Well, when you make sweeping statements then you would really do well to prove them, otherwise this is really a “I said…you said” situation.

Good, then maybe you’ll start by providing sources and facts for your following claims.

If you look at all those posts on who has won where – Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, India, etc, there is one major problem: there is no context even mentioned.

Fact is Switzerland is the only competition where we’ve had a somewhat “official” look on what happened in the inside due to the nature or their very people centred democracy. No other country have offered us such an insight, and even that one doesn’t tell the hole story…

For instance:

– Korea: the Typhoon was found impressive by the ROKAF, I recall reading about it in an English edition of a Korean paper online.

However, this was the turn of the century, at the time the jet was basically an interceptor that could carry a few dumb bombs. The Rafale was purpose-built as a multirole fighter from the start, the Typhoon as an interceptor/dogfighter with multimission work thrown in as an afterthought.

Bottom line Rafale made it to the finale against the F-15 and Typhoon didn’t. At the time Rafale’s AtG capabilities were still mostly in development as well.

Therefore there were different development time cycles for the ‘multirole’ part. The timing at the turn of the century suited the Rafale at that moment, and not the Typhoon.

Eurofighter has always had multi-role capabilities in mind for the Typhoon (at least that’s how the story goes), but limited funding and disagreement between the UK and Germany (mainly) led to making hard choices and finding a middle ground. Since at the time Germany was unwilling to fund an expensive multirole aircraft, that led the consortium to focus on AtA which was the only area were they could apparently all agree. At least that’s my understanding.

– Singapore: there was this time cycle lag here again for the Typhoon because it was not developed at the same pace. It did not have the Rafale export Block 10 version’s AESA (an early RBE2AA model with American tiles supplied by Raytheon), nor advanced weapons for air-ground work.

The AESA at this stage was an very early prototype, and we don’t know whether or not it played a significant role in the competition. Whatever Typhoon’s development, and until we know the full story what we know is that Rafale was in finale while Typhoon wasn’t.

In the air-air role, the jet was hugely impressive – famously beating three F-16s and supercruising in hot conditions – but it was still an interceptor that was gradually being given multirole capability.

Again how do you know that it was “hugely impressive” exactly? Have you seen any official report of the evaluation? Have you simply read some partisan press that found the Typhoon to be “hugely impressive” in any competitions/excercises/air show or simply sitting in the tarmac no matter what the real results are? Anyway how is your description of Typhoon been a interceptor being given gradual multirole capability different today?

I recall that the Singaporeans were not impressed by the Rafale. They were saying things like “show us what it can do” – this was from a RSAF source. They did not buy much into Dassault’s so-called omnirole claim, to them it looked like just another multirole jet.

They were so not impressed by it that they selected Rafale in their finale while eliminating the “hugely impressive” Typhoon… You should stick to serious investigative journalism when finding your sources…

– Switzerland: here we see that the Typhoon got a practically perfect score for performance/kinetics, and was the top scorer in engagement and MMI/workload. It means that for its chosen role, namely interdiction, it was the best of the bunch.

Actually that’s not what the Swiss report is saying. They’re saying that for air interdiction Rafale is the best of the bunch.

It failed in other areas because it was not really developed as a multirole fighter, that capability was gradually added on and it is still early in the process. This is one hell of an underfunded program…so it takes a while to get going.

As far as the Swiss eval is concerned Typhoon came second in every area including air defence/superiority. Even for QRA (Typhoon main mission so far), they found the Rafale to be ahead. Lack of multirole capabilities have nothing to do here. In today battle field, having the biggest engine is simply not enough. The F-14 might arguably have been a better plane overall than the F-15 on the aerodynamic front. Yet higher cost with less relevant sensors made it come second to even the SH… Something to think about.

The Rafale’s scores are a revelation and show much more product maturity and development, but it is working on a different timing cycle. It had an AESA radar, but the EF consortium was also brewing a most excellent one in their labs, it was just too early to show it off. Likewise, new pods and weapons can come in for the Typhoon as well…the operative word is “can” because of the state of European economies.

Well let’s separate facts from wishes shall we? As far as facts are concerned, Rafale has proved to be more advanced, suitable, versatile, mature and relevant during evaluations, exercises and real world operation than the Typhoon.
We’re all wishes the see both planes mature and gain new capabilities and remain top notch for the foreseeable future.

India: it was a close finish between the two. The Typhoon was “under weaponed” and did not meet certain test requirements. The EF consortium however could sort it out by integrating new missiles and gave the IAF choices.

