verbatimIl-22 family you mean.
Electronic warfare it’s the Il-22.
I actually meant Il-38, the ASW derivative from Il-18 linee.
Being almost 40 years old the youngest Il-38 airframe still flying with RuAF, I believe a replacement or at least a supplement is overdue.
With an MPA derivative of Tu204/214, it would be at least possible to relieve some missions from the aged and shrinking Il38 fleet.
verbatimSpeaking of old and venerable aircrafts: isn’t it overdue to grant retirement to the Il38’s family?
Even if I’m not a supporter of nasty conversions of civilian liners, even less when they had no commercial success, I have the idea the Tu204 could be suitable at least as long range MPA if not as pure ASW, the latter obviously being a more complex conversion.
verbatimI’m not convinced about a light payload.
MQ-9 seems to be the actual benchmark about size, weight and installed power, and its turboprop sports a sfc around 0.550 lb/shp hr. It seems the sfc showed for the superchargd diesel engine chosed compare quite well.
To be honest, the real lacking data is its empty weight, if they went the advanced composites way and developed an advanced profile for the wing, we could assume both a real long endurance and a remakable payload.
About its ceiling, being a MALE seems to imply a ceiling well over the 10,000 ft mark, up to 30,000.
The engine has been tested on a Yak-52, a quite limiting airframe, still it should have granted to actually test it up to around 15,000 ft at least, some engineer could maybe give some hint about performances of diesel engines at higher altitude…
By the way, diesel powered DA-42 has a service ceiling of 18,000 ft, I think a purpotedly designed engine could warrant at least a little more than that.
verbatimI think that’s definitely a RED Aircraft’s engine:
verbatimIt seems to be a RED Aircraft A03 V12, an aeronautical diesel engine.
http://www.red-aircraft.com/engines/red-a03-v12/
The company has been founded in Germany by Vladimir Raikhlin, perhaps is he a russian expat?
verbatimI’ll sound foolish, but can I ask why it’s not conceivable that one if not both flight crew went nuts because of food poisoning?
There is at least a few types of seafood, Salpa being the most documented, forcing hallucynated behaviour similar to LSD’s effects on people.
As far as I know, in some instancies of such hallucynated states of mind, people don’t loss ability to perform practical and even complex tasks, just perform them in the context of an altered reality where sometimes demons hided well deep in one’s own mind find a way to surface.
Have anybody investigated where and what the flight crew had eat before departure, or if they took with them some personal lunch on board?
That would not conflict with the hijacking scenario, just providing a different explanation about motivations and possible goals.
verbatimI’m aware it could sounds plainly stupid as a hypothesis, but provided both the pilots failed at some point to perform their duties (because one of them got mad, or because hijacking or anything else) couldn’t it be a case of food poisoning lyke in paralytic shellfish poisoning?
Usually food poisoning results in pains, fever and swelling, but some kind of food poisoning could even results in cognitive hallucinations, intermittent loss of consiousness and so on, maybe incapacitating one of the aircrew and driving the other to repeatedly disengaging the autopilot trying to manually control the aircraft and then engaging autopilot again when realizing his inability to control the aircraft.
verbatimFrance sold Foudre to Chile in 2011. Only Siroco is still in French service. She’s scheduled for retirement & sale, but there have been stories that Chile has first dibs, & may take her.
I knew about the Foudre itself, I was wondering why Russian Navy hadn’t a look at Foudre’s blueprints on top of the Mistral’s deal.
I suspect at the time, French Government would have loved to sell them (the blueprints), along with the Mistrals, even without actually building any for Russian Navy.
verbatimThey may have 😛
In other news, as has been already reported, old Kara-class hulk ‘Ochakov’ indeed has been sunk as a blockship in Donuzval Bay: http://www.demotix.com/news/4108631/kiev-accuses-russia-sinking-cruiser-ship-blockade-ukraine-fleet#media-4108401
Sad sight!
LOL!
I meant the Foudre class LSDs, French Navy is getting rid of them as not strictly relevant given present budgetary constraints.
They would still be a quantum leap compared to legacy landing ships requiring to actually bring them ashore.
Looking at their US Navy’s mentors, the Widbey Island LSDs, it could be feasible to redesign the hull to make some of them as logistic ships.
Mistral, Foudre and some logistic hull would make a quite impressive amphibious warfare force.
verbatimI hope so. That would be damn fine news.
Why so?
