they’ll both be quite expensive, and will probably see little actual (vs a little third-worldistan type enemy) combat if any.

will be a great Paris / Farnborough / Dubai airshow to see a “lineup” of all the 5th generation uberfighters though 😀

imagine J20 – T50 – F22 – F35 – J31 next to each other on the apron :eagerness:

but what is really important is which one will have a DEW first 😀

maurobaggio I have read that book entirely and am coming at you from a perspective of someone who knows both sides of the equation and therefore I identified the “holes” in the arguments put up by the various cooper/bishop books from the early days (Iran-Iraq War in the Air, F4 and F14 books…). The “holes” are really quite huge and certainly the books do give a very distorted view of the air war if one doesn’t update it with information from the “other side”… (PS, 99% of the sources used for the above three books were exclusively Iranian… despite claims to the contrary… in fact even when cooper/bishop claim to have used Iraqi sources the basic mistakes with the claims were just too EASY to spot… e.g. using iranian placenames for Iraqi areas and Iraqi names! a mistake that NO Iraqi would EVER make).

Finally now we know exactly how many Iraqi planes survived the war with Iran, which lays to rest 75%-80% of the “kill claims” from the above three books.

regarding why Iran didn’t have a “quick victory” sounds like simple made-up-stuff disconnected entirely from reality… Iran’s airforce flew as much as it could… so did Iraq’s. In 1980-81 Iraq was under arms embargo from USSR, it had NO diplomatic relations with the US and saddam had only been in power since 1979 (same year that khomeini came to power) and was in the process of mass purges in the military to get rid of unreliables… but these were not exactly given much space in the cooper/bishop books. As I told you, you need to UPDATE yourself with at least Iraqi perspective as well as concrete numbers of aircraft losses and sortie rates from the Iraqi side in order to put into perspective the various iranian “claims” from the cooper/bishop books… and judging “success”, take into account the things I wrote above… how an airforce of “arab inferiors” with 0 BVR aircraft going up against 300+ BVR armed F4s and F14s managed to hold itself up very well indeed!! flying 8x more sorties and losing 1/2 of the aircraft in the process!! Did Cooper/Bishop mention these little “fleeting facts” in any of their books?

or are those books with 0% Iraqi perspective gospel?

have you read the links I put up?

now going back to the original thread title. The F4 and MiG25 didn’t meet each other in the war.

The Mig25s were tasked with high altitude interception. The F4s flew in low to attack Iraq and were intercepted either by Iraqi SHORADS or MiG21/23/Mirage-F1
The MiG25RB flew high and fast into Iran… the F4 was never in a position to intercept them.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Corp., Fort Worth, Texas, is being awarded an $830,000,000 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee modification (P00008 ) to contract FA8615-12-C-6012 for additional production of 18 Iraq F-16 aircraft and associated support equipment, technical orders, integrated logistics support, contractor logistics support and an electronic warfare system. Work will be performed in Fort Worth with an expected completion date of April 30, 2014. This contract modification is foreign military sales with $406,700,000 obligated at time of award. This contract was a sole-source acquisition. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center/WWMK at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio is the contracting activity.

http://www.defense.gov//contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=5030

I suppose for simple air policing the croats could “rent” out Hungarian gripens which would cost them far less than operating their own planes.

Ok I said it because my BING translator was unable to translate it.

Iranias were able to do HESA SAEGEH;

[ATTACH=CONFIG]216063[/ATTACH]

Looks like 86% F-5 and 8% F-20 + 2% AGM-129..+1% F-18 ?

no. its just an existing F5 delivered in the 1970s that they added a second tail to and ruined in the process… purely a propaganda stunt for the mullahs that any serious Iranian cringes when looking at…

to download them
1- download the gettrddoc
2-open it in a PDF reader / or add .pdf to the filename

First document shows total aircraft availability in 1990. When combined with total aircraft deliveries it tells us the number of aircraft Iraq lost to ALL causes up to 1990… That information is amalgamated on the Iraqi military forum and the total number of fixed wing Aircraft Iraq lost was 150 during the war. The source is not a general or an interview it is the OFFICIAL IRAQI TOP SECRET ARCHIVE recovered from the Presidential Secretariat and was the result of the internal audits. That tells us that whilst in the above OLD BOOKS you put up Cooper/Bishop claimed something like 300+ Iraqi combat aircraft destroyed JUST in air to air engagement (combined with the surface to air engagements they must have shot down the entire Iraqi air force twice…).. we can see that the reality is that 75% of those claims WERE NOT TRUE! and COULD NOT HAVE BEEN TRUE since the planes claimed shot down WERE STILL IN ONE PIECE IN 1990!

