JackonickoCut CVF and JSF and you can afford everything else – tankers, support helos, Tranche 3 Typhoon, transports, etc. and you can hit the targets that you’d have used JSF against with Storm Shadow, Tomahawk (and here’s an idea) a new long range precision stand off weapon along the lines demonstrated by Hi Fly.
JackonickoArthuro,
“To be “considerably” superior would mean that the rafale MMI would be very bad.”
No it doesn’t. It means that Typhoon’s MMI is considerably better. By design. It does not mean that Rafale’s MMI isn’t better than most of its rivals.
Of course MMI and navalisation are “two different things with different kind of skills and engineering”, but the point is that dedicating resources and manpower (not the same resources or manpower) pays off. Dassault spent wisely on navalisation and A-G capabilities, Eurofighter on BVR capabilities and MMI.
Quoting Moussez is like quoting Bob Judson, they have both acted as spokesmen for the respective programmes, and both have ‘gilded the lily’ – as is their job.
Otaku,
A skim of your quote seems to show it to be from the Guardian, whose behaviour in this whole episode has been disgraceful, and whose coverage has been one-sided and usually highly distorted. For example, the bald claim that the Serious Fraud Office investigation “was abandoned last year on the grounds that the inquiry might jeopardise national security” ignores the fact that the Attorney General had already decided that there was no case to answer.
JackonickoArthuro,
I am not a Typhoon fanboy. I’m a professional defence and aviation writer, and my portfolio includes a number of articles which are extremely critical of different aspects of the Typhoon programme. I’m working on another one at the moment. I recognise the superiority of different aircraft in different areas, and am a particular admirer of Gripen’s datalink solution and network centric capabilities.
1) I can believe that a French pilot would view Rafale’s MMI as being ground-breaking and earth shattering, though the pilots I’ve spoken to who have flown both types UNANIMOUSLY rate Typhoon’s as being superior.
I don’t claim that Typhoon is superior to Rafale in every area, (quite the reverse) but recognise superiority where it exists. And when it comes to MMI, superiority is considerable.
And that’s not based on feelings, it’s based on evaluations (subjective AND objective) by highly trained, neutral test pilots and frontline aircrew.
This should hardly be surprising. Dassault spent thousands of hours on Rafale’s carrier compatability, and as a result the aircraft is inherently superior as a carrier aircraft than Typhoon. Dassault concentrated more time, energy and resources on providing precision stand off weapons capability, and as a result the aircraft is currently a better A-G platform. But much as the Rafale fanboys hate to acknowledge it, there are areas where Typhoon enjoys similarly big advantages. And the EF partners spent an inordinate amount of time on the aircraft’s MMI, using a cockpit design committee whose members had direct operating experience of virtually every modern fighter, and who thrashed out the best compromise. Dassault did not undertake anything like the same process, and instead concentrated on improving the very solid single seat MMI developed for advanced versions of the Miraqe 2000. Result? EF has a better MMI.
2) I would not insult your intelligence by quoting a BAE employee or an RAF officer closely associated with EF GmbH to prove a point. In just the same way, Francois Moussez is not an unbiased source, and in claiming that Rafale has “systematically won against the F-15 and the Eurofighter Typhoon” he is not being truthful or accurate.
3) The Dutch CPB evaluation was a paper exercise, with no access to the aircraft, and with no meaningful evaluation of capability. It was primarily an economic/industrial evaluation.
Jackonicko“The great evidence of success of Typhoon flaunted, is the No. of aircraft ordered by partner countries.
The said No. is the one agreed before the development began, isn’t it? Now after seeing the final result, every partner is finding a way out of this mess, by cutting down the order.
The less said about the way export was achieved the better.
That should give you “hint”, whether Typhoon is success or failure.”
On that basis, we can certainly judge F-22, F-35, Gripen, Rafale, and all of the second generation MiG-29s and Su-35s as failures, since all have had their order numbers reduced since development began.
