kiwinopalRafale is the best fighter, the French made the best Eurocanard, it is not only the most beautiful, but also the best in combat agility.
kiwinopalHow much performance was given away from the original design of the SU 27 compared to the SU 34??
Topspeed?? Ok, hence the new intakes, agility, ……….
The Su-34 gave away a lot in agility and speed, its heavier foreboy made it nose heavy, reducing agility by increasing longitudinal stability, it has smaller LERXes, so the need for canards was even greater to increase agility by reducing longitudinal stability and do for some of the LERX area lost.
Its inlets are not designed for the Mach 2.35 as the original Su-27s and its large head made it less efficient at high speeds in terms of drag.
The Su-34 has only something the Su-24 just dreamt off, it has AA-10s and AA-12s, so it has a BVR combat ability.
In general terms the Su-34 is superior to the F-15E as an attack platform due to better cockpit design and low altitude high speed ride, in the other hand as a wild weasel everything will depend in the equipment you fit to the Su-34.
kiwinopalBut then I could say, that by 1995-2000 the first F-22, Rafale and EF would be entering service. I would be very careful to compare WarPac and NATO forces after 1986. Gorbatchev changed the game and the Cold war was about to end. After 1989 all is speculation.
IF you want to consider the 1990s, of course Russia lost the edge it had in 1989, by 1999 the Russian air force was a mere ghost of what it was, in 2010 still is too weak, to be consider a real modern example of the Soviet Union.
The CIS is just a paper union, not the modern representative of the Soviet Union.
However you have to see as the things were in 1990, Russia had the best fighters, the best dogfighters and the best technology in naval fighters the Yak-141 had no counterpart any where in the world, the Su-35 and MiG-29M were exellent fighters, the MiG-29k was really good.
The An-225 was the largest transport and still is, the An-124 surpassed the C-5, the Mi-28 and Ka-50 are and were much better than the AH-64.
The Buran space Shuttle was also a great machine.
in 1989 Russia indeed was ahead.
kiwinopalAdd the AIM-120 to the mix and all things change again. Apart from that the early MiG-29 and SU-27 were great dogfighters, but the radar guided missiles still lacked and the use interface outright sucked.
the arms race it is always bringing new weapons, of course by 1994 the MiG-29 and Su-27 fell behind not because lack of technology, but because budget constraigns, but the Russians had things like the AA-12 and R-37.
kiwinopalWhich one is more suitable for the air to ground role??
I think the SU is more suitable for global missions, which include multiple air refuellings, and hence the comfort on board ( pressurized cabin, toilet, seats that can be reclined to a flat bed ) and the roughness, for which russians aircraft are known, it might be a competitor for upcoming F 15 sale campaigns….
DOes anyone know anything about the avionics in this aircraft??
And a MTOW exceeding 44 tons….wow……
The Su-34 is better suited to the air to ground role, for two simple reasons the side by side arrangement and its canards,
The canards on the Su-34 are for damping turbulance and increase lift at low speed, giving it a better ride than the F-15E, the Su-34 has also chines that reduce RCS, as a strike aircraft, the Su-34 is the better airplane, Russia is not purchasing Su-30s to replace the Su-24, but the Su-34, the Su-24 with VG wings has excellent low speed handling something difficult to get with the F-15 wing or Su-30.
The Su-30MKI has no side by side seating too.
kiwinopalAll that does not matter, because from 1985 the danger of a real war in Central Europe was over. Just in the second half of the 80s Russian 4 th generation fighters did enter the ranks in numbers to have an impact at all. At that time-scale the more important weaponary had still to catch up. Just the HMS and the R-73 were worth for a tactical surprise at first.
The MiG-29, MiG-23MLDs and Su-27 stationed in Europe returned to Russia until the early 1990s, around 1991, so the whole 1980s saw the MiG-23 in Europe.
The Soviets ended the cold war with better operational fighters than any western fighter with the exception of the F-117 that actually is a bomber.
The F-117 would not had fared as many think since a diminute air force operating less sophisticated weapons managed to shot one, the Soviets would had used SSM that would had obliterated airstrips and Tu-22Ms to destroy most of all the enemy air bases, in 1989, the F-117 was only an offensive weapon operating only as a surprise and first strike weapon.
If it is true the West won the cold war in economic and political terms, they did not win the cold war in terms of aircraft technology
kiwinopalThe Syrian MiGs from these incidents had Jaybird radars (being handed over in the 70s), the same one in the 1958 MiG-21. It’s just a gun ranging radar for all intents and purposes but can be used for a beam riding version of the Atoll (sidewindski), in visual range. It has no doppler which means it can only target something right in front of it or at higher altitude, and it has no IRST.