The more useful information from Cooper/Bishop is the confirmations of Iranian aircraft losses (although, for example Iran lost a total of 19 F14 tomcats during the war, Cooper/Bishop mention only 4-5 losses in combat! they acknowledge that 19 were indeed lost… but mention only 4-5 losses)… when all data is eventually amalgamated (Iraqi and Iranian), we will see that the war:

-Iraqis flew 8x more combat missions than Iranians
-Lost half the number of aircraft in the process than the Iranians… meaning it was 16x more dangerous for an Iranian pilot to fly a combat mission than for an Iraqi pilot.
-That is despite Iraq having 0 BVR capable fighters in 1980-81 vs Iran having 300+ BVR capable fighters at that time (not to mention EC-130 and Boeing 707 airborne command posts, a fleet of airborne tankers etc…)! Ludicrously lopsided against the Iraqis (and don’t forget Iraq, just like Iran was under arms embargo at that time AND was still undergoing an “internal coup” with anti-saddam types being purged from the Military… in fact Iraq’s military at the time suffered more purges than Iran’s).. yet somehow the Iranians never showed any advantage in combat even during that period.
-Most of that is due not to “iraqi superiority” somehow, but because the combat zone exposed Iranian aircraft to Iraqi Radars as they were ingressing giving the Iraqis enough time to intercept the aircraft… whilst Iraqi planes flying into Iran were not detected by Iranian radars (due to Iran’s terrain mainly) until it was too late to intercept in many instances. Simple facts, no hyperbole or innuendo 😀

the fact that neither airforce made any real difference in the war is down to:

Iran- the lack of effective radar coverage over enemy territory, lack of coherent air combat strategy and organisational mess
Iraq – lack of effective radar coverage over enemy territory, short range of most of its aircraft

I am rather hoping that one day Cooper et al will come up with a “definitive” book on the Iran-Iraq air war including all the corrections and new data out. 😀

Do you have a link to the iraqi counter-claims somewhere, sheytanelkebir?

http://iraqimilitary.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=71

Total Iraqi fixed wing combat aircraft written off about 150 for the entire war. Another 100 airframes written off from the army aviation (helicopters and PC7s) for a total “aircraft loss” of 250 airframes fixed and rotary wing to ALL causes including: accidents, ground fire, blue-on-blue, and air-air shot downs…

The Iranians claim something like 300 fixed wing aircraft JUST from “air to air” shootdowns… when the real total number could not exceed 50-80 in total. The numbers claimed are completely ludicrous now that we know how many airframes Iraq had in 1990… there are also lots of completely unsubstantiated claims about Iraq receiving “secret” shipments of aircraft from the USSR just in order for the number of shoot-down claims to tally with the Iraqi airframe figures (without any proof from either Iraqi or Soviet/Russian side)… just in order to make the Iraqi figures “fit” the Iranian kill claims (we all know how statistically/scientifically “acceptable” such a routine is)… sadly the fact that we have new information about this topic for at least the last three years, the old unreliable figures continue to be bandied about mainly for sensationalist and nationalist reasons… not least because it would change the “accepted wisdom” about:
-MiGs are losers
-arab pilots are retards
-Western fighters are the best
-BVR wins over WVR fighters every time
-Airpower makes a decisive difference in a war between “developing” world combatants (it does not)

Iraq to Receive Final Three C-130Js
MARIETTA, Ga., April 29, 2013 – The Iraqi Air Force (IQAF) is set to receive its final three Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] C-130J Super Hercules airlifters. Aircraft number 5721 was the first of these aircraft to be ferried from Lockheed Martin’s production facility here on April 23, 2013. All three C-130Js were ferried to U.S. Air Force bases prior to delivery to the IQAF.

The IQAF, a legacy C-130 operator, received its first C-130J in December 2012 and will have a total of six C-130Js in its new Hercules fleet. The IQAF uses the airlifters for intra-theater support for its troops and to provide humanitarian relief operations in various locations.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs about 118,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration, and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products, and services. The Corporation’s net sales for 2012 were $47.2 billion.