Visit this link.
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/assistance_eu_ms/greek_loan_facility/index_en.htm
Click on the ‘+’ that heads ‘Overview of disbursements’.

The EFSF has been providing the lion’s share of well over €240 billion Greece received since 2012.

Yes, which is an agreement with what I have said. The EFSF is not directly getting money from individual countries’ budgets. It is borrowing money using the European Union as a collateral. How is that different to what I said?

Oh and by the way, a very large part of those 240bn returned back the very next moment as payments of previous loans and bonds. So it isn’t like Greece is sitting on 240bn euros right now.

That would be a bit superfluous as you already are an expert on the needs of the whole planet.

Well, yours “not buying the Typhoons was a smart move but hey let’s spend a double of that on LockMart’s flying pig” is so much better. Why not make the already exorbitant 158% GDP public debt of Greece at least 212%? Wanna sell your car and pay for that? Me not..

This not actually entirely true either. The only people who are hurt by the aid to Greece are the Spanish and the Italians. The rest of European taxpayers have paid diddly squat to Greece so far. But even still it will be very hard to justify to Italian and Spanish parliaments that Greece is dishing out a good 5-10bn euros for a couple of dozen of planes and doesn’t use that money to lighten its debt burden a little bit.

And by the way, this is not digressing, this part of the multifaceted problem the F-35 represents as the next NATO fighter …

Greece was never particularly big or rich, yet throughout its NATO service it could maintain a more than respectable and quite capable actually, Air Force with diverse assets maintaining about 300-350 front line NATO fighters up to the 2000s. Well all that is gone now and the spectacularly high F-35 price is not going to allow that to change.

Looks like the EU citizens will be providing bailout payments to Greeks who will, in return, go shopping to the US to get the most expensive and the most useless fighter in existence today… Yes, you can bet on that.. 🙂

How would the F-35 help the Greeks defend their airspace and stop Turkish violations if an F-35 cannot detect another F-35? How do two equally low RCS planes intercept each other? Presumably AWACS on both sides are not going to be much use, ground radars even more so. So how does one effectively police their airspace with low rcs planes against low rcs planes?

The original point is not “should advanced trainers have ground attack capability, thus meaning don’t develop the same capability on pukka fighters?”…

but rather “when would command actually have the balls to deploy trainers/ground attack aircraft instead of pukka fighters?”

The two are complementary. Not conflicting. But I’m not sure they ever would be used as such by top brass.

Question of cost.

To send an asset into battle (when you have the choice) it must be ready to do battle.

Advanced trainers where (almost) always offered with the avionics options to make them light fighters. Some countries opted for light bombs and rockets, others for AA missiles etc.

The point is you may not have suitable comms, ECM, chaff and flare dispensers, RWR and whatnot on the plane to make it a solid choice to do a bombing run on a -even mildly- threatening environment.

Start to add all these things up and your price increases, your lead times into using the trainer from buying it, increase, overall cost increases, most air forces don’t bother with a full suit. Some weapons capability for weapons training and that is it.

Personally I think the hunchback on the two-seater Flankers is fairly ugly and ruins the Su-27s original lines.

Spoils the lines a bit, but not completely terrible. It’s ok I guess.

It will make both companies more atractive to potential buyers than if they had stayed together.

However these are executive decisions and as such, anything may end up influencing them.

If he knew, then why would he say “what the hell was that?”
BTW, in the video, except deploying airbrakes, I can’t see the MiG making any “sudden manoeuvre” as you mention,.. Can you?

Well he did drop into the F-16’s path, so he could either be coming close from the back and time his brakes (which you can see extended) exactly to slow down right by the 16’s starboard or do exactly the same but dropping down from slightly higher altitude.

Both semi-aggressive style of flying and too close for comfort, hence the wtf!

I just wonder how could the 31 sneak in completely undetected within 20 yards distance of the 16…

I suspect it made a sudden manoeuvre towards the F-16 which was unexpected I doubt the pilot didn’t know the 31 was there.