We’ve no real idea what happened during the evaluation. All we know is that the IAF seems very happy so far with how the competition is going and with Rafale’s selection. We’ll have to wait a few more years to have some credible tongues start to loosen…

The French jet was by now even more mature and polished with an AESA and improved ground attack avionics, as well as a huge list of strike weapons. Again, the time cycle is on its side, because the EF consortium needs a customer to finish all the development plans they have.

Again with you. What “huge” list of strike weapons? AASM, one LGB and Exocet IIRC, that’s not really what one would call a “huge” list.

I believe that one of the reason why Rafale is so effective is that the aircraft was designed from the start around the MICA for AtA engagement and around the AASM for strikes. These two weapons were designed from the beginning as part of the Rafale’s weapon system and that’s why they’re so effective and so well implemented with the aircraft.

The Rafale did win (from IAF sources, also confirmed marginally in the press) but the gaps between the jets in final form (what would be available if all proposals were implemented) were not great. The gaps between the Typhoon and the Rafale were rather small overall – certainly not half a generation’s worth…

We know they both passed the test in India, like they both passed the test in Switzerland (in both case Rafale and Typhoon were recommended). That’s all we know for sure. According to the press the fly away cost difference was marginal but the life cycle cost was the deciding factor.

Certainly there are compromises in each of the designs and they relate to how the jets were originally desired.

Oh boy…

(a) Let’s look at the Typhoon: It is “under designed” for weapons carrying, in the sense you can’t carry too much fuel and weapons without spacing and payload issues. This is a product of the bombing role being added as an afterthought, as the original desire was for aerial engagement.

“Under designed”, really? Typhoon does well what it was in the end optimized for.

(b) Now we’ll look at the Rafale: It does not have the nose radome size for a powerful radar that would be useful for interception at farwaway ranges, and also does not have powerful engines. It’s power is adequate but not efficient for supercruise (even if it can supercruise a bit, especially with a good wind). This is a product of it being developed for different tasks including aircraft carrier landings where a compact nose is an advantage.

The rafale despite been one of the smallest if not the smallest MRCA in existence is able to carry more than any of them out there, hold its own against the F-22, Typhoon, F-15 etc. That’s not what I call underpowered engines. If anything that a testimony of how good its handling characteristics are. One dreams of what would be with even more thrust!

The radar’s size isn’t the biggest out there and while it might be limited in detection’s range it won’t be as far as engagement is concerned with the METEOR.

And unless you can prove the “not efficient for supercruise” claims, please state it as your opinion.

If you look at it this way, you cannot really compare the two jets as if they were tasked for the same missions. In surface attack the Rafale will forever retain an advantage because it was heavily focused on that, while in interception the Typhoon has the edge.

If anything that claim has been proved wrong many many times over. Rafale has proved itself as good an air superiority fighter as any other out there, and an outstanding striker. Few aircraft in the world have achieved such a feat, and none that are carrier capable as well.

The question is more of value – here I think that the Rafale is clearly ahead with better costing figures and more maturity. With AWACS planes its radar disadvantages can be balanced out or even converted to a stealthing advantage. But if I wanted to go for engagement – especially with a fifth gen fighter, the Typhoon with an uprated EJ230 and the Captor-E would offer undeniable advantages.

You read the Swiss report and saw Typhoon being rated first in the engagement capability and so that’s your conclusion. You forget that engagement is only the final part of the battle and before that Rafale as per the Swiss eval won every other important parts like detection, ID, acquisition.
Captor-E is unlikely to provide Typhoon with a longer range for detection, so as I said here plenty of time before, the difference between the RBE2-AA and the Captor-E will be like 200 to 300 TRs, and we don’t know if that’s enough to guarantee the superiority of one system over the other over the spectrum of missions starting with detection.

In the end the best advantage of the Rafale is its programme’s management that is IMO more efficient and clearer from the start on designing a weapon system that include the aircraft + sensors + weapons that work together to form a single platform that can operate in single seat, two seats and from aircraft carrier with the same software and weapons. Heck Typhoon isn’t even capable of using the same software for its entire fleet of one seater, and in the end the same weapons and sensors.

As things goes you’ll have the Rafale that will continue to be a one weapon system capable of being more and more versatile and capable, and you’ll have Typhoon that will be a different plane for each airforces operating it.

Rubbish! Unsubstantiated supposition, and actually not the case.

Exactly what you’re doing as well

I know what weapons were dropped, when, where and with what results, so I know that you’re making this claim up, or repeating someone else’s made up nonsense.

Well? Can you enlighten us or just come to brag?