And the size of Tranche 3 is yet to be decided. Germany looks set to take its full allocation of aircraft, and so will Spain, while the UK and Italy uptake remains to be seen.
And there are more Typhoons in service than there are Rafales on order, with more air forces than there are Rafale squadrons.
JackonickoOtaku,
Of course the US have no interest at all in hobbling Typhoon export sales. Especially not in Saudi Arabia, where the F-15 (desparately in need of orders to keep the line open) wouldn’t otherwise be a contender. Of course the ‘hopeless’ Typhoon doesn’t threaten US interests in India, Switzerland or Japan either.
And the money paid to Bandar was millions, not billions, and was Saudi money, paid to Bandar as MODA, at the request of HMG and the Saudi government.
Still, you were never one to let the facts get in the way of a good rant, were you, old chap?
Rom_un,
Al Yamamah and Salam are separate contracts, separated by several years. An inconvenient fact for the sore losers who are desperate to pin unsubstantiated accusations of bribery on the Typhoon programme.
I liked your link. The English was sufficiently bizarre to give a good idea of its credibility. Whoever wrote it obviously didn’t have any primary sources to copy from. Presumably this third hand claim that the threat aircraft was an Su-35 outweighs first hand reports from people who were there?
Venky,
Lots of quotes, all based on discredited mainstream press speculation. Why bother with Air and Cosmos, Flight, Aviation Week and the like when the general media have such a great track record on defence and aviation reporting?
You’re starting to sound suspiciously like Fonky, rather than Venky.
We seem to be getting a lower grade of Rafale fanboy, nowadays. Otaku, Rom_un and Venky. So many words, so little to say.
JackonickoOtaku,
The unproven allegations (which the UK’s Attorney General viewed as having insufficient evidencial backing to justify action) related to Al Yamamah, and therefore had nothing to do with Typhoon.
The UK SFO, US Justice Department and OECD have not criticised BAE over the Typhoon deal (which was Government to Government anyway), but over the Tornado deal.
As I said, “Only an idiot” would fail to grasp the difference.
And only someone with a vested interest would fail to see that the allegations had no real substance anyway.
“The IN MiG-29K (imminent delivery) with its AMLCD HOTAS cockpit & Thales TopOwl-F HMD- should be pretty intuitive, huh?”
Not necessarily. Big AMLCDs can contribute to an intuitive MMI, as can a helmet, but it’s fundamentally not about hardware, but about how that hardware actually works.
You could have two cockpits that look identical in a still photo, powered down, but whose MMI was chalk and cheese.
JackonickoVenky,
Dassault explicitely denied that there had been Saudi interest in Rafale before the last Paris air show. Senior RSAF officers have also denied having had any interest in the aircraft. There was no evaluation, and no Saudi officer flew Rafale.
Typhoon’s superior MMI, supercruise and supersonic agility is not ‘propaganda’, it’s fact.
Flex,
Good question! The short answer is that yes, in some circumstances, a more intuitive MMI can make a massive difference in combat, though it won’t always necessarily be enough to overcome other advantages.
And the more complex the tactical situation, the more important MMI becomes.
A more streamlined and more intuitive MMI will present the pilot with the information and display formats that he needs, when he needs them, without calling them up. It may allow a much more rapid target prioritisation or re-sort. All of this allows him to concentrate more of his attention ‘outside the cockpit’ and less on simply managing his systems. It’s likely to give him better SA.
JackonickoI don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
That the BBC is beyond reproach for accuracy, and that because the BBC has questioned the Saudi Typhoon deal, that automatically makes it suspect?
Or that the BBC cannot be trusted because (you think – wrongly) it supported what turned out to be the mistaken view that Iraq had WMDs?
(Have you heard of Andrew Gilligan?)
Saudi Arabia eagerly bought Typhoon precisely because they do know what it’s worth – it was the best fighter available to them. It was not to protect the reputation of the House of Saud or to avoid bad publicity.
