It looks like the backplate in the camera lens. Is it a digital?

Nope, wasn’t too worried about it considering its over-spec design.

So the supercruise part is 250 nm at mach 1.2..that means roughly a 20 min time period.Thanks Scorpion.

This point is something people battled for months over a year or so back. Supercruise is defined as flying at a velocity above the speed of sound for a sustained period. But some people around here were overly zealous in demanding the super cruise speed needs to be in a range much higher than mach 1.2 to be useful or it was not considered supercruise. The raptor in comparison will supercruise at a theoretical, optimal supercruise speed of mach 1.7 which is well above transonic speeds.

A country the size of Morocco is best served by more airframes. But when one answers that it is not a simple question of numbers, it is more of one concerning how many are flying while the others are serviced. These decisions are best made by civilian auditors as much as anyone on the military side of the sale. I’d have to think the F-16 made more sense 8-12 years down the road.

How many service trips were passed over to make up tight money to cover operations in Iraq? Sure is funny so many big ticket items are withering at the same time. I smell politics.

I’m not so sure that angle proves it has any bottleshape to it. It looks like blending between the wing and body at the wingroot. Perhaps the cross-sectional area of the Tejas’s body is distributed effectively, but from that photo one cannot honestly say that is the case.

Just looking at how the air will flow across the plane’s shape in the line art leads me to suspect that supersonic drag is more of a problem than raw power of the engine. It should have power to spare at this point in the program. Convair had a very streamlined design that couldn’t get supersonic when smarter shaping allowed it to boost the speed by 25% with a modest 7% boost in thrust even though it weighed two additional tons by the end of the change. Guess what, that plane was seventy feet long, 700 square feet of wing, and weighed 15 tons when loaded yet did that stunt on less power than what the Tejas uses.

I can see the Indian crowd gets a little touchie when someone is critical of one of their indigineous designs.

At 5.5 tons empty weight, Tejas is 700 kgs lighter than the S. Korean T-50 light trainer jet. Tejas has a smaller height and wingspan than the T-50 trainer. One may be forgiven to think of the Tejas as a trainer, and the T-50 golden eagle, a full-fledged combat aircraft, whereas it is the other way round !

The T-50 Golden eagle is also powered by the GE F-404 engine as the Tejas. However, its top speed is limited to Mach 1.4 compared to Mach 1.8 for the Tejas. The Gripen, also powered by an advanced variant of the GE F-404, has a top speed of Mach 2, despite weighing 1 ton more than the Tejas.

It is thus unclear as to how the IAF claims that the Tejas is “undepowered”, although it may also be unclear how the Gripen manages a top speed of Mach 2 on the same engine despite weighing 1 ton more than Tejas. Anyway, by conventional norms, the Tejas should be regarded at par with its counterparts the Gripen and T-50.]

The Tejas is basically having problems I’m guessing with supersonic drag from its own shockwave. If you look at most modern day fighters they design them to incorporate some sort of contouring where there is no straightline airflow on the fuselage. Start with the F-102 and look how they contoured the body like a soda bottle. This new shape allowed the basic F-102 aircraft to pass through the air much more efficiently with the same amount of thrust. You’ll see this same bottleshape on the Mirage family, too. The Mirage IIIE has less thrust, more weight, and about the same surface area yet is able to fly at up to Mach 2.2 above 30,000 feet. The Tejas seems to be devoid of these characteristics.

If they raised the forward fuselage and drooped the nose more like how Sukhoi or Mikoyan designs have been the past thirty years, they might make it flow better. Better yet, they should have designed the fore section of the body to be more diamond-shaped so that it had less frontal surface area.