land on a carrier? What is the commonality in avionics between the X-35 and F-35, which is where the real focus of any modern flight test programme lies, as Haavarla alluded to.

I haven’t kept up with the timeframes, but I think the PAK-FA program is quite a bit faster than the F-35.

It isn’t. The T-50 is 4 years and 9 months into its test flight programme. The F-35 test programme was certainly far more advanced in August, 2011:

http://www.codeonemagazine.com/f35_article.html?item_id=75
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/f35_article.html?item_id=83

Well the T-50 test programme doesn’t seem to be any faster than F-35 flight testing or the F-22 programme from 15 years ago. Seems a lot faster than the Chinese J-20 programme though?

Ok, listen up. I live in Northern part of Norway. If you guys study our coastal line, you will find our Airbases pretty much located near the coast. That means one important issue:
UNSTABLE CLIMAT, strong wind and Wet elements during winter. This in turn makes our roads, runways and equipment covered in a glaciour slippery icy condition that you will have a hard time locate anywhere else.
My point is, deep inlands in both Russia and Canada you have stable DRY climat during winter, which doesn’t produce the ice we are talking about.
I’ll pick ÷ 20c dry snow over 0c ice with melted water on top any day, when i’m driving my car.

I’ll hope this help put things into perspective when we are debating drag shute on our F16 and F35.

Maybe Norway should buy the F-35B version if there is a problem operating off of winter runways?:confused:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]232430[/ATTACH]

It doesn’t look too bad. Apparently the pilots had already ejected! Interesting ‘autopilot’. It reminds me of a famous incident of a pilotless F-106 back in the 1960s which was recovered after a crash and put back into service.

What are the alternatives? Ignore stealth, build an easily detected fighter that manoeuvres and accelerates slightly better than legacy aircraft and then find that it can still be easily detected and shot down BVR.

That is about the essence of it, and btw, who seriously thought that any successor to the F-16 would actually be cheaper and lighter in weight than an F-16?

As for what happens in the interim, isn’t there still some ongoing contact/cooperation occurring between Antonov and Russia? Or am I a few months out of date on that?

I shouldn’t think there is much communication between the Antonov in Ukraine and the Aviastar plant in Ulyanovsk? It would be the sheer prohibitive cost of renewing production of such a huge and specialist type like the An-124 that would go against such production – although technically it should be still possible.

Hi
There is a big question after the Ukraine crises with Russia. Is the future condition of the Ruslan AN-124 airplane? There is no hope to re-cooperate between Russia-Ukraine to produce this big bird.
So the question is technicality is Russia have the ability to reproduce this aircraft alone in Aviastar-SP factory in Ulyanovsk.

It’s unlikely that completely new An-124 aiframes will ever be built. However there are plenty of older airframes which can be taen out of storage and overhauled for a new life. The Russian air force is making a concentrated effort in doing so…

For example:

http://russianplanes.net/reginfo/459
http://russianplanes.net/reginfo/456
http://russianplanes.net/reginfo/445
http://russianplanes.net/reginfo/458

Sourcing the D-18T engine might be a problem though, they were produced in Ukraine.