You can always settle with the Cheetah if you like. It’s got the best of both worlds: the lighter and stronger fuselage of the Mirage, but will all sorts of Israeli goodies in an ugly nose.

One thing often forgotten about the Kfir is that those aircraft were nowhere near as sturdy as the original Mirages. The F-21s as used by the USN and USMC were literally flown to pieces in less than three years. Obviously they suffered hard as agressor aircraft, but if you compare the structural record of the F-21/Kfir (written off after only a few years of intensive useage) with that of the original Mirages (airframe lives well over thirty years and still in service, despite heavy useage), the Kfir doesn’t look well.

Same here – PM me for my email adress, i’d like to read it.

When was the last USAF Eagle produced?

There were a few tiny orders for attrition placed in 1997 and 1998, i think the highest serials for F-15E’s are 01-2000 to 01-2004 (the dumbasses with the USAF don’t even know their own serials anymore, since 01-2000 is also an E-8C…. :rolleyes: ).

Taiwanese pilots were trained in France, it was part of the RoCAF’s M2K deal. The Mirage on the pic is coded 5-OA (í’m clairvoyant, that Chinese guy’s head is actually transparant to me), which coincidentally happens to be in EC5, the escadre where the RoCAF pilots got their M2K conversion.

Sigh.

Orange (where EC5 has it’s base) is the M2000C base furthest from Paris, actually.

It’s true if you want to ask “what is the ultimate development of the Mirage III/V series?”
The answer is the Kfir C10.

BEEP – wrong answer! The correct answer is the Mirage IIING. Canards, LERXes, fly-by-wire. One prototype built, first flight in 1982.

There is no comparison. For one, the J in JAS does NOT mean ‘joint’.

But i’m sure you agree that T- for the Fencers, and S- for the late Fitters doesn’t make any sense? Also, the S-80 doesn’t have swept wings either (unless they use an S for ‘straigh’ this time).

Can’t we punish Sukhoi for breaking all of it’s own conventions on designating it’s aircraft? They have really managed to make their post-Soviet designation system less incomprehensible and more illogical than it was before. That is of course an achievement on it’s own, but that doesn’t mean i’m happy about it.

Kompleks-20 was the whole package of Tu-95K (the ones with the big chin radome) + missile + radar and other guidance goodies. But back then the Tu-95 had already entered service as the bomb-dropping Tu-95, Tu-95A, Tu-95M and Tu-95MA(1). Also, it’s only in some cases that an aircraft got called after it’s Kompleks number, the only one i can think of now is the Tu-128 where the airframe was specifically designed (based on the Tu-98 though) around the whole kompleks.

I think that after the T6, Sukhoi simply dropped the S designations for new projects, at least for some time. Especially when the T6-1 was replaced by a VG design, the difference between S and T designations had become pretty much useless. Even more so if you think that the Fitter series with variable wings had an S-designation.
The S-series used in recent years (S-37, S-80) seem more like purely experimental aircraft to me rather than aircraft actually ment to enter service, but i’m only guessing.