The RAF is not a marketing flying club for the Typhoon, but a real Air Force.

Still, the RAF doesn’t mind flying their typhoon in many airshows around the world…

Should I conclude that Aero India is a more valuable war mission for the RAF typhoon pilots than 6 hours of CAS over Afghanistan ?

And if they retire their current air defence plane in form of the F.3 and do hardly have enough Typhoons ready to cover the air policing duties in the UK and the Falklands

IMHO, more than 100 typhoon seems a bit too much for the air policing of UK and Falklands during peacetime.

, while they have plenty of Harriers and Tornado GR.4s that could do the job in Afghanistan as well, then you do not deploy the Typhoons

.

Or the Typhoon is too fragile, or too expensive to operate, or not ready for anything else than a 1 hour interception.

The “combat” deployments of Rafale where also not that impressive, when they largely relied on older Mirages to do the actual targeting of the bombs.

Afghanistan is a low intensity theater. it is a perfect opportunity to evaluate a new aircraft and confront it to the extreme conditions of a real battlefield :
– difficult maintenance conditions
– reliability in sandy, dusty, salty environnement
– very long missions (4-8 h)
– international inter-operability in real stress conditions
– high flight hour rate

BTW, in Afghanistan, most laser targetings are done by TACP on the ground and the Rafale does not need anybody for the targeting of its AASM bombs or 30mm shells. + I’m affraid thatThe laser pod of the Rafale will go to Afghanistan well before any Typhoon

Sorry, I don’t buy this “Rafale goes to Afganistan only for the marketing”
off course it is a good point for Dassault who can add the “combat proven” stamp on the rafale brochures but it is before all the best and only way to collect real data on how the plane (and the crews) behaves when they are confronted to real war missions in a degradated maintenance environnement.

It allows to fine tune the procedures and find the real weak points of all the systems of the plane and correct them. This is very, very valuable.

This is the entire text from the pictures i posted earlier:

What i find amusing is Mrs’ Kubiske’s repeating of how inferior the Rafale is. I would be really curious to know whether she trully believes that or is it out of courtesy or patriotism. 😀

There is something intriguing in those FX-2 cables…

Where is the Gripen ? :confused:
As far as the US embassy is concerned, the only competitor of the SH seems to be the Rafale. Why ?

The UK, Germany, etc. think that Meteor can replace AMRAAM, & needs only a short-range missile to supplement it. Why does the senat think that AMRAAM would be needed by France? What are the arguments? All I have seen so far are assertions, with no reasoning behind them, & given what other air forces think is necessary, I find those assertions very odd.

1- France think a light and agile medium range BVR missile is requiered for the Rafale.
The meteor is not seen as a suitable weapon for the 15-50 km range

2- The Rafale will most probably carry 4 meteor only, versus 6 mica today and 8 when the external wing stations will be opened.
So going for meteor + SRAAM combo would reduce the Rafale BVR missiles load from 6/8 to only 4.

BTW, Mica is newer than AMRAAM. Why replace it with an older missile? This is all very strange.

amraam is a generic designation. There has been a lot of amraam versions since 1990
AIM-120C7 is newer than mica

BTW, the point of the senator is not to replace the mica by the amraam but precisely not to be forced to do it by developping the mica succesor on time.

Er – no. The post you replied to says

I.e. not Meteor alone, but Meteor plus a shorter-range European missile, instead of the shorter-range American missile stated in the Senat discussion to be the only option. There are currently two short-range European AAMs in production, & another missile in development which is seen as a possible basis for a replacement AAM for one of those missiles.

http://www.mbda-systems.com/mbda/site/ref/scripts/siteFO_contenu.php?lang=EN&noeu_id=414
Why reinvent the wheel?

The french senat is talking about a medium range BVR missile to replace the mica and the only acceptable option if there is no french or european mica replacement by 2020 is the amraam.

Sorry for the confusion Blue, what I mean when I say no radar emission, I refer to the Rafale not using its radar for getting firing solutions / updates to missile. But what you are saying is that IF a single Rafale, can via the SPECTRA detect enemy radar emissions, it can fire Mica?

And of course, the Rafale can do this using a LRF at around 35kms.

Any sources on this would be appreciated.

USS.

Yes spectra alone gives a good ranging estimation. Enough to get a firing solution for a mica IR.

Now, I presume that the ranging accuracy depends on how smart the emitting radar is. Ranging an APG-77 might be a bit more difficult than a N001

when it comes to ToT, what are they putting on the table??

I can’t tell you what’s on the table but i can tell you what’s not :

F-414

:diablo:

I was simply bringing up the issue of tech security with the F-35 aboard french ships. this is perfectly on topic. it only went out in left field when fan-boys got there panties in a bunch because I educated them on past U.S. policy.

Take it easy.
In a few years, half of the european airforces will fly the F35. And many of them will spend weeks on french air bases during TLP, tiger meets and many other nato or non nato trainings.
So half a dozen of british F-35 on the Charles de Gaulle in 2020 will make no difference.

If I were you I would me be more concerned about the jsf sold to Israel :rolleyes:

I can’t change the list now that people have started to respond, sorry 🙁