KovyYes, if the Typhoon programme was to (a) retain a facility to develop advanced fast jets (b) to provide fast jets for the forces of the participating countries, the partner countries passed up much of the industrial benefit provided by investing in (a) through refusing to agree to invest in systems they were going to acquire anyway before trying to secure export sales. By trying to save money the Typhoon partner governments lost all the tax income that would have flowed from additional sales yet still have to pay to develop the missing capabilities that resulted in Typhoon being non-competitive in many selection competitions.
Yes,a bit like trying to sell a house when you have only just started building it when the competition is offering a house where most or nearly all of it is built or arrangements have been made to do so.
Well, this is exactly what the Gripen E managed to do in Brazil and during the previous round in Switzerland 😀
KovyWe all saw that episode already 🙂
it’s a reboot :sleeping:
KovyThis is a disreputable mode of argument. Instead of addressing what’s been said, or the real situation, you’re putting forward an extreme position you’ve made up, as if that’s what I’ve said. It isn’t.
Because this is the position (India should buy cheap T1 Typhoon) I was trying to address in the first place. It seems that you jumped into the debate without knowing the initial proposition.
To sum it up.
Vnomad : “India should buy cheap second hand T1 Typhoon”
Kovy : Bad idea because these aircrafts will be very expensive to retrofit to current and future standard (ie they are obsolete = their core architecture will have to be changed).
Yeah i said “impossible to upgrade” when I should have said “too expensive to upgrade” , but my point was that it would make more sense for India to buy directly a brand new T3 than a used T1 that will be very costly to upgrade in the future. (Exactly like a M2000H, a F-16A or a Rafale F1 are obsolete and therefore very expensive to upgrade to up to date standard…)
Now, Vnomad thinks that the upgrade compatibility issue is not a big deal while I consider it to be a big drawback.
That being said maybe we should end this “what if” debate and come back to reallity where India is in fact about to buy 36 Rafale F3 O4T.
KovyI implied no such thing. I said that governments don’t want to spend the money to upgrade them. I said nothing about the cost of T3, or how that compared with the cost of upgrading T1, & there was no implication at all that there was any comparison.
Indeed, that was my conclusion : If they don’t want wan’t to spend the money, that implies that the retrofit is too expensive and I conclude that it’s more insteresting to buy new T3
That stuff about dead ends is silly, just as silly as saying they’re impossible to upgrade. Typhoon T1 – the only fighter ever built that is impossible to upgrade! A feature that distinguishes it from MiG-21, Mirage III, F.1 & 2000, Rafale, A-4, F-4 – & just about everything else out there. Really? The UK is proposing to retire T1s with half the years & flying hours of Mirages, F-5Es, F-4s & MiG-21s that have been thought worth upgrading, & keeping in service for many years. It’s not because of the properties of the aircraft, it’s an excuse for cutbacks which politicians want to make anyway, but which would be embarrassing if the aircraft were the current standard.
Component obsolescence affects all aircraft types nowadays, & much more. For example, a former employer of mine used to keep a few million pounds worth of electronic components in storage, bought just before they went out of production, so that it didn’t have to replace much larger & more expensive pieces of equipment as soon as one of those components failed – & AFAIK it still monitors the production status of critical components for that reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with aircraft. A sensible air force (or whoever supports that air force) should do the same, & I expect they do. It won’t keep old kit useful forever, but it can keep it operating for years after the parts stop being made. Software incompatibility is another standard problem, for which there are some mitigation measures.
Why are you spouting all this nonsense about Typhoon?
OK fine, Typhoon T1 are not obsolete because they are easy/cheap to maintain and upgrade to the last standard which is why India should rush to buy them at a price of 10-15 millions per plane like the US did with the Harrier.
That makes sense.
KovyDear Xman,
I have no problem for fr to buy military equipment to India or Egypt. But that is called Foreign military assistance. Not sale.
And this shld be the subject of a vote at the Fr national assembly because in two years, it’s not granted that the next legislature would back-up such awkward military sales.
Oh and by the way, I have for long advocated a Fr FMS type of contract as being more in line with the Fr strategy in a modern world (endorsing local prod when there is not always enough logic or momentum in that decision).
Well, isn’t that how FMS works ?
If I follow your logic, the USA have not sold any military fighter jet for a long time then.
