This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The SH has had more than ample time to demonstrate its capabilities in both peace and wartime and the US Navy is more than happy with its performance. It has gone from being the plane they never wanted to the plane they can’t imagine letting go of.

See, there you go trying to be reasonable. That simply isn’t acceptable here. 😉

The Typhoon was built as an air-to-air platform. It excels there as one might expect. Once it is fully matured with an AESA and Meteor it will be a fearsome adversary.

…but it can’t land on carrier. In a discussion of carrier aircraft it simply never comes up. That isn’t a flaw in the Typhoon, it wasn’t designed for a carrier.

If it had been designed for carrier operations changes would have been required that would have impacted its performance when operating from land. That is just reality.

It will be interesting to see where the Indian Navy goes moving forward. At the time India began negotiations for the Mig-29Ks a US purchase wasn’t possible and the Rafale just wasn’t ready.

this talk of which carrier aircraft is best doesn’t matter anymore..
F-35C eats spanks them all..
that is until the J-31 enters full production 😮

China generally tries to model itself on American direction and takes it one step further

If the US makes a UCAV, China will try to make a similar looking one.
if the US researches DSI, the Chinese will slap on DSI on every plane, woman, and child.

what limits them however is certain things can’t be replicated due to some kind of limitations for example engines.. they’ll still have to work with Russians.

in the past this model was widely used by the Russians but these days the Russians are doing their own thing.

These are all great and some of them look only a hair’s breadth away from having been a reality!

I always felt the Tornado 2000 proposal was a bit of a Frankenplane, after all slabbing a stealthy nose and intakes onto the rest of the plane was a monstrous proposal given the job it was supposed to undertake….

You couldn’t fashion a Vulcan 2000 along the same lines could you?

looks like it would’ve been a new plane

Its a very good looking airplane. With the J-31 out, we can safely assume that PAF is an acceptable customer to sell this bird. They’ll definitely need it.. replace their Mirages, Fantans, and other relics with this jet. Would be nice if they could replace their JF-17 with it too!

What? West doesn’t like things cheap? Then why the Christmas sales hype ?

No, they are willing to pay much for a product that has a bitten apple logo on it when something with the same specifications could be had for half as much.

Christmas sales usually means marking the price up then offering discounts.