I suppose Typhoon ‘flunked’ the hot and high tests at Leh, too? I know what happened at Leh…..

Again do you have any serious informations? Or are we simply to have a blind faith in you?

And the radar tests? Do you even know what the targets were? I do!

Seriously man you should consider having a cult with followers and such… Of wait :rolleyes:

The simple fact is that Typhoon got more of the 643 tick boxes than Rafale did, and led after the technical evaluation. After Switzerland, I have to say that that surprised me, but the Swiss and the Indians were looking at different things, and evaluated very different aircraft.

Last time I checked the evaluation was still classified and I’m not aware of anybody leaking it. Not am I aware of the bidders receiving each other evaluation. So I guess you know someone at Eurofighter who was present when the results were given and either you’re ready to release classified intel, or maybe you had the “holy spirit” tells you and you can’t tell us?

The Swiss never looked at P1E in the air or in the active cockpit, for example, and didn’t get to do a guided LGB drop or an AMRAAM firing. The Indians did.

They reported having “taken into consideration” Typhoon 2015 with P1E etc. Whatever that means… I sure droping a guided LGB isn’t going to be the miracle changing life experience… at least not since the 60s…

No sane person would doubt Rafale’s superior ability to meet specific Swiss requirements, at a particular point in time, more like. Anything else is a stretch.

Sure.

Hudos and thanks to Bluewings for his pretty red green and blue bar chart, by the way! Knowing what standard of aircraft the Swiss saw, and knowing what went wrong, I find it frankly remarkable that Typhoon came so close to Rafale in SA, Detection, Identification and Data Dissemination, and am amazed that it didn’t do worse in Acquisition, CNI and EW.

What were you saying about stretching things a bit? You had the excuse that PIRATE wasn’t properly integrated in 2009, it might be true for the regular squadrons but I find it hard when it come to test aircraft. Anyway how does your special and highly regarded knowledgeable insight explain that the Swiss evaluation found Rafale to be ahead in Detection, Identification and Acquisition? Will you tell me that Captor wasn’t properly integrated as well? Or maybe Dassault had a special satellite’s death ray that killed Typhoon so “obvious advantages” (in your own word) for the Swiss eval, but the Queen sent Bond just in time for the Indian’s evaluation to turn the tables!

And it’s nice to see Typhoon ahead in engagement (that’s not just BVR, you realise), getting top marks in performance, and being so far ahead, and the score for pilot workload. There’s more for a Typhoon fan to take comfort from than we realised at the time – especially in view of how far the aircraft has come since the evaluation (with the drops in Tranche 1, and P1E in Tranche 2, as well as Strongbow), and in view of what the Swiss saw in terms of MD.

So first the evaluation where showing Rafale’s strengths is only to be taken at the time and in the context… But when it’s about Typhoon’s strengths they’re of course applicable any time any place!

I remember just before the Swiss eval came out you were bragging about how Typhoon was, is, and will be vastly, so obviously, so widely admitted by any one advanced in pretty much any areas then the Swiss eval came out, then India, and you’ve been silent for a bit, then changed your tune a bit, and now here you go again throwing words and believing hard that P1E is such a revolution, it’s going to do anything but simply upgrade the Typhoon up to date with what SHs, F-16s, Rafales, F-15s have been offering for ages with a little Typhoon’s favour in it…

Honestly get to the facts and stop trolling. It’s like Bluewings saying how this pissing contest is boring a few pages back and then jumping straight into it, or Shiv making claims and giving pilots and airforces intentions they never had in the first place. We’re all free to express ourselves but please make a distinction between what is known as an approximated fact, and your own wishes…

UK ‘debating cost of special relationship’

How the Trident Replacement and the MoD’s £38bn ‘Black Hole’ Help to Subsidise India (excerpt)

I recently described the infamous ‘Black Hole’ in the MoD accounts as an illusion cleverly manipulated to deceive the British taxpayers. On Tuesday last week, only seven months after taking office, the Defence Secretary, Mr Philip Hammond, confirmed this with the announcement that he had not only filled the £38 billion ‘hole’ – he had another £2 billion spare.

This is not his first miracle. Within a few days of taking office he discovered that the supposedly insolvent MoD had £560 million unused in a budget intended to finance the advice of external consultants. This half billion is understood to be real money that was there, waiting to be found – but a total of £40 billion, £40,000,000,000? Surely not.

The truth is that the missing £38 billion, conveniently ascribed to the ‘mismanagement’ of the MoD under Mr Gordon Brown, mesmerised the public into accepting there was no alternative to decommissioning warships, selling very cheaply aircraft that had just been expensively upgraded, discharging recently trained pilots, and destroying ancient regiments.

