qwertyWithout disputing what you copiously wrote, let’s use logic.
The test was done.
The comments were made.
The pilot is not an idiot because he is a test pilot (+most pilots are not idiots)
The scenario in all likelihood didn’t play out as you outlined because the report stated “basic BFM in offensive, defensive and neutral setups”. That pretty much indicates that the F-16 wasn’t there to simply provide a visual que for the F-35 pilot. Besides they could have used another F-35 for that or a Talon!To be honest, I am making an assumption here, that the F-35 limits were removed for the test. In my mind it is pointless to do the test with the limits on. I think it is logical to assume they were removed.
I have to agree with you. Generally I think that the best pilots in any air force big enough to have such job openings are the test pilots which has been true since WWI. Being a test pilot is not punishment for the dunces who weren’t good enough to fly fighters, it’s fighter jocks who (with some notable exceptions) are usually the ones who weren’t good enough to be offered a position as test pilots. If this guy is for real and if he says the F-35 is a turkey then then he can probably fly rings around most of the USAF’s supply of full-of-themselves fighter jocks even when they are flying better aircraft than he is and I’m going to take what he has to say seriously.
qwertyWhile some people here are fantasizing about MiG 35’s with R-33/37 missiles and I’ll eat my hat if that ever happens (I have one made of liquorice for just such an occasion). What Iraq needs at the moment and will continue to need in the foreseeable future is, and in the following order: Attack helicopters and gunships, a proper airlift capacity, big nasty bomb trucks with a self defence suite capable of fending off a MANAPD or tactical SAM that ISIS might capture from Assad’s thugs and UCAVs. Fighters are a distant fifth priority and when it comes to fighters they’d be perfectly served with bog standard MiG-35s or F-16s but I’d still trust the Americans to sell them better aircraft and train the Iraqis better than the Russians ever will. Iraq is not going to war with Saudi Arabia, Jordan poses no threat, Iran has special forces helping them out and is flying air strikes in Iraq, Syria is in no fit state to invade them and they are in no fit state to invade Syria. Assuming they aren’t dumb enough to p**s off the Israelis, that leaves who? The Kurds which (1) the US/EU will never let them attack (2) even if they do attack the Kurds they will never be able to take on the Peshmerga with state the Iraqi ground forces are in at the moment (3) if they ever get their ground forces trained up to the point that they can take on the Peshmerga they won’t need MiG35s, F-16s or Rafales for that fight, just Attack helicopters & gunships, transports, big nasty bomb trucks and UCAVs.
qwertyThey won’t have the F-35 until around 2017 and will only have a couple dozen.
Is all of this haste to dispose of the A-10 really all about freeing up resources to get that overpriced turkey otherwise known as the F-35 into service? At least I’ve seen that written and stated in several discussions about the retirement of the A-10. If that is true then retiring one of the most successful CAS aircraft in history would not be a mistake, it would be an act of monumental stulidity. Especially since the A-10 is still pretty useful. Unless the USAF has a replacement lined up because I don’t see the F-35 as an adequate replacement for the A-10 in the CAS role (never mind the fact that using the F-35 for CAS missions would be a waste of F-35s). Selling off mothballed A-10s would be a bad idea as well if it is done in large numbers since as far as I know manufacturing major airframe spares for the A-10 is not economical nor is restarting production and using mothballed aircraft for parts would seem useful. The Brits retired all but a few operational recon Canberras and scrapped the surplus airframes in a fit of frugality. Years late they were reduced to cannibalizing museum exhibits for spare parts. I’d prefer to keep surplus airframes in storage for future use.
qwertyit is not ambitious design relative to money and time spent in developing it. ambitious mean fast development at minimum cost.
No, that’s thrift. If you want low costs go with time tested technology and buy a bunch of upgraded C-130s. It’s not people who always go with traditional time tested methods that advance technology, it’s people who take risks and try something new. Ambitious design is doing something new and innovative which can be expensive and is likely to lead to cost overruns due to teething troubles because developing new technology is inherently risky. One can justly criticize Airbus for underestimating the costs and complexity of the A400M but I won’t dump on them for trying to produce a modern design.
qwertyThere was a flight in Spain on Tuesday, with the head of Airbus Miitary Aircraft aboard.