KovyWrt the gap between the first flights you are right, however, this was exactly an issue of integrating the FCS teams from BAe and DASA into one functioning unit and sorting the issue of who got the design responsibility. Add the turmoil created by the German reunification, the huge question mark it left over the future of the programme and the temporary suspension of development activities caused by it. It is not as easy as it seems and the conclusions that are drawn here are solely based on the time differences and ignore the reasons for it.
The ability to anticipate and react quickly to changes/issues is my point. In that regards the big Eurofighter consortium didn’t do as well as Dassault because of organisationial issues which led to lower work efficiency (on the FCS for instance as you point out).
German reunification shouldn’t have been an issue with 3 other countries backing up the program… But for some obscure reason, it seems that nobody wanted to take responsabilities to keep moving on.
Also which two aircraft was Dassault designing? Rafale C/M are two different iterations of the same design sharing a lot of commonality. Surely an additional challenge/burden, but calling it two different aircraft is a bit of a far stretch IMO.
Well, this is only a semantic dispute then.
KovyNot really, it took about 2.5 years from signature of the development contract in November 1988 to completion of DA1 around May 1992. You shouldn’t confuse construction of the aircraft with the first flight. Rafale C01 was completed in October 1990 and was ordered in April 1988 IIRC that’s about 2.5 years as well. There is also a huge difference between designing, developing and producing aircraft or anything else for that matter.
Furthermore you can hardly compare a single nation programme with a multinational programme. The latter will always be somewhat slower due to the need to agree and arrange everything among multiple partners which is never an easy task.
I stand corrected (of course I was talking about the first flights), but i keep my point.
Rafale program was also signed in 1988 and the fact remains that there was a 3 years gap between the first flight of the 2 prototypes despite the fact that Dassault was developping 2 aircrafts at the same time with a much much smaller team. Can such a huge gap only be caused by cooperation issues ? I would agree if the work to be done and the workforce were about the same on both sides, but those 2 parametters were obviously not in Dassault’s favor.
Look at how it went when BAe and Dassault were designing the EAP and Rafale A respectively. There was no real difference as far as the timing was concerned.
Sure the timing was almost the same, but the final product was not :dev2:
Ok I’m trolling a little bit 😮
KovyI did. And like I said in my last post, the (Dassault run) assembly line isn’t the issue. The supply chain is. Every one of the 500 subcontractors will need to double production instantaneously to take delivery rate to 24 by 2018. And while the Falcon production is elastic, the Rafale not so much (which is actually a positive, the stability enabling lower costs quoted by suppliers).
That leaves them almost a full year to adapt and organize…As Many of them were complaining about the slow rates, I don’t think they will see that as an issue.
KovyLead time for subcontractors is two years but that is for normal production. Any ramp up is bound to take some time to implement.
Well, let’s wait for the delivery schedule proposed by Dassault instead of speculating.
Dassault’s experience in terms of production is industry standard but hardly outstrips its peers like BAE, LM, Boeing, Saab etc. The current rate of 11 units per year is not a momentary drop but has been consistent (default) for several years.
Dassault experience is more about adaptability and quick response to a fluctuating market. Huge company like BAE, LM or Boeing usualy have more inertia.
Just a quick reminder as an exemple : It took a relatively small company like Dassault 5.5 years to design and build the Rafale C01 AND the Rafale M01 while it took 8 years for BAe, DASA, CASA and Alenia all together to build the first Eurofighter. This was during the development phase of course, but this should give you a hint about how responsive they can be.
KovyAhh.. the appeal to authority. Dassault has the bestest engineers therefore _______. Following from that LM’s F-22 pedigree would probably make it easy choice for an F-35 customer.
Unfortunately, there’s lead time involved for all aircraft, and no amount of software prowess would enable subcontractors to perform miracles.
Yes there is a lead time, it is 2 years, everybody is aware of that.
Now, you are free to distort my argument and invoke an appeal to authority when I was merely pointing out Dassault experience in that domain :
Dassault is used to non constant production rates (the bizz jet business is also fluctuating a lot) and knows perfectly well how to adapt to momentary production raise or drops. They proved it many times in the past for their military or civil products. They also created a specific suite of software especialy for that and they sell it worldwide.
Here are a few more facts to consider :
Dassault assembly line is designed for a production rate of 2.5 a/c per month and it is currectly running at 1 a/c per month. So there is a lot of room there.
Dassault aviation has been increasing his Rafale workforce for a couple of months now.