You urgently need to sharpen up your critical faculties and learn to sort propagandist nonsense from the truth. Your blind adherence to the most stupid propaganda makes your posts laughable.
JackonickoStar,
Yuri Guzkov?
Nice chap. I enjoyed getting slowly drunk with him on their stand at Farnborough one year.
But he and his chaps have been talking up different radars for decades, over-stating performance and predicting impossibly ambitious service entry dates, etc. often for radars which still haven’t seen the nose of a frontline aircraft.
Yuri Beliy and the NIIP folk are just as charming, and talk just as much ********, too.
Venky,
No bribery, no blackmail in Saudi Arabia. Equating the BBC and Fox shows is utterly daft, propaganda at the most dull-witted end of the spectrum.
It’s entirely possible to compare the MMI of any pair of aircraft (and you were quoting me, not Flex). You can even do it objectively, using measures like the the Modified Cooper Harper scale, NASA TLX, or Bedford.
But even a subjective evaluation, when undertaken rigorously by properly qualified people, is a useful guide. And such people favour Typhoon in this area.
Incidentally, we are comparing MMI effectiveness and intuitiveness, not ‘MMI integration’, whatever you mean by that phrase.
JackonickoOf course.
But the more accurate your simulation, the greater the fidelity, the more applicable it becomes. And the more often you repeat it, with real frontline pilots and QWIs as the ‘man in the loop’ the more useful, and the more representative the results.
And that’s why, among professional observers and participants, JOUST enjoyed such a good reputation.
Jackonicko“They have accepted F-18E as competitor but not EF.”
If they mean on price grounds, then that’s probably accurate. Or even if they mean on the grounds of A-G capability that can be delivered now. Otherwise, it’s deluded.
JackonickoSferrin,
Sorry, I had thought we’d moved on from the JOUST simulation and I had thought you were challenging the relevance of the Typhoon active cockpit as a means of judging MMI.
The great thing about JOUST and SILVE lies in the ability to run multiple scenarios again and again (often enough to make them statistically useful). Of course any such simulation is only as good as the data used – but like Rand, I believe that DERA do have the experience and expertise to accurately model the aircraft types used.
You have to look at the purpose of JOUST (which was to evaluate alternatives to Typhoon, and to probe whether Typhoon was ‘up to the job’) to understand that wherever there was doubt, the response was to over-estimate the performance of both the threat aircraft and the alternatives.
The aim was not to make Typhoon look good, but to reveal any weaknesses. Because Typhoon did emerge looking good, BAE and EF GmbH seized on it and used JOUST results for marketing, but that was not the intention or purpose of JOUST.
I believe that the MoD may have been quite annoyed that the results leaked, which may explain why there has been so little reported about SILVE and Gambit.
JackonickoThank you for your courtesy. You’ve made it rather less frustrating.
JackonickoSferrin,
That’s the difference between a spotter and a pilot, perhaps?
Bear in mind that we’re talking about MMI.
Flying the Typhoon active cockpit actually gives a very, very good idea of MMI, especially if you’re a current Rafale frontline pilot or TP, with Rafale’s cockpit as a baseline to compare it with.
You can even probe aspects of the MMI that you wouldn’t see in a short demo flight, where you’re probably flying a DA or an IPA from the back seat, as a singleton, with no chance to fire any weapons, and probably with no real opportunity to operate the weapons system.
Want to fly a single-seat Typhoon in full operational fit? Want to lead a pair and react to an unexpected bounce? Want to switch to A-A while in mid bomb run? Want to change the target sort using DVI? Want to ripple off a whole salvo of Meteors? Want to repeat any element of the sortie several times? No problem in the active cockpit.
Now if you want to assess handling, or rate of climb, or supersonic agility, or the ability to point the nose off axis, then any sim is useless to you.
JackonickoYou have good information in front of you. Take note or ignore it, I’ve done my bit.
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