Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? Never. Captive trials for months on end, leading to a passive drop with twenty camera planes in pursuit and after two years a live firing followed by a 24 month opeval- you know the usual cr@p.

things are different when you are at war

F8s retired in 1999. They still looked pretty decent back then, considering they logged 148000 flight hours.

lol, Come on ! they are 40 years old aircrafts that have suffered years of carrier stress (expecially carrier landing and salt atmosphere)
The french navy first plan was to retire them in 1977…Thanks to new wings and some structural tests, they were able to postpone the date until 1993. And finally they kept them until 1999 which was the ultimate date possible for safety reasons : The french lost 27 of their 42 F-8 during their 35 years of operational service.

You still want French F-8 ?
Take them, the navy asks 1 euro for each airframe and I’m sure they will give you a few etendard IV for free :rolleyes: :

PS : these are all the french F-8 left, the rest is in museums

indeed 🙂

Too bad the 4000 was not chosen. 🙁

Assembly lines are modular…
Dassault is even building mirage and rafale in the same factory.
BTW, the existing rafale assembly line is far from its full production rate (less than 1 rafale / month now)…so…

It is named EMTI (MDPU for modular data processing unit in english)
As its name states it is a modular system in charge of the fusion sensor processing, mission and trajectories calculations.

This system is not present on the 10 first rafale M (F1), only on F2 rafale. Moreover, it should be upgraded on F3 rafale.

I think it is interesting to compare this eurofighter order with the last rafale order :

Eurofighter tranche 2 :

– 236 jets
– €13 billion
– €55.08 million “fly away” unit cost

Rafale F3 :

– 59 jets
– €3.1 billion
– €52.5 million “fly away” unit cost

As we can see, The typhoon is a bit more expessive (€2.5 million) even with an order 4 times bigger.

So they just flew with one wing or only half a forward fuselage?

yea, cheater ! :p

Or may be they flew with a half empty internal fuel tank :confused:

In fact nobody know.
UK advertise everybody has been impressed…blablabla…even rafale team has been impressed…blabla… but actually, the 3 evaluations are secrets… therefore all “leaks” are only …well…blabla

They did it with ease on a normal hot day. And they seem to have hit a bit more then just Mach 1.0.

Well, ground T° is not very important if the typhoon was flying above 10000 ft during the test… 😉