If I was American: I’d tell the customer he’s being given the chance to demonstrate his willingness to sign up as part of the coalition of the willing. That he’s either with us or against us. I’d pressure him to sign up now, but wouldn’t give him a price, and wouldn’t tell him exactly what he’d get, capability wise.

If I was French I’d be much too good to talk to a customer, I’d alienate past customers (who really loved what I sold them last time) with my arrogance and inflexibility, I’d fail to make modest investments in the jet that would give it what export customers want, and if I was lucky I’d end up selling a handful of jets to regimes that were so unsavoury that no-one else would.

If I was Swedish, I’d offer insanely good offsets and industrial participation, and I’d make sure that my customer could use whatever weapons he might want to. I’d make brutally honest comments about the opposition, then I’d be surprised when many customers decided that while I had a winning airplane, I had no political clout.

If I was Russian, I’d make outlandish claims about super new versions of aircraft, using new kit and new black boxes with impressive specs on paper, then I’d tart up a few long-in-the-tooth unsold airframes and hope the customer didn’t notice.

If I was a Brit, I’d make sure that I timed my campaign for when my own MoD’s commitment to what I was selling looked shaky. I’d try my utmost to impress the pants off the evaluation team with the airplane, but not quite get the paper bid right, omitting key information that the customer wanted, and delaying the whole process. If the customer were a long-standing UK customer, where UK links might help, I’d quickly give campaign leadership to the Germans…..

The RAF RC-135s will NOT be probed.

“Jacko said something like that. But I haven’t seen something official.”

Jacko said it because he’d been at the same Farnborough Press Breakfast as the journo who wrote the FlightGlobal piece, and had enjoyed much the same conversations with Ays Rauen and Brian Phillipson.

He posted on it within a couple of days of it being revealed.

If Jacko says something, he’s giving you pukka gen – often before he and others have written it for the magazines and websites you quote.

Jacko is pi$$ed at being disbelieved “until someone more credible” confirms what he says.

It’s a crude but effective way of preventing spanwise migration of the boundary layer. It was employed on the DH Venom and the HP Victor, incidentally, and I’m sure folk will post more examples of Western types with fences…..

More challenging than -117 was?

More challenging than the F-22?

Yes, of course F-35 is challenging, but with F-22 as a ‘pathfinder’ and without the problems of being developed in the Black world, it shouldn’t be all that challenging. It was intended to be affordable and easy, after all.

I’m not at all sure that the programme is going well – the extent of the gathering delays and cost increases would lead me to conclude otherwise at the moment, and the concurrency of development activity with early production worries me to death, though I’m sure that it will all come right when enough money is thrown at it.

Actually, I think that it reflects unrealistic expectations on the JSF front, whose costs have escalated, and whose programme has been subject to major delays.

Real world DACT will teach us a great deal about how EF Typhoon and the rest stack up against each other. Simulations like SILVE and JOUST will continue to provide a useful indicator of how they will stack up against other threats – ‘Flankers’ given parity in radar, or even superiority.

I don’t know where you’d find it online, if at all.