The engine is a 98kN redevelopment of the MiG-21 engine (same as fitted to the MF), where the ML and MLD have a 128kN engine and can actually out-accelerate an F-16.
The MS used by Syria then is really more like a MiG-21 update than a Flogger, it’s sort of a Super-bis 21 and not very capable against anything more serious than a Mirage III/5.The ML and MLD have a much better radar, IRST and much more powerful engine. It has some airframe improvements “optimised for air combat” (L designation means “lightened” and the D means “modified”), the MLD has countermeasures, ECM hardening, various systems changes, avionics updates.
The MF is an export version of the early series 23M (ca.1975), handed to WP nations initially and non-WP only after 1978 (when the ML and P was in Russian service). It’s got the early series engine, and an earlier version of the HighLark radar which is 200kg heavier than the ML and MLD, but has the IRST. It’s not much different to something like an F-4E/F.
And along the “central front” as you put it, the Soviets had the full benefits of massive logistical support and force coordination to work with, in theory. Their Floggers would’ve been working within the EWR networks and under SAM coverage at all times.
But it’s mute anyway. As of the West Germany Treaty ca.1963 any movement of conventional forces by the Soviets into western Europe would result in an immediate, full scale nuclear retaliation by NATO.
It was always the US threatening nuclear war, never the Soviets. Everybody agreed the Soviets would most likely win a conventional war in Europe.I grew up in the Cold War and remember the climate, the paranoia well. The US was never a shining paladin, not ever. They were the other bad guy.
i agree with you in many points but i think the NATO powers had the edge in the late 1970s early 1980s in terms of aircraft technology, by 1988 that edge eroded and the Soviets got the edge.
The reason is because the F-15 and F-16 were definitively superior to the MiG-23 and MiG-25 in general terms.
Of course there is not such thing like the F-15 would had won all the fights.
Most Western historians have portraited the F-15 with an aura of invencibility, in part thanks to a great propaganda campaign and in part to the fact they do not see the real conditions the MiG-23 and MiG-25 were supposed to operate.
The MiG-29 and Su-27 were created to surpass the F-15 and F-16 and surpass them returning the edge to the soviet side.
The MiG-23 and MiG-25 had the ability to destroy the Mirage F1 and F-4E with some degree of superiority, but the longer range AIM-7s the F-15 used were better than the early R-24s and it had better radar range than both the MiG-23 and MiG-25.
Soviet/russian historians say the F-15 is closer to the MiG-23MLD in agility than to the Su-27, that is more or less correct, because the F-15 has just a slight difference in turn rate over the MiG-23MLD.
If the MiG-23MLDG would had been deployed, it had a HMS, it would had very well matched and surpassed the F-15, the MiG-23 also can fire the AA-10 and AA-12, but of course this variant never saw operational service.
The Soviets saw more sense to deploy the MiG-29.
If the F-15 was victorious it is mostly because never faced an enemy as prepared as the Soviets were, Iraq barely represented an air force like Poland in 1989 and Serbian air force was not even a match to the Belarussian Air force however we have to consider that since the Vietnam war, the West has not aknowledge a single air to air loss as part of its propaganda campaign and has only admitted losses to SAMs.
Syria in 1982 was similar to the Bulgarian air force but with less equipment and technical knowledge.
kiwinopalAll memebers posting here I have a question
Do you think the soviet mig-23ML , MLDs and MFs would have fared just as badly agianst NATO on the central front in the mid-80s as the syrian AF mig-23s did against israelis ? Please give reasons if possible
thanks
in my opinion, the MiG-23MF did not fare as bad as it has been written, most MiG-23 shot down over Lebanon were MiG-23BNs and few MiG-23MFs.
The Israelies mostly shot down MiG-23BNs and these were shot down while attacking ground targets.
The MiG-23 in general was not a threat to the F-15; the F-16 in the 1980s was only superior in WVR in the range of 15 km but at BVR was definitively inferior to the MiG-23MLD and MiG-23MLs specially at 30Km where the MiG-23MLDs had AA-11s, most other fighters were more or less even with the MiG-23s, among them we find the Mirage F1, Mirage III/V, F-5, F-4E, Saab Viggen etc etc, but by the mid 1980s the Soviets fielded Su-27s and MiG-29s and had MiG-31s so basicly they would had fare well.
kiwinopalI do think it is a mistake to be overly negative in generalizing about cultural norms. It is also probably a mistake to think that operational policy driven by technological limitations is indicative of human nature…while the operational limitations of 60s era interceptors may have had some similarities when comparing US to Soviet air forces, I am unaware of “accounts” that would indicate that Soviet pilot cultural norms were similar to those of US ANG pilots. Having known a few of those folks, I think they would get a huge laugh out of that notion.