Dassault subcontractors working on the Rafale have been told to prepare for a production increase since the Egyptian deal.
You are talking about a miracle when in fact it is only a matter of industrial organisation to build additional export aircrafts that everybody in the production chain were expecting to produce one day.
What a curious argument. Its almost like Rafale domestic orders were never cut from 287 to 225 down to possibly 180 (depending on whether the Mirage 2000 is retired). Having signed just one confirmed export contract. Surprising thing is that you, being French, would assert that production/operational numbers are a true reflection of an aircraft’s capability. An F-35 fan saying the same would have been understandable, seeing as its production numbers and exports are huge, but in this case its a puzzle.
You obviously didn’t get (or read) my point. Nevermind.
As for EF T1s being ‘obsolete’, I’d really be interested in your definition of the term ‘obsolete’. Maybe for expeditionary air forces that are being downsized to 150-180 fighters. For India on the other hand, fielding a sizeable number of MiG-21s, MiG-27s & Jaguars and numbers being critical, EF T1s acquired on the cheap would invaluable. Especially for air defence & air superiority (i.e. non multirole functions).
My definition of obsolete is explained in another post above.
For the rest, there is really nothing more to discuss. You think that second hand T1 typhoon would have been valuable for the IAF… Well, unfortunately, the IAF and India Prime Minister don’t share your opinion and prefer to buy 36 brand new Rafale F3 O4T off the shelf. Get over it.
KovyWhat a load of garbage.
The RAF wants those aircraft, but isn’t being allowed to have the money to pay for keeping them. They’re not obsolete: they’d be perfectly good for many roles as they are, for quite a long time, & could save flight hours on the newer airframes. They’re not impossible to upgrade seriously – again, it’s money. Politicians refuse to pay for upgrading them to the same standard as later batches, or to fund the logistics chain to keep them operational without upgrades.
They are obsolete in the sense that too many of their core components are not produced anymore for the current typhoon standard or are incompatible with current software upgrades.
I grant you that they could, in theory, be retrofited to the lastest standard, but you imply yourself that it would be very coostly and probably cheaper to buy brand new T3 airframes with full potential in the first place.
IMHO, It is not in India’s interest to spend money on a product that is more or less a dead end, even as a stop gap, when they clearly need and want new airframes and have the ressources to buy them.
KovyIt was mentioned in the article that this buy is part of an option of MMRCA deal, to be able to buy off the shelf aircrafts. So the thing is part of the MMRCA deal, hence no-one can come and say: hey it’s something else ! start all over again and try my EF-F-35-Gripen-Whatever…
Air and Cosmos says that this contract is separated from MMRCA.
Kovy‘Easily’ may be a stretch. One, the lead times involved in aircraft production are measured in years. Similar timelines will affect infrastructure & supply chains. Two, all the subcontractors have production capacity scaled for a certain rate. They can boost it but if the rate thereafter falls (as its bound to once the export orders are serviced), they’ll have to write off that surplus capacity.
We are talking about Dassault here. You know, the guys whose softwares (DS PLM solutions) are used by most major industries around the world to organize production in advance ….
But lets assume that it can be done as you suggest. That still gives the Rafale, a lead in delivery time of just a year or two. Hardly worth basing an entire contract on. In fact, Eurofighter here could make the case, that surplus EF T1s could give the IAF a far larger short term boost in numbers.
You mean those Typhoon that nobody wants, not even the countries which produced and bought them in the first place ? You mean the planes that the RAF plans to decomission within 3 years because they are obsolete and impossible to upgrade seriously ?
Does India really want to get such fighters ?
KovyRafale production is 11 per year. That’s 55 Rafales delivered by 2020. 26 of those are committed to the AdlA. 24 of them are earmarked for Egypt. Assuming the French orders are postponed and the aircraft diverted to serve the Indian order, the IAF will still receive the last of its 36 units only after 2020.
With 60 export Rafale to deliver as quickly as possible, the production rate will obviously increase.
The production can easily double within 2-3 years which means that the 26+24+36=86 Rafale can all be delivered by 2019
Here is a ramp up example :
2015 : 11
2016 : 14
2017 : 18
2018 : 21
2019 : 22
total = 86
KovySO, eventually the MMRCA was not really canceled, but a new separate contract was in the pipe 😀
Congrats India and Dassault :eagerness:
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