Mike Currill,
why do you expect many crashes of A400Ms? Other Airbus aircraft haven’t had many crashes. They have good safety records. Why do you think the A400M, alone of Airbus types, is unsafe?
One crash does not have to be the end of the world for a military aircraft, especially if it is an ambitious design and the A400M is a fairly ambitions design even if it may only appear to be a hum-drum military transport at first glance. It’s TP400 engines are the most powerful single-rotation turboprop engines in the world and the TP400 is the third most powerful turboprop in the world after the Kuznetsov NK-12 (1950s vintage) and the Progress D-27 (A 1980s design?) in other words the most powerful turboprop to go into production in 30 years and the most powerful ever to make it into operational service outside of Russia. The aircraft is to a large extent built from carbon-fiber reinforced polymers and the complexity of the A400Ms software system is pretty high. When you are doing that level of computer integration of the controls and the engines I’m not surprised that there are development hiccups, even fatal ones. I’m also not surprised that Airbus’ bean counters under estimated the extent of the troubles and the amount of cost increases that would come with them. It’s more the exception than the rule that bean counters get these things right.
qwertyI’m no expert on these matters, but as I understand it. The CVR and FDR can help to tell what went wrong.
You often need evidence from the wreckage to tell why it went wrong.
Der Spiegel reports that a heavily injured Airbus worker who survived the crash has confirmed to investigators that the crash was caused by multiple engine failures just after takeoff:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/a400m-ueberlebender-berichtet-von-triebwerkschaden-a-1033103.html
qwertyThey still wouldn’t be afforded a lot of protection from SAMs even at 8km away. If however you swapped the Hellfires for Brimstone IIs, that would then extend range significantly. Although there’s currently only 1 MANPADS capable of hitting it at that range, the future could conceivably bring more. Don’t need fighters, they would also be vulnerable to Vikhr-M missiles on Russian helicopters at that range, which have a very good resistance to jamming due to the nature of the guidance. You’re forgetting the S-400 wrt Polish AF fighters though and terrain could make low-level 8km engagements tricky to impossible at times, that much I can tell you after flying simulator-based CSAR missions in an A-10 in the Caucasus. The mountains and 10,000ft cloud cover can make long-range shots on even short-range SAMs very difficult, even with a Maverick. Then you have the prospect of gits with IGLA-Ss on mountains, range no longer just 6km, flight ceiling also increased.
Hellfire missiles have millimeter wave radar seekers. The firing procedure is literally pop up from cover, lock on target, fire, pop down under cover and these days they can fire from a defilade. SAMs would have a difficult engagement problem against a target that behaves that way. If you have better missiles than the Hellfire i.e. greater range electro optical seeker with fire and forget capability the engagement problem for a SAM only gets worse and the target is harder to defend since you can’t jam a camera very easily. Fighters are another story but as I said before attack helicopters depend on air cover and the ability of your fighters to engage them in a really effective way depends on you getting air superiority or better yet air supremacy and I don’t see either the NATO air forces nor the RUAF being a pushover when it comes to gaining air supremacy. Another thing is that against fighters, attack helicopters aren’t as defenceless as people think. I remember reading about the USAF trying their hand at simulated combat where they sent fighters down into the lower airspace layers to hunt down gun ships simulating Russian Mil-24/35s and being rather surprised at the exchange rates they got. It’s not only that the helicopters are actually quite able to defend themselves if they have enough of situational awareness, but also that that part of the battlefield airspace is crawling with SAMs and AAA and fighters, unlike AH-64s and Ka-52s, can’t just pop into a depressions in the terrain to hide. I’m not saying that attack helicopters are invulnerable but they aren’t the sitting ducks they sometimes look like when you use them in nests of insurgency like Iraq where the Americans were lucky that the insurgents do not seem to have had access to large quantities of state-of-the-art MANPADS never mind mobile tactical SAM systems or a BUK launcher like the Russian paratroopers and irregulars in the East-Ukraine have. I expect the Iraqis would have given their eye teeth and a few other things as well for a few hundred SA-24s.
qwertyI guess in that regard it might actually work if you use it over friendly territory against advancing tank columns. That would protect it from most MANPADS, except maybe Starstreak, which isn’t a likely enemy weapon but other potential SAM threats would still be an issue even if used at very low level.