The money to be ‘saved’ by this vandalism then became available for Mr Cameron’s ideas of ‘soft power’ which, in brief, is to be his way of defending our nation and our interests by giving money to those countries whose citizens might be tempted to do us harm. This 21st-century Danegeld is to be used, for example, to finance women’s education in countries such as Somalia and Pakistan so that they will turn their sons away from recruitment for terrorist attacks in London.

Very quickly after Mr Hammond’s statement in Parliament, posts were appearing on the Internet questioning the nature of a £38 billion ‘hole’ that could be filled so quickly and, following the blog, accusing ministers of deliberately misleading the public. One signed by ‘Cassandra’ was typical – it opened with this:

‘As is usual with this most dishonest of regimes the truth is hidden behind a web of lies; the supposed black hole was in fact a sneaky wheeze to get the public to accept the plan to smash our armed forces and reform the bits into part of the EU armed forces.’

But it is not necessary to accept theories of a European Union conspiracy to recognise the immense damage inflicted on our defensive abilities when our Armed Forces are allowed to sink in size below their critical mass.

So what was the ‘black hole’ that has now disappeared? For a long time no one knew, perhaps because the MoD’s accounts were in such a mess (as the National Audit Office and two Parliamentary Select Committees have stated) that it was very difficult to see what precisely was happening to the Defence budget. But now we have been told, by the man who has filled in the ‘hole’ of £38 billion, that whatever it was it was created by ‘Labour’s fiscal incontinence’ (does that mean financial prodigality?), and that a ‘yawning black hole’ had been left by Labour’s equipment programme.

What Mr Hammond was implying is that orders had been placed for equipment for which no funds had been allocated. What equipment might this be? He gave us examples.

First, ‘two 65,000 tonnes carriers, three times the size of a typical STOVL carrier’ (such as the three STOVL carriers, of which HMS Ark Royal was the most famous, we already had and are now to lose for reasons most analysts cannot fathom).

Second, ‘the unfunded Trident commitment’! Until that weird moment last Tuesday no one outside the secret Mad Hatter’s world of MoD finance knew or even suspected that Trident was in the Black Hole. Perhaps Mr Hammond had not intended to confess this, and the revelation slipped out when answering a question from his predecessor, Mr Fox, who stated that he had inherited from Labour ‘a commitment to the replacement of the Trident programme that had no funding line whatsoever.’

Third (aimed at Mr Brown), the ’22 Chinook helicopters that the former Prime Minister famously announced but then forgot to fund’. (The present Prime Minister also has promised Chinooks, greatly needed by the troops in Afghanistan, but intends to withdraw the troops before the Chinooks will arrive there.)

Does this make sense? Well, when the MoD twelve months ago released the likely cost of the Trident replacement programme, the Defence Secretary, then Mr Fox, suggested that by the time the new submarines were built the figure would have doubled even before the price of the warheads, the lease fees for the missiles, and all the running costs were included. It would have doubled, he said, to £25 billion.

So with the unfunded Trident replacement programme at £25 billion, and the unfunded increase in the carrier programme at £7 billion, and the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 aircraft which could not be funded because no one knew, and still no one knows, the price, we may have the notional constituents of the Black Hole which the Defence Secretary has filled, but he has not told us where he found the money to do this. So was it a ‘loaves-and-fishes’ miracle? (end of excerpt)

Source: Daily Mail’s Forbes blog; posted May 23, 2012

Selex Eyes AESA Radar Progress

The Italian-British defense electronics company also is looking for progress on the Captor-E AESA development for the Eurofighter Typhoon. The Euroradar consortium — which comprises Selex, Cassidian and Indra — hopes to deliver the first AESA for a Typhoon development test campaign in the second quarter of 2013, with first flight planned later that year. Hardware for the first flight radar “is now coming together,” Mason says.

Typhoon customers have been slow to support the AESA program, even though several have expressed interest in the technology, leaving industry to self-fund much of the work. A government-backed contract is expected next year, although it is unclear which countries will sign on. The U.K. just announced that future Typhoon upgrades are part of its long-term spending plan.

Euroradar partners have agreed on a concept where Cassidian will integrate the system, with Selex Galileo providing transmit/receive modules.

Some times the truth does sunk in. In it like if you order a menu at the restaurant. Would you rather have the best French chef prepare it or a team of Italian, German, Spanish and British cooks?

Nice:)

6th Gen fighter:diablo:?