Originally Posted by matt
That makes soo much more sence then wasting money on Mirage 2000’s and MRCA’s we are going to end up like Italy before world war 2 with the best Aircraft and find out when war actually does come years down the line that we are obsolete and have no money to spend on new aircraft because we bought crappy 1970’s airframes.

Well the su-30 and mig-29 are also 70’s airframes 😉

First flights

YF-16 : february 1974
Su-27 : May 1977
Mig-29 : october 1977
Mirage 2000 : March 1978
Gripen : December 1988

Don’t forget those fighters will fly for at least 20-30 years.
The good question is : how much more does it cost to operate a su-30MKI compare to a mirage 2000/gripen ?

If you operate 100 figters at a rate of 150 flight hours a year for each of them during 30 years… you reach a total of 450000 flight hours. It is not a factor to underestimate and I fear that the su-30 MKI is far more expensive (I guess a least 3 times more) to operate than the a mirage/gripen, mainly because of those 2 enormous and complex TVC engines.

And you have to admit that you don’t need a “25 tonnes, 5000 km range” su-30 mki for every day missions like Sky police, medium range interceptions, border strikes, CAS etc…

it can carry more then the agil 29’s because it was designed primarily as a bomber, it doesnst matter what electronic wizardary you put into the aircraft its always going to be a bomber first

.

The mirage 2000 was first a pure mach 2.2 class fighter/interceptor (mirage 2000 C) and he is in the same class as the F-16 in dogfights.

The airframe is extremly strong and designed to sustained up to 12 G.

many Strike capabilities have been added on the mirage 2000 mk2, but I assure you he is still a hell of a fighter, especially the single seat version. 😎

Thanks, gui!!!

Do you know the split of the 32 Rafale B/C ordered in 1998/1999?

Thanks

Ruud

My figures for this order were 21 rafale B, 12 rafale C, 15 rafale M

not a very thorough job of destroying these aircraft is it ? probably just a warning and a let off by the French.

Actually, the aircrafts were being refueled and rearmed at the time the french made their attack. The main concern, then, was to ground the su-25 without hiting the ground crew working around the planes.

Those su-25 have been hit by milan missiles but IMHO, their warhead was not activated.

No one can give you any real answers, its all pure conjecture, both aircraft are going to AMSAR, so both systems must have shortfalls somewhere!.

The rafale is moving to the “RBE-2 active” to be able to use the meteor at its full capacity. This is mainly a problem of range. The RBE-2 was enough for the range of the mica, but not for the meteor.

BTW, the active antenna will be very similar for both Typhoon and Rafale (same development) but I guess the software that will manage each system will be different.

At the end, the typhoon teams will have more work to do on the software part than the rafale team which has flown with electronic antenna for almost 15 years now.

Irak, but it’s too late now 😀

may be Libya ?