He described what modern gunships like the AH-64 were intended for, stand-off attacks on enemy forces in a conventional conflict. Sending attack helicopters off to pop insurgents in areas where you have no idea if the territory they are flying over is hostile or friendly is something they weren’t primarily intended to do. If you want an example of what happens when you let Apaches loose on massed armour take a look at first Gulf War. I’d expect the slaughter to be less extreme in an engagement in Europe against a real army like the Russian one but as ijozic points out the AH-64, and the Eurocopter Tiger are lightyears more advanced than the Mil-24s used in the Ukraine and so are the Mil-28 and Ka-52 they are also way more advanced. In Polish hands attack helicopters like that would be flow by better trained pilots and they can take out a target at a very long distance (8 kilometres + for the AH-64). No amount of AAA guns will help the target being engaged at that range nor will MANPADS. I suppose you could try and kill the chopper with fighters but that’s assuming the Polish AF fighters let you just cruise up and down the combat zone unmolested shooting at their gunships. SAMs would remain a threat, they always are but at very low altitudes the risk would be acceptable.
qwertyExactly. IIRC, Ukraine uses the old Mi-24’s (e.g. V or P variants) which are not upgraded (so they have only basic optical systems and their situational awareness is quite low – e.g. no thermal sights, paper maps, etc. as are their defensive capabilities) AND they were used in chaotic anti-insurgency operations where it’s common to fly over a potentially hostile territory (thus can be easily ambushed with IR SAM’s) and their coordination with the ground troops was probably non-existent. I really fail to see how this would be relevant for the Polish context which would be primarily stand-off anti-armor use (over friendly territory) at which ranges they are pretty much untouchable for the IR missiles. Not to mention superior thermal optics, Longbow radar, defensive suite, digital maps with real time datalink, UAV’s, etc. which would make them much less vulnerable in other missions as well. And that’s without getting into training levels – I’d expect Polish pilots would be MUCH better trained than the poorly funded Ukrainian Air Force.
Right, the Polish use case would be large numbers of Russian armor they would try to pick off at long range from ambush positions while flying at very low altitudes and they would have effective air cover and proper self defence equipment. All of the alternatives the OP named are perfect for that role but the AH-64 in particular has proven that in combat. Hell you might even argue it’s one of the biggest supplier of Russian tank parts out side of Russia 😀
qwertyThis was my favourite part:
You heard it hear first. Live in a democracy? Don’t like your government? Go give rioting a try.:highly_amused::D
Protesting does not equal rioting, but what do you suggest as an alternative the Russian definition of democracy?
ROFL
If I was Polish the mere thought of that alternative would would motivate me to join the Army.
qwertyDuplicate.
qwertyIt’s actually not normal at all, you obviously have no idea how a proper democracy actually functions, which is quite worrying. Whilst, people often decide they don’t like the government they elected all the time but the correct procedure is to wait for the next election which, in this case, was due in November 2014, i.e. just 8 months away or 4 years and 8 months after the previous one. By comparison the maximum period between elections in the UK is 5 years. If everyone were to resort to violence every time they weren’t happy with a government, as per the Ukraine, there would be civil war raging across the entire world.
Protest on its own has never driven any government out of power without violence. Once violence is added, it becomes a coup, if it’s against a democratic government and a revolution if the government wasn’t democratic.
Incorrect, the people who sniped protesters were actual Maidan, ballistics tests and bullet fragments have confirmed it. They shot protesters and police.
Elected governments have rarely every stepped down in my experience. The poll tax and minor protests in the UK were massive but that government remained in power for 18 years and won 4 elections.
Greece has been ruled from the ECB since 2008. It honestly wouldn’t matter what government they elect as long as they remain in the EU.
Yep criminal gangs in Mexico no doubt benefiting from arms the ATF supplied to the cartels.
Okay 20th century it is, in fact let’s say post-WWII to keep the debate modern. That’s because the US doesn’t annex, because it’s always been less honest about its involvement, it just funds and supports coups. E.g. Pinochet (Chile), Rios Montt (Guatemala), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), The Shah of Iran, the Khymer Rouge etc. Oh yeah, that’s real choice selection of people.
