step away from the crack pipe.

Hmm. Just thought of something since we are doing “what ifs”. Looks like it could be made more durable and be a good jet for a RN cat style aircraft carrier.

Cute, but looks like it has about as much endurance as a MiG-29 or Hornet. Two engines burning per hour and not much space for internal gas.

Hmmm . Don’t know about a C-130 AEW. Sounds good if that is all you can afford. The Hawkeye had one big advantage, It could run off of an aircraft carrier.

A large body AEW jet has a few advantages:

*Endurance
*Speed/Mobility ( a lot more 1000’s of square miles of coverage per hour than a slower turbo-prop.

Advantage of the smaller Turbos:
*Cheaper
*Get into smaller fields
*Common platform with your other mission airframes ( Cargo-C-130 ) (Sub hunt- P-3 ) etc.

I think turbo prop AEW jets are very very useful and would work for a large amount of users, Just for some larger users they wouldn’t be up to the task.

Well if someone has copies of the agreements the various partners signed then we would be all better off instead of over-reacting. In order for x country to hand over y millions of $$$ I am sure there is a really detailed contract covering all this. Best to get someone who has read those things rather than guessing.

I beleive you are right. The JSF should be considered if you want a striker. But I would say it is way more multirole than the Super Slow Hornet.

I think time will show that the JSF will be going over budget for more conventional reasons. ( It was a bid process and “becareful what you ask for… you might get it” ) If the bid had a requirement in the very begining of a price ceiling with penalties, you would have had more realistic bids by Boeing and LM originally.

As for protecting certain gizmos on the jet. I have no problem with that. Protecting a companies original creative work. I am sure if you end up with IAI tech in the jet, Aussie tech in parts of the jet, BAE etc. that they have the same protections written in to protect their original processes. If Dassault or HAL etc were involved, I am sure they would want the same thing on their gizmos.

I don’t know how it is going to “match” the JSF if you don’t have a complete netcentric ( secure, modern, ) network to log onto and have no family of all wheather cheap PGMs tied into that network.( this network includes secure C3, off board sensors that are on the network like U2, UAVs of all flavors, Rivet Joint, JSTARs, trained G-FACs, etc. Lots and lots of capability missing. Good luck on your comparison.

The network is a big part of the new strike warfare. If you aren’t considering that, there is no comparison.

Originally posted by keltic
We can´t generalize, but I would say that many third world countries pilots, are more skilled because they have a really hard hard live trainning with the elements; flying wrecks, bad weather, badly equiped airports, complicated orography and hard situations all the time. Real guts and risky decissions all the time. Harder than landing a modern A320 in Munich for instance….a piece of cake.

I wonder. That could also mean that they don’t get the top quality safety training and sim time that, for example, some here on the forum get. Also that kind of a poor safety environment will catch up with you. I would say it takes a completely different kind of pilot out of the worst of the hazard airlines. One that is willing to roll the dice vs. a pro here on this forum that is trained not to roll the dice based on a few generations of quality industy experience to get them to where they are today. I don’t think I would fly on a bush pilot airline that uses bad, unmaintained equipment and makes “risky decisions.” I understand some people don’t have that choice. I don’t see anything that means the bush airline might be more skilled, just the ones that are still alive are more lucky. My 2 cents from seeing numberous aircraft accidents, taking photos of them and hanging out with the accident investigators for weeks at a time. I’ve seen what risk and bad decisions and poor / failed equipment do in that environment. Like all major aircraft accidents, its the bad day where a bunch of little things that aren’t quite right, ruin it for you. I don’t think many here in the world of auto-throttles and fancy jets are short of the core fundimentals. Thats the other advantage of a first line airline. Ones that can’t hack it or start to fail those fundimentals are usually detected and weeded out. The low dollar bush airline doesn’t have that kind of luxery to take a pilot out of the cockpit. The big leap here that they have a mechanism in place to do proper certification. Kind of hard to believe in an enviornment where poor machines and maintenance are common. Most likley is that you have more air crew in that environment that slip through the cracks and don’t have the same safety mindset and or certification to do the job up to scratch.

I’m sure one of the pros here could comment better on that than I could.