Agreed 🙂

I’m not trying to “change” anything. Just providing data.

One of the (many) reasons which led France to leave the Eurofighter program in the 80s was that France wanted an A2G with (very) good A2A capabilities aircraft. Other nations wanted firstly an A2A aircraft, A2G was secondary or not needed.

Cheers
Az’

It says nothing about the capability of the aircraft. Imagine Germany and the UK would have bought Rafale and would so far only have trained their crews in using the capabilities of the F1 standard. They would not drop bombs over Libya today.

For the EF users it is not the aircraft that is holding them back, it is the crew training.

The Rafale begun its operationnal career (in 1999 or 2000, can’t remember) as a pure A2A (F1 standart) only for the MN (french navy), replacing -at last- Crusaders.
Now all operationnal aircrafts are F3s (new crafts or updated F2s). Still ~10 F1 in storage (Marine), to be updated.
About replacing the F1s : they don’t replace “only” F1-CT (pure A2G), but more capable F1-CR (CT missions + recce role) (and, partly, M-IVs) with the new Areos/Reco-NG pod.

Cheers
Az’

What does it change? Typhoon has so far been mainly given to air-to-air defence orientated units. A Block 2 Typhoon could be used to drop bombs over Lybia, but so far the user nations have not trained for that role.

Indeed, the current capability gap between Rafale and Typhoon is rather astounding. How did they get all these weapons integrated so fast?

Depending on the need. Rafale did not replace the 2000C/2000-5s first but also SEMs, F1CTs and even M2000Ns. EF on the other hand replaced F3s, F-4Fs, F-104s/F-16ADF first. And tehcnically the EF can use most weapons (or similar loads) as currently used by the Rafale, but the user nations are not equally trained in AG work, as most new units are air defence units first and foremost.

Oh another malfunction over a war zone. 😆

Best choice.

USAF gets a tanker
Boeing gets the contract
EADS does not have to built a plant in the US

France tried quite seriously that Spain could join the Rafale project, but then we prefered to stay with Germany, Kohl in that years had a great influence over our PM González. And we stayed on the EF-2000 deal.

Which also had a lot to do with the fact that Spain was invited to join EF right from the start, while Dassault took a look at France only when it needed partners.

The Soviet example is a perfect example why it does not work. Terrain creates holes in the radar which can be exploited by low flying planes. RCS reduction or jamming means you need to up-grade your SAMs and increase the power they can output. The SAM netork needs to be integrated with early warning radars, mobile radars against low flying targets and command sections. It must operate as whole, must have no vulnerable nodes and must still be operational if a central node is destroyed.
Apart from that you need redundancy (triple is better) which means cost are going up, while you still need planes for ground attack, recce missions and air policing.

If the competition is opened I can see strong points for:

a 2 engined plane – extra safety over the wilderness
a 2 seat option
integrated Anti-Ship-Missiles
US operated aurframe
cheap price

or in other words Super Hornet.