Firstly you seem to think that the Russian model of democracy where the same dictator is elected over and over again and any opposition figures are gunned down in the street is the norm but it isn’t. The people have the right to protest, period. That is not a coup attempt, it is not civil war it is simply politicians reaping the consequences of screwing up. Secondly if you think that I’ll believe that the Madan protesters shot at themselves you are barking up the wrong tree. Thirdly, you can also compose long lists of injustices the USA has been guilty of and you would be right but I can also compose a long list of injustices the Russians have been guilty of since the end of WWII starting with their oppression of most of Eastern Europe during the cold war although I’m not quite sure what you want to achieve with that. All great powers have skeletons in their closet, and Russia has more than most especially when it comes to partitioning, repartitioning and annexing Poland. Now can we please go back to talking about Polish helicopters?
qwertyIR jammers won’t work against dual waveband, or amplitude filtering IIR seekers, even DIRCM won’t unless it can fire at several frequencies at once. A modern AAA will also make light work of them. Helicopters are just big, obvious and slow and sit too close to potential and unexpected lethal danger.
I’ll take your declaration that the military helicopter is dead with a grain of salt. There was an excellent article in AFM recently about Ukraininan helicopter operations during the recent Russian invasion. I take it you subscribe to AFM and read that article? It stated that Ukranian gunship losses were primarily due to poor tactics and a complete lack of any kind of a self-defence suite. Also if you are right the Russian forces themselves are wasting large sums of money on ~ 450-500 Mil-24/35/28 and Ka-52 gunships which according to you are all scrap metal.
qwertyOkay exaggeration on tank count, but still correct wrt principle.
Well IIRC, weren’t some ATF guys caught selling weapons into Mexico.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/item/2344-sen-grassley-atf-provided-guns-to-cartels
So basically supplying drug cartels with weapons. Significantly worse than supplying people who have legitimate reason to be upset with the overthrow of a democratically elected government.
Who are you to determine that it was and unfit government? It was elected less than 4 years before the violence. Many people didn’t like the direction the government was taking wrt allegiances but then many did, but people who support government actions have nothing to protest about. There were a lot of military and police who switched to the side of the rebels after things kicked off.
I think you’ll find that historically the US have already annexed most of what was Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_United_States
Or a nationalist mob decided they didn’t like the elected government, started a coup by shooting people at random from flat windows and then imposed an anti-Russian agenda causing ethnic Russians to fight for independence, then held an election during a civil war after Crimea had elected to leave. They then went to war with ethnic Russians in the East causing millions of civilians to flee and killing thousands with rocket, artillery and SRBM attacks and air strikes on residential areas, all the while fully supported by the US and less-willingly the EU. Even before an election was held, the US and EU jumped to support the coup, which took place on the Russian doorstep. The Russians were not the aggressors here IMO. Various Pentagon people like to mention that Russia is on NATO’s doorstep, whilst expanding both NATO and the EU towards the Russian border, quite ironic really.
And some of the policies adopted by the new Ukrainian government, amidst the regular parliamentary brawls, wouldn’t be constitutionally legal in the EU or the US.
This may come as a shock to you but in democracies the people quite regularly decide they don’t like a government they previously elected. Usually they remove such governments from power by not electing them again but occasionally, if the government has been particularly corrupt, inept and generally unfit they have been known to drive government out of power through protests. This is pretty normal in most countries with a functioning democracy that are not ruled by a dictator with delusions of Czardom, even if it is rare that such extreme levels of protest are required to get a government to step down as was required in the Ukraine where the democratically elected government sent snipers to pick of protesters. Just look at what has been happening in Greece. They’ve had four governments since 2009, massive levels of protests and none of those governments sent snipers to shoot at the protesters. As regards Mexico, firstly what is happening in Mexico is not a minor crime wave it is a full blown insurgency perpetrated by criminal gangs. Secondly, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? Really? Russia participated in three separate partitions of Poland, four if you count WWII. Compared to that the USA is a rank amateur at annexation next to old annexation veterans like Russia and given their history the Poles have every right to be paranoid about Russian sabre rattling. Do you really want to go into this discussion or shall we limit it to the 20th century or better yet get it back on topic.
qwertyyou would think the helo debacle in Ukraine would have put off the idea of spending cash on helos,
sinking money in that is a sure way to lose long term combat capacity
According to AFM those Ukrainian gunships were operating without IR jammers or anything else resembling a self defence array capable of defeating MANPADS so the resulting losses were not exactly surprising.
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