VnomadGermany has very low military spending as a percentage of GDP, at 1.2%.
A budget equivalent to 2% of the GDP isn’t a prerequisite to purchasing the F-35. Especially when your GDP is the size of Germany’s. R&D expenditure will compete with finance for the Tornado replacement but its still manageable – Rafale, for example, is expected to be in production past 2025 IIRC.
The F-35 has been toxic politically in some countries. If you read the comments at the end of the French language article about recent testimony to France’s parliament, the commentators are all against the F-35.
True. But this is now – the F-35 just gotten past its main hump. The opinions of air forces around the world have already shifted – the negative press will fade too with the ‘developmental hell’ stories going away. Its a common theme – from the F-16, Abram, C-17 & Osprey to the Eurofighter, A-400 & NH-90 (in the early days, Rafale as well) – though the size of the F-35 program resulted in a far larger degree of public scrutiny.
Vnomadi guess there could have been a deal on Rafale here.
Lol. See now I can’t tell if you’re being serious!
That’d be a mental decision. They have the Eurofighter and they’ve been pitching it against the Rafale around the world for 15 years. It’d be worth it, just to see them try to justify a Rafale purchase to the public with a straight face.
Fact is, unless you have some very strong nationalistic blinders on, the Eurofighter is very obviously a multi-role aircraft. It is, or will be, operational with the Meteor, IRIS-T, Taurus, Paveway series and SPEAR III. Any residual gap with the Rafale can be remedied with an ESM upgrade & CFT integration, for a fraction of the upfront cost of inducting a new type.
Also, worth noting is that the Brits are upgrading/modifying/whatever the EF for greater inter-operability with the F-35 – an obvious area of interest for the GAF vis a vis its allies (consisting of upto 10 F-35 operators).
VnomadAnd Germany will not invest in F-35. Take the bet?
I’ll take that bet. Fact is the Franco-German project, currently in the conception stage, is for a Rafale/Eurofighter replacement, that will in all likelihood FOC no earlier than 2040. Meanwhile the GAF has two Tornado wings that need to be reequipped with a modern fighter starting no later than 2025, with the age of the fleet nearing on 40 years at that point.
50-70 F-35As are well within the German capacity to fund. The political aspect might look like a hurdle but keep in mind that the Trump Show will only be on air for another three seasons, after which relations will ease up substantially.
VnomadSorry, I’ve been a little distracted the last couple of weeks…
Car accident (totaled) due to a leg infection going septic, week in the hospital, buy a new car, schedule an amputation below the knee so that I can never have the issue again.. You know, typical krap
Gosh. Sounds awful. Hope you get better soon. đŸ™‚
VnomadDon’t engage the troll Spud. You know better. It just provides him validation for his trolling.
VnomadI would be very surprised by such a buy, Germany is just the one pushing the most for a new european fighter and by political stance is not so interested in a specialized A2G plane.
I suppose its fortunate then that the aircraft the Luftwaffe is advocating for, is a multi-role fighter and not a ‘specialized A2G plane”.
VnomadI think that this is not real in 2017. Probably FY18 SAR is trying to deceive us …
And your evidence for this rather bold conclusion is?
VnomadUmm.. you make it sounds like:
-There is no issue at all. This was the ground crews fault!
Have you any idea how stupid this sounds?
There is an ISSUE alright.
Over the first 100,000 flight hours of its life the operational fleet has logged just three class A mishaps (or two, just counting the F-35A), a safety record better than any of its peers today.
And that was before awareness of the current issue as a potential safety hazard. Yes it is an issue, and a minor one at that.
As far as Norway is concerned, as when the NoAF relocates to Ă˜rlandet as its primary air base, aircraft shelters will be constructed. Even the F-16s (aside from the odd rotating contingent) wouldn’t have been permanently stationed out in the open. In the meantime, half a dozen burly grunts would need less than a minute to physically push the aircraft off-axis to the wind.
VnomadPoland to buy 5th-gen fighter jets around 2025
WARSAW, Poland — Polish Deputy Defence Minister Tomasz Szatkowski has announced plans by Warsaw to acquire fifth-generation fighter jets around 2025.
The acquisition will be carried out under the Harpia program (Harpy in English), which is planned to be launched next year, Szatkowski said at a panel discussion held by Warsaw-based think tank Polityka Insight. The procurements will be enabled by Warsaw’s plans to increase the country’s military spending from the current level of 2 percent of its gross domestic product to 2.5 percent in the coming years, according to the deputy defense minister.
The latest announcement comes as the Defence Ministry is developing its procurement plan for the years 2017 to 2026. Ministry officials have said that Warsaw might purchase two squadrons of F-35 Lightning II jets, consisting of a total of 32 aircraft. The planned procurement of fifth-generation fighters was also included in the ministry’s “Concept of Defence of the Republic of Poland,” a strategic document released May 23.
