MiG-21. The basic airframe to start with should be a good basis. INlet verymuch shaded. small cross section.
I second that one. I think a good starting point would be the Guizhou JL-9.
S-duct inlets to hide the fan-blades, compact Grifo-style radar, conformal fuel tanks on the upper fuselage, internal jamming suite replacing the back-seater or in an extended spine like an F-16D, retractable fuel probe (maybe in conformal), a T-50-style set of “missile canoes” outboard of the landing gear, and a centerline “missile canoe” with a couple more missiles (one in front of the other). End up with something like a cross between a JL-9, F-16D, and an F-35.
You get to keep much the same wing as the JL-9, unchanged landing gear arrangement, the same basic fuselage, and the same engine.
You should end up with a basic fighter (good MiG-21/F-5 replacement) that has a short range, good top speed, limited BVR capability, and a very low cross-section. Cheap, but still deadly, especially for non-stealthy adversaries. Even Meteor-armed enemies are still unlikely to get a lock before you can with your own PL-12s.
Spend some extra money and give it a retractable refueling probe, some RAM treating, a compact AESA radar, an HMS and some Pythons or R-73s. You’ll be very tough to lock beyond 40 km and quick deadly within 40 km.
Best of all, with a pricetag in the $10-20 million range, you can afford to lose a few if you can bag a couple of F-15s or Typhoons for your effort. It’s really a good plane for protecting your reactor, silos, or presidential palace from an enemy strike package.
Cheers,
Logan
I’ve been right behind a MiG-25 before and it did feel like you could pitch a tent in there. You could at least climb in with a big sleeping bag and a newspaper and have no problem.
On a side note, the mock-up of the plane used in Casablanca was not full-scale (the set wasn’t big enough to accommodate the full-scale variety), so they hired midgets to plane the ground crew crawling all over the plane to make it look bigger than it was.
Cheers,
Logan
Huh?
Douglas, Douglas, oh yeah, the Douglas Dauntless!:cool:But that wasn’t a fighter now was it? what pure fighter types did Douglas ever produce in its history?
You’re clearly not big on aviation history. I can loan you some books if you like.
They built superb attack, transport, and comercial aircraft, but fighters?
The only ones I can think of was the F3D Skynight & F4D Skyray (and limited F5d Skylancer), hardly great fighters.
The F4D Skyray was a great plane at the time. Its pilots loved it and it had fantastic performance for a naval fighter. They didn’t hand out Collier Trophies for turkeys.
“Once he got into it, [Rahn] found the stick forces were very heavy and handling at high speeds was rough. His initial efforts at spin tests were downright terrifying: the Skyray could (usually) recover from a spin, but the book had to be rewritten to tell pilots how to do it. Despite all that, Rahn called the machine a “fighter pilot’s dream”, the best machine he had taken into the sky since flying the Spitfire. Its instability made it supremely agile for a skilled pilot, and Rahn claimed that he out-flew every Air Force chase plane sent up with him. Marine Major Marion Carl, one of the top test pilots of the era, flew the Skyray and claimed: ‘If we had this airplane now in Korea, I could just pop off the MiGs — one, two, three.’ “
http://www.vectorsite.net/avskyray.html
The F5D Skylancer was BRILLIANT. The Navy just decided it would be a good idea to have more than one supplier for their carrier planes for the next few decades. It was a good decision, but sad for the great Douglas company.
The A4D (while designated as an attack aircraft) was as much a fighter as many other aircraft throughout history. The Blue Angels don’t fly attack planes. Such a fantastic little plane. It’s spent over 50 continuous years as a carrier-based fighter/attack plane. Name another type to claim that… That’s right. There isn’t one.
The pièce de résistance however, was the A4D Skyhawk, better known as the A-4. It may have been designated an attack plane, but it was as much a fighter as many aircraft throughout history. The Blue Angels fly fighters. Top Gun instructors fly fighters. Name another type to serve as a carrier-based fighter/attack aircraft in a combat role for OVER 50 (!!!) years. There isn’t one. Such a fantastic plane. Still going strong. It served in Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, the Falklands, and the Gulf War.
Douglas was good to the US Navy, the fighter community included.
Cheers,
Logan
Saab 2000 has 5 operator stations vs 3 on EMB 145.
They mustn’t have done their homework. Here’s the interior layout of the Greek ERIEYEs. There are actually 2 interior layouts available for the EMB 145 AEW&C. They can have up to 6 operator consoles. I think there’s only 3 operator consoles in the Saab 340-based ERIEYEs, however.
Endurance of 9.5 hours unrefuelled. Pakistan did not have any refueller at the time of contract.
True, but they had to have been planning the purchase already. Either way, they sure don’t have enough hoses to make be able to think they’d be able to refuel whenever they needed to, so I’m sure the endurance was a factor.
It can carry towed radar decoy.
No reason I can think that the EMB 145 couldn’t use one, as well.
Cheers,
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