A-2000 thunderghost II ! :very_drunk:

France should have ordered A-4, modified it to their tastes, and dumped Super Etendard. Even Bought A-7 fit their ship better for long range strike. Super Etendard was built on an obsolete airframe using long in the tooth engines. A-4 had a pretty good combat record in comparison. If not for the Falklands fiasco against Exocet, I don’t think Super Etendard had a lot of remarkable performances.

Well it did take part in a lot of conflicts:

Falklands war
Lebanon war
Iran-Irak war
Bosnia war
Kosovo war
Afghanistan war
Libya war

Nothing to be embarrassed about as far as combat record is concerned.
Sinking a Type 42 destroyer is what made the a/c known to the public. But the Super etendard did a lot of more usual A2G war missions with little advertising.

Ozair is right.
Links to the sources are very important.

Do i have to fork out 100 per cent of the development costs?

Well, as far as workshare (ie how many work hours you get for your country) is concerned having 100% of the development is rather a good thing 😉

Kovy, your analysis whilst looking pretty and nicely ordered is seriously flawed and does not present all costs and you are playing with %’s to portray a picture that doesn’t exist.

There is not a single penny discussed in it because it does not intend to address the costs or the benefit issue, only the wokshare per country… no more no less. That is, how many eurocanards are produced by who and what portion of this prod is exported.
So please, do not try to read into it what it does not intend to show.

I don’t want to assess the costs and benefit because most of the time you end up comparing apple and orange based on partial data.
For example, How do you compare the dev cost per country between UK and Germany knowing that their eurofighters have very different capabilities ?

Your Gripen production count fails to take into account imported parts, which are a big share of Gripen A-D & a bigger share of Gripen E. Lots of US & British stuff, for example.

Indeed (see note N°3)
This is also very difficult to do 🙁

BTW, how does it count Gripens planned to be built in Brazil? And does it fully account for Gripen C/D rebuilt from A/B? They’re often counted twice, or not at all, & it’s hard to decide exactly how they should be counted.

Only for simplicity concerns.
I will check for the zombi Gripen A/B. I may have counted some of them twice. Imho they should be counted as 1 unit as their serial numbers should remain the same when converted to the C/D version.

Your numbers ignore the economic investment required to get to the point of export. Each of the Eurofighter nations input around 5 billion or less in total funding for development. Sweden didn’t develop even half the jet or its systems and a decent proportion of those manufactured jets are no longer in service compared to Rafale and Eurofighter. Comparatively, France had to outlay the entire development cost of the jet and the engine, somewhere around US$20 billion.

I would like to see your analysis take those figures into consideration.

Yes indeed, this is only a unit production analysis.
Cost analisys are almost impossible to do, especialy between different countries.

what if, they skipped the rafale instead. it would be skipping half a generation.
RD resources would focus on more advanced M2k upgrades while they build an actual 5th gen design.

what is a 5th generation design ?

yes, Tiger too!
again, French make great helicopters. but when working with Germans..

you guys should’ve gone Mangusta or Cobra

It would have been the same because this is what happens when you ask for a completely different version and want to do the assembly yourself …

You don’t want problems ? buy the same product as the manufacturing country and let them do their job.
Besides that, you also have to consider that these helicopter have been used in war conditions only very recently… which is usually what allows to fix most undetected issues.

France has used and is currently using its tigers and NH daily in very tough war conditions (Afghanistan, Libya, Mali) so you can bet that those machines are going to mature very fast now…