The 4×4 results are hardly worth a medal, given the claims of 400-600 per cent superiority in air-to-air.

The F-22 didn’t rack up extremely lopsided kill-ratios because it was a great dogfighter (which it is). Most of the time, its opponents, or rather, its victims got nailed without knowing it was there.

i did not comment the content of the report, just the fact the report existed.

That was just a general comment. Not in response to your post. :angel:

I vote for sale to Kuwait.

P.S. Do we have any bookies on the forum? :eagerness:

Hi All,
According to the Daily Fail it was the F-35 test pilot who said it couldn’t dog fight…:confused:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3144873/U-S-air-force-s-sophisticated-stealth-jet-beaten-dogfight-plane-1970s-despite-expensive-weapon-history.html

Geoff.

Its quoting David Axe too.

I’ve been staring at this picture for 10 minutes now, and I admit I’m somewhat befuddled. I know this has been discussed before but are we 100% sure that those are auxiliary weapons bays under its wings?

How do they work? Will you have one door opening with the missile ejected out, or will both faces open with the missile fired off a rail? While a missile can fit in there, just about, is there enough volume to accommodate an ejection mechanism/missile rail? Also, why do the structures taper down at the aft section, given the R-73’s larger rear fins?

Here’s a line drawing by Paralay showing a possible arrangement –

The problem here is that the outer section of the wing (that’ll face maximum bending moment) appears to lack adequate reinforcement. And the scale is obviously a little off. Thoughts?

Why, in the world, would i just randomly let the Indian delegation to go and take a look and crawl all over the cripled T-50-5? At that point Sukhoi themself were not sure what happened exactly so it is only natural that they closed off all access to the frame post accident. So that the investigation could start without any disturbance from outside.

I agree. And I brought that up to illustrate the level of participation of the Indian side in the program. In contrast, I doubt the chaps at LM/USAF would have refused to let a British team take closer look at an F-35 in similar circumstances. Point I was making in my post to Rii was that the PAK FA (and by extension the FGFA) is a Russian aircraft through-and-through and there’s no reason to suppose that there’s any unreported high-level collaboration going with India.

Also, “reported by multiple sources” means nothing. Those words are completely meaningless and are not proof by themself. The 12/52 numbers for T-50 were reported by multiple sources despite it all originated from one (1) source that in turn got it from “an anonymous source”. It got repeated ad nauseam without ever getting checked, and those numbers never got stated officially. Point being; media are parrots and repeat “information” without ever checking where it came from in first place. Especially true if it is negative information.

Well your own comment above indicates that this time at least, the media was spot-on.

I turned on the extension of the nose strut – the electrohydraulic retractor engaged, and the nose of the aircraft started to “crawl” up. “How about that?” I shook my head surprised. “Couldn’t you do without it on this little one?” As for me, not a common way to reduce your takeoff roll. In the USSR, only Myasischev used this on M-3 and M-4 – the heavy long-range bombers with a tandem gear layout, thus with very short nose struts.

Why did the F-5E use an ‘electrohydraulic retractor’? Why not just employ a larger forward landing gear? Like the Rafale M.

Because it is. Their delegation was allowed to be around T-50 3 years before that.

Not quite the same thing as allowing a delegation of prospective buyers to examine the still-smoldering airframe of the T-50-5.