No, not me. My opinion is worth nothing – as a journalist my only function is to assess and report what I’m told, and to use other people’s expertise to do the assessment, too.
I take good note of that :p
I’m interested in listening to people who fly modern fast jets for a living – not senior officers who stopped doing so 16 years ago.
Personaly i would not give more credits to an active F-15E/16C/18 pilots who is glued in his -teen MMI habits.
i would rather evaluate the intuitivity and learning curve of my brand new MMI with someone not too much used to ONE type of modern MMI.
The typhoon MMI is very similar to the teen’s MMIs. It uses the same principle, the same philosophy. It is not a surprise that F-16 pilots (like the singaporean) found it … easy to learn. However, that doesn’t mean it is better or worse than the rafale one in any way. It is just more “Classic”.
And ACM Torpy said that he found the cockpit layout intuitive – NOT the MMI.
The cockpit layout is a part of the MMI.
Joust was, however, a rigorous series of man-in-the-loop simulations, which Rand (a good independent source) praised – however unpalateable that might be to some of us. It was conducted by DERA/QinetiQ – which Rand described as: “a highly professional civilian government organisation, and certainly not controlled by the RAF or British contractors.”
I can understand why French enthusiasts want to dismiss Joust as being unfair, unreliable, inaccurate and loaded against ‘their’ aeroplane (especially since BAE Marketeers exploited it so enthusiastically), but unfortunately, it was a pretty good tool.
JOUST purpose has never been to compare real fighters. It’s goal was to evaluate the “value for money” of specific caracteristics to improve A2A efficiency before they were selected for the real typhoon. The opponent was a simulated SU-27+ (with all the errors of a virtual su-27). JOUST was a good tool for what it was meant to do. End of the story.
The simulation of a simplistic virtual “BAEish” rafale against a virtual su-27+ was pure spin with no other purpose than a good marketing campain for the british tax payer.
This “dark side” of the JOUST was simply irrelevent as far as scientific data were concerned.
Nick 76
In BVR, when you’re talking about radar cross section, all that counts is frontal RCS. There is no evidence to suggest that Rafale’s frontal RCS is any smaller than Typhoon’s, and indeed with the fixed AAR probe and boxy OSF installation, some claim that it is higher. I suspect that both are very close, with Rafale shading it ‘clean’ and Typhoon better when loaded for A-A.
The big-fast-moving dish of the captor is very bad for her RCS. Far more than the 2 small OSF bubbles with gold treated optics which are BTW, huge assets in BVR fights.
Moreover, the RBE2 has significantly reduced range compared to Captor M when looking ‘straight ahead’, but as a direct result of the physics of phase shifting, range performance degrades even more markedly at the extremes of the scan, whereas a mechanical array does not. This gives RBE2 a MARKEDLY reduced performance at the ‘Gimbal’ (and the Gimbal is 60° off the centerline, instead of 70°) and this is crucially important in BVR air combat, for obvious reasons.
We are in 2007 Jack ! Today, the keys of BVR fights are FoF identification, data link tactics+sensor fusion, passive engagement using ECM suite, Missile effective NEZ, radar agility and discretion…. not raw radar range.
RBE2 does allow genuine simultaneous A-A and A-G modes, of course, as well as fully automatic terrain following, while OSF gives a useful passive target identification capability. Given particular RoE this could be hugely significant.
it seems that you have missed a war…
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