In my six years of flying in the 70s and 80s in Europe, I do not recall ever being briefed or seeing intel reports that suggested that WP pilots had the same level of autonomy and freedom of decision making as did NATO pilots when it came to what we did when flying our missions. Maybe way down deep inside Boris was a man yearning to be free and only waiting for that chance…but the only evidence that we had was that he was tightly bound by the state to doing exactly what he was told. Personally, I think most pilots are typically all over-achieving Type A personalities with a certain disdain for authority, so I would enjoy reading accounts that can show that Soviet or WP pilots were no different than us…from what we know of that time from limited reports (Belenko), that isn’t our understanding.
I think that the myth Soviet pilots were very dependant upon GCI has more of propaganda than actual fact, inside the Soviet army propaganda was important too, ideology has to be fed to the soldiers in order to fight for a system so political indoctrination was essential if they were going to fight for Communism, in my opinion, all those reports that WP pilots were not free has the same political intent of indoctrination, feeding Western fighters with the idea that they were free and democracy was even applied within the military.
At the end airplanes are just machines, with limits imposed by Physics.
Independently of how free is a pilot, an airplane has limits and at the moment of facing another aircraft model, tactics have to be made to exploit its superiorities over the rival and avoid its own inferior characteristics against the rival aircraft.
This was done in the West when assesment of captured MiG-21s, MiG-23s and in general soviet equipment, the same applied to the Soviet side.
Flying a MiG-21 versus a F-4 is different from flying a MiG-21 versus a F-15 or F-5, here independently of how free is the pilot, you can not force equipment with inferior technology to surpass machines with better flying and combat characteristics.
Always the aircraft with longer range radar will have less dependance upon GCI units, we can not expect the MiG-21 have more freedom of action than a F-15, F-14 or Tornado ADV.
The MiG-29 also exemplifies the same, the MiG-29 was designed as an F-16 equivalent, leaving the Su-27 as a F-15 counterpart.
The MiG-29 was designed to have BVR missiles when the F-16A only have AIM-9s, the F-16A in the 1970s and 1980s was limited to fight as the MiG-29A was, just as a dogfighter, the Soviet knew the F-16 lacked BVR missiles and they made a fighter that used BVR missiles to kill it but also with better short range missiles.
Most analysis made in the West always claim their tactics are superior, that is also propaganda, technology shows that the MiG-29 was designed in 1986 with superior weapons to its main rival, the F-16, saying that the Soviet did not know how to use the MiG-29 is another attempt to justify a military mistake by making the F-16 a pure dogfighter without a missile like the AA-11 and a HMS.
In my opinion the reality each side enjoyed superiority for very breif periods when they possesed weapons superior to the weapons used by the other side, but this never lasted long since the other side always deployed weapons to counter such superiority.
kiwinopalCold war propoganda depicted the soviet pilots as untrained robots rigidly tied to GCI which would be easy meat for maverick NATO pilots in their hot new 4th generation fighters
How much of that is fiction and how much is reality
Considering that the purpose of soviet airforces was primarly to defeat western strike planes and protect their ground forces, was the extensive of GCI for soviet fighters really such a liability ?
And to what extent did the NATO fighters rely on AWACS to increase their situational awareness ? if you are on the defensive like soviets isnt the GCI kind of like having AWACS support ?
Propaganda exists everywhere and at any moment in History, also as you can have even in this forum people favours their personal point of view, official propaganda always will depict my side is good and the other is evil.
In my childhood i had Soviet magazines that claimed the West was the agressor, always forcing the peace loving Soviet union to follow in the arms race.
Of course now i know that is pure propaganda, but the same was in the West, the idea the West was free was even expressed in the idea the Soviets were rigid pilots that lacked even freedom of action and so on you can see that in movies like Rocky where a Soviet boxer is portraited even as a Robot however if you have ever watched a Soviet film that idea was totally made up in the west, Soviet movies had a highly idealistic philosophy that contrasted with the portrait western propagandists tried to show about the Soviet mentality.
Aircraft like the Su-30 and MiG-31 that acted as AWACs show that pilots did have a degree of freedom from ground control and pilots of Mirage IIIs and F-104 would have had the same dependance on ground control as a MiG-21.
As technology evolved dependance on ground control was released in both sides, AWACs allowed some tactical command in both sides too.