Mistral are fine ship forma the amphibious warfare, the only weakness being a little small for the typical force structure on the black berets.
Bit still versatile and moderna LHD are they, maybe only the spanish Juan Carlos would have ben a better choice.
I’m still wondering why russian MoD didn’t purchase some LSD as well.
verbatimPhilippines has half the GDP respect to Belgium, with ten times the population.
And Belgian Navy is made of just two frigates and an handful of minehunters.
To get something close to a real Navy, Philippine’s military expenditures would have to get at least a three fold increase, way too much.
verbatimSigning an agreement at the prevailing exchange rate is a perfectly neutral way to conclude the deal. Unlike a private business, the respective govts can directly influence the value of their domestic currencies, so putting in a currency buffer actually disincentivizes fiscal rectitude.
They do their national/state budgeting in their domestic currency. International negotiations in contrast usually use USD as the unit of barter.
Nobody’s suggested that, least of all me.
Small currency fluctuations can be again be written off by the respective govts, without needing to split the risk or involving the private sector to insure against it.
Signing an agreement nominated in foreign currency means, actually, agreeing upon terms of payments, not trading upon costs, profits and safety’s means.
It’s especially so in multiyears contracts, where no real assessments on prospective currencies’ values is possibile. It’s quite a common practice both amongst private firms and governments’ agencies.
By the way, it was in a post of yours it was hypothized countries could performance payments in their own currencies but still estimates costs in a foreign and 3rd party currency (USD).
I objected it’s a far more customary way of behaviour to compute every detail of international deals with regard to respective parties’ currencies and then formalize the deal in a globally accepted 3rd party’s currency.
Of course, I stated that too, limited fluctuation in currencies’ nominale values are usually allowed to freely happen, but no party would risk to break the bank because of them becoming too ample.
verbatimIt’s the most obvious step from UAC’s point of view.
Tu-204SM is now at the level of performance and technical characteristics it should have been 15 or 20 years ago.
In a market 99% made of B737 and A320, and with aircrafts of the likes of A320NEO and C300 close to start their first deliveries, there are exactly zero chances Tu-204 could sell any meaningful numbers, even in its SM iteration.
Right now MS21 is the only real contender in the medium range narrow body’s market that russian industry can be confident with.
Foreign parts are not an issue, they actually are a plus: given the current low confidence the global market puts in russian made airliners, all critical systems have to be western ones or made from russian firms that already and indipendently have estabilished a solid reputation in the global market.
MS21 should not, under any circumstances, be used to showcase and promote russian components.
It is the opposite: russian parts are to be used only when both well estabilished by themself in the market and on par or better than western parts.
The goal is to restore russian airframers reputation, to create a russian brand for the final product.
verbatimBusinesses can do that. Govts the size of Russia and India on the other hand effectively insure themselves.
They do the best with the information they have at hand. Not just currency fluctuations, but plenty of factors from international oil and commodity prices to trade disruptions and natural disasters, have the potential to wreak havoc on carefully planned budgets.
The responsibility for which lies primarily with the Govt of India, as does the power to rectify the situation. Failing which it has no choice but to shoulder the additional fiscal burden.
Assuring themselves is exactly what governmental bodies do negotiating with foreign counterparts upon procedures to compute costs and profit margins in a manner as neutral as possible with regard to currencies fluctuations.
By default, it works the other way around as you are suggesting: they deal costs and profits taking in the foreground respective currencies, then agree to perform payments in a 3rd party currency as US Dollar, Yen, Euro.
They do not deal in dollars or other foreign currency to end with payments in own currencies.
Of course a safety bracket is most of the time there to allow fluctuations to freely happen to a limited degree, and thresholds are there as well to stop any compensating procedure if fluctuations becomes so ample to make them no longer agreeable by the parties involved.
verbatimFund transfers need not necessarily be in USD but international defence contracts of the type are almost always negotiated in dollars.
Smaller entities would be expected to hedge against currency rate fluctuations, but not an agreement signed between two govts in a non-national currency.
Are you suggesting governmental bodies do not take care in a multi years contract currency fluctuations even when dealing with partners using a 3rd party currency?
It’s a naive proposition to say the least.
By that line of thinking, any not US administration would not be able to foresee and plan expenditures at all.
In this specific deal, Rupee has lost around 1/3 of its value against US Dollar in the last 10 years, with several fluctuation endured meanwhile.
One should wonder which way they could allocate funds for any international deal whenever the lifespan extend over a few months.
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