That said, earlier this year, Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz stated that the country’s government may purchase used F-16 fighter jets for the Polish Air Force from the United States. The aircraft would be overhauled and upgraded by the Polish state-run defense industry. The new jets are designed to replace Poland’s Soviet-designed Sukhoi Su-22 and Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters.
VnomadYou can’t have it all, there is always a compromise somewhere for any jets. Having internal bays and high fuel fraction must have an impact somewhere. but again engine and FCS did a good job to limit impact even if still visible.
There is a trade-off for the internal bays & fuel fraction and that manifests as a larger transonic bump (relative to a lightly loaded F-16) and not in the form of ‘subtle’ nonsense about unreasonable AoAs and whatnot.
VnomadOn the positive note the engine is impressive in dealing with a somewhat “fat” jet due to the internal bays and high fuel fraction, the take off was nice and it could accelerate fairly quickly although it looses energy quickly too as it rapidly reach high AoA in many of its agressive maneuvre.s Then it has indeed good nose pointing ability at slow speed. All in all, given the compromise of being a stealth jet it did fairly well, above my expectetion which were quite low in the first place.
:facepalm:
There’s no such thing as a high energy high AoA display. If you want to go high AoA/post-stall, you need to shed speed, there’s no way around that. And if you shed speed you lose energy. So saying that it ‘loses energy too quickly’ is a contradiction in terms. It is supposed to dump speed – that’s where the nose-pointing ability comes from.
And just for the record, the F-35 recovers speed as well as any other fighter out there. Whether you liked it or disliked it is only a commentary on the routine planned, the aircraft itself did exactly what it was expected to (the plan for the manouvre display was released well before the airshow).
VnomadIf you do that you kill the other two bidders that don’t get chosen and the corresponding skill set in the corresponding countries. Each of those firms should develop their design and compete to sell them to different countries. Anything else is pure communism.
I think LockMart & Boeing will approve of that idea. Use higher production volume to suppress the cost and beat the competition on price. Pure capitalism.
VnomadNo. First you do not have any official value for REC flyaway inside Indian deal. If you want them, take the data from french senate. Otherwise apples to cocnuts.
This is a fair point. SpudmanWP should include the FMS service charge in the F-35’s flyaway cost to get the equivalent ‘bare-bones’ cost to Belgium. That would be 3-5% charged by the DSCA (though that can be waived by the DoD). For the sake of argument, lets assume its 5%.
So the flyaway cost of the aircraft ordered in 2020 would be $80M mil x 1.05 ~ $84 mil.
Problem is, even if you adopt a very conservative outlook and add $15 mil in ‘ancillary expenses’ to that, the Rafale is still not a viable alternative on economic grounds.
VnomadF-35 : Rumors go this would be the favoured candidate. But it costs the most of all candidates, whether at fly-away or through-lifecycle costs. Despite economies of scale, based on production numbers that since decades have never been realised anymore in aviation industry. Complete dependency of US for evolution on hard/software (no production line will be based outside US territory as LM needs it to replace F-16 production that is coming to an end.
Don’t kid yourself, buying the Gripen or Rafale would lead to just as much dependency on Sweden/France as well.
To start with, nothing in BAC CONOPS requires the customization of any of the fighters on offer. Well… possibly in the Rafale’s case (diversifying the weapons options) but not for the Gripen or F-35. Especially in the F-35’s case where its set to be the de facto NATO fighter for the next three decades offered with the widest selection of weaponry and bolstered by MADL connectivity with allied F-35s & Eurofighters.
And that’s not including the nuclear mission of course; the F-35 if ordered by Belgium will be delivered to the BAF in the Blk 4 configuration i.e with B61-12 integrated.
That aside, even if theoretically some minor customization was required, it would be performed by the OEM on contract – not done in-house by SABCA (generating the requisite local capability would be grossly uneconomical). We’re about half a generation past the stage where operators could rig their aircraft with discrete systems acquired from third-parties and carry on unhindered.
So yes, while the F-35 is a sealed box, in practice, it would make no difference to an operator like the BAC (or RDAF, RNAF, RNoAF).
VnomadHmm, the development costs of the Eurofighter were around 23 Billion US$, my source is the UK National Audit Office, and that number is consistent with quite a lot of articles that i´ved read.
UK Parliament report –
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmpubacc/860/860.pdf
Development cost: £6.7 billion ($11.3 bn @ 1 GBP=1.7 USD*) to the UK MoD. Assuming the UK contributed 1/3rd of the development cost that puts the total R&D cost at ~$34 bn.
*The GBP has fallen steeply recently coupled with a rise in USD but historically the ratio has averaged roughly around 1.5 to 1.9.
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