Now if you send MiG-21s or MiG-23s against F-15s it is obvious the F-15 has more freedom from ground control because it has a longer range radar, the same will be the F-14 versus the MiG-23 as your original example was, the F-14 has more freedon of action due to a longer range radar.
Aircraft like the MiG-25 were not dogfighters, so were more dependant upon ground control as they were interceptors.
Aircraft designed in the 1980s in the Soviet Union had the same degree of flexibility their western counterparts had, the MiG-29M, MiG-31M and Su-27M were basicly aircraft that offered more independance from ground control.
The MiG-31 as it acted as interceptors sweeping in groups of 4 vast areas of the Soviet Union did need some degree of flexibility as they linked the whole radar sets into a single tactical image that presented an image of the theater of operations as an AWACs had presented.
kiwinopalLet us put the 2 photos together……
it is not the same amount of compressor, the newer pictures has more compresor face shown
kiwinopalAs well as all information about blocker – from our forum(paralay). Source – ostr_ov – employee of Sukhoi design office.
i will believe you but still i am skeptical, a forum statement is not an official one, specially if it is not followed by a respected media report or Sukhoi does not write about it on its own webpage.
kiwinopalThe particular appraisal in question is inappropriate to apply to Soviet tactical and strategic doctrines.
Whilst it is true Libyan pilots were trained to some extent by Soviet instructors and inherently use some elements of Soviet sourced air combat tactics, this doesn’t mean it has any relevance to Soviet doctrine using Soviet-only equipment.Authoritive sources (such as global security org) repeatedly publish the Libyan MiGs in that incident were 23MS Flogger-E which are comprehensively downgraded and effectively more like an updated MiG-21 than a Soviet or Warsaw Pact Flogger. Their line formation was probably more related to their 10-20km radar track range and the need to limit BVR vulnerability than it is to standing aerial doctrine. Also even the Soviet-only 23ML and MLD would have trouble locking up a target at 27 miles, the MS non-Soviet export version has exactly zero chance. To lock up Tomcats, flying even slightly lower altitude the Flogger-E would need to be at something like 5km and a Flogger-G would have trouble past 20km. Those early sapphire sets were analogue J-band with barely more than a simple signal interpretation projected to the HUD, vulnerable to ECM and range halved on lookdown/shootdown, the best they had at the time. The Jaybird in the Flogger-E, dude it’s from the fifties, barely more than a gun ranger and not real good at that.
What is likely is that Soviet instructors provided tactics which were suited to the Libyans and other export operators, but not in practise by the VVS/PVO/AV-MF themselves.
Soviet air combat tactics are defensive, contrary to popular western thought, and designed to work within EWR networks, GCI coverage or datalinked to fleet command ships. The idea is they flock a border with everything, move ground forces forward, move up air forces.
Also yes the GCI digital-nav system was only fitted to PVO aircraft (MiG-23P version of the MiG-23ML, Su-27P as opposed to Su-27S, etc.), but Frontal Aviation still uses datalinks for the EWR network, which would work with PVO interceptor/controllers (MiG-31, Su-30) or Russian AWACS. It is true however that opening hostilities and border conflicts would rarely see PVO aircraft unless there is a strategic threat.If the Soviets were going to actually invade NATO-style with an aerial blitzkreig, the smartest move would be using PVO controllers, like was suggested. They’d do it too, being this is a strategic objective (invading enemy nation) and thus comes under the command structure PVO, not VVS or Army.
They wouldn’t do that though. They’d do it like Afghanistan. Flock the border. Move in ground forces. Bring up air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjQeOER5I_8
here is the original pictures of the MiG-23 shot down that day.
I agree with your assesment
kiwinopalDo not try to find blocker on T-50-1, it appears only on the T-50-3.
how do you know that? what official statement has said that?
thanks in advance
kiwinopalThe picture isnt coming up, but if your referring to the night time photo, then you have missed some 4months of arguements over that picture (go back a few pages and you’ll see that I had reposted it yet again).
That picture appears to be “retouched” in the intake area and there was another picture which was clearly faked which was also posted on here a while ago.
While the “new” picture showing the blocker or front face looks “better” in terms of it looks purportional, but still very fuzzy.
Its strange that in other pictures where lighting conditions which were brighter, you cant see into the intake at all.
In the video clip where the camera is just a few meters away you still cant see into the intake (note that there is a redish haze in the area of the intake???), yet this picture where we can see into the intake was taken on an overcast sky?
Honestly i do not agree, why Strizhi.ru will post fake pictures? why the new picture will be a fake? i think all the arguments it is not a blocker are gone, there is no validity in them after so many pictures. just open the link and you can see the picture http://pilot.strizhi.info/category/aviation/sukhoi/pak-fa
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