Wrenchbender,

It looks as though you need to polish up your historical knowledge as well as your grammar.

Britain is asking for no more than it was promised when it signed up as the only Tier One partner. The goalposts on technology transfer changed only after that, when Bush replaced Clinton.

And US101 may not get the CSAR contract, the only sure fact is that it’s the best aircraft for the job, as most people in that community will tell you. The S92 is a non-starter, and for all its compelling advantages in other roles, the H-47 is simply too slow and too noisy for CSAR and SF insertion.

“They can take back their EH-101 also.”

It won VXX fair and square. If it comes down to platform capability it will win the CSAR competition too. Only the best is good enough for VXX, and Merlin is the best helo in its class.

The only thing it’s capable of is putting on a airshow for school children. Build a carrier if it’s so swell of a plane.

Defended the Winter Olympics. On Q with the Italians. In squadron service with the UK in less than a fortnight. Do you say the same about the F-16, F-15 and F-22 with their carrier capabilities?

As to what we need on JSF, this week’s buzzword is ‘Operational sovereignty’, which our noble friend Lord Drayson has defined as being ‘the ability to integrate, upgrade, operate and sustain the aircraft as we see fit and without recourse to others.’

That means the ability to conduct all necessary maintenance and upgrade activity in country as required (though airworthiness issues will place the Design Authority – eg BAE/LM and OEM in an almost monopolistic position for permanent mods). That also means the ability to integrate UK weapons and kit when we need to do so.

The reason that we can’t simply agree to let LM integrate whatever weapons we want is that they can’t be trusted to do so. Look at the fuss over Meteor, external carriage of ASRAAM, etc. already. US industry may be obstructive when asked to integrate weapons that compete with its own products, but any customer is going to want to tailor the aircraft to meet its specific needs, and to integrate the best kit in order to do so.

It has NOTHING to do with manufacturing our own F-35s for sale to other nations, nor even with having the right for the UK to compete for integration, upgrade, support and sustainment work on other people’s JSFs.

We are asking for no more than the US would quite rightly expect on Merlin, or than it expected on AV-8. We are not expecting to be able to develop an improved version, nor to sell it overseas, as you did with the B-57.

We should be entitled to expect some help on this, since we paid up front to be a tier one partner, and since the aircraft was developed using plenty of UK Intellectual Property, and since (regardless of how many JSFs we buy) we will be building the back end of every single JSF that flies.

The new Defender’s configuration is well shown in the linked PBN press release.

Steves,

It’s an aileron mass balance.

Swerve/Super Nimrod,

The three extras weren’t CASTOR aircraft, they were turbine-powered Defender 4000s, and have been used in Iraq (AFM has had photos). They do have a slighty different nose shape to the standard AAC Islanders, but don’t have a big radar.

There have been suggestions that two of the original AAC Islanders were donated to Nepal.

Great, great thread title.

You’re using stupidly approximated figures. 100 kg for a fully dressed, fully-equipped pilot?

A standard UK 500-lb bomb weighs 540-lb. I seem to recall that a non LGB 1,000-lb bomb weighs close to 1,100-lb.

A full 1,000 litre tank AND pylon will weigh rather more than 1,000-kg

etc.

And I suspect that EF GmbH’s ’24 tonnes’ is equally approximate.

Moreover, this is an IPA, so as you surmise, will be weighed down with test instrumentation.

Ah, but to be fair, until very recently (when the four Eurofighter nations finally started to get their acts together and make the sort of progress that was always possible) Rafale development and deployment was years ahead of that of Typhoon.

It’s also still the case that though in service Rafales are now massively out-numbered by in-service Typhoons, the Rafale will enjoy some capabilities (arguably not those that the EF partners would view as being the most important in the post Cold War world) before Typhoon does.

The Rafale team deserve great credit for their achievement in getting a one-nation programme this far, this quickly. A four nation programme should, perhaps, have accelerated much further ahead of Rafale, but has not.

Ticket price is misleading. Gripen is an exceptionally cost effective aircraft. The F-16’s through life costs are roughly four times its purchase price. Gripen’s are only double.

Having just ordered the F-15SG, the singapore airforce already has quite close commonality with Korea and these two countrys are likely to be the last to operate the F-15 (many years from now) so future cooperation may be a good move.

The F-15K and F-15SG are very different aircraft, as are the two nations’ F-16s. The idea that Korea and Singapore are on the cusp of some major strategic alliance is unsustainable.

A T-50 buy would make sense for Singapore. Even though supersonic capability isn’t strictly neccessary for an advanced trainer, the T-50 is the only alternative that offers a realistic secondary air defense capability.

Singapore can afford, and wants separate platforms for these two roles.

The Aermacchi M346 offers no clear cut advantages over the current A-4 fleet, not to mention the fact that the M346 program appears to be doomed if it doesn’t win the Eurotraining requirement. The Hawk 128 is notably inferior in performance to the F404 powered A-4.

Both M346 and Hawk offer a better, more cost effective training environment than the A-4 for pilots destined for the F-15, F-16, JSF, etc.

The F-5 replacement should be key to any advanced trainer decision.

No it shouldn’t.

Initial procurement of the T-50, followed by full partnership on the F-50, would certainly represent an advance for Singapore’s aerospace sector. The purchase of either the M346 or Hawk 128 would represent a backward step for Singapore’s defense interests.

Utter nonsense! The trainer’s unlikely to be a purchase, anyway, it will probably be a PFI service contract.