hopsalot(Reuters) – The German defence ministry has no overview of the costs it is incurring for Airbus Group’s Eurofighter jets and will spend twice as much as it originally planned on the country’s most expensive defence project, federal auditors said.
The German Federal Court of Auditors, which oversees the government’s financial management, said in a report the costs for the Eurofighter jets over their life cycle would climb to around 60 billion euros ($83 billion) from an originally planned 30 billion, despite a reduction in the number of jets.
The auditors said operating expenses, especially maintenance costs, had increased particularly strongly.
They also said the budget of 11.8 billion euros that the defence ministry had calculated in 1997 for the purchase of 180 Eurofighter jets would be enough to buy only 140 of the planes.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/04/30/germany-eurofighter-airbus-group-idINL6N0NM3AR20140430
Stand by for the usual “concerned” persons on this board to decry the Eurofighter for its exploding costs, high operating costs, forcing European force structures to shrink, etc…
hopsalotAnother funny caption obviously designed by the PR department, but in this case there can be no other interpretation other than PR..
That was a joke, not a real caption…
hopsalot[ATTACH=CONFIG]227584[/ATTACH]
19 March 2014 – World’s first formation flight between a single engined 5th generation jet fighter and a twin engined WWII-era fighter where both aircraft were named “Lightning.”
hopsalotBtw, The flying Rafale is the B301 experimental plane. Did you notice the small white satcom antenna?
Another world first!
:eagerness:
hopsalot.
hopsalotUgh. So one dimensional.
The Navy needs range. Range for interdiction and range for interception and airframe size for power gen for EW. Always has, always will – keep the boats as far away from harm as possible. They were able to use the E/F Hornet in the 90s and 00s without boat loss due to the nature of the threat environment. But, don’t be under any illusion that Navair didn’t suffer for it. The most obvious example would be the severe limits imposed by the E/F’s payload-range over Afghanistan. In the future, their primary EW asset will also be severely range/endurance limited.
A hypothetical F-14E (or, the F/A-XX) will rectify matters.
[Note that even NATF wouldn’t have solved the problem as the F-22’s range is not where it would need to be for Naval ops.]
I am being one dimensional? You are the one proposing a completely unrealistic course of action all based around range and carrying capacity. (and to guard against a non-existent threat)
I absolutely agree that more range and carrying capacity is an advantage. That is true in naval aviation as in land based aviation. (though I disagree that Afghanistan has much to teach us about naval aviation. Land wars in Central Asia simply aren’t the place for naval aviation and the Navy should not be designing aircraft around that mission)
The Super Hornet, especially if fitted with conformal fuel tanks, has good range performance. It will never be an A-6, but then nothing available today is. Perhaps UCLASS will fill that niche.
hopsalotThe E/F is a more capable weapons system now and even then only in certain aspects as it received the benefits of 20 additional years of development.
With that big nose, long range, loiter capability and payload capacity, an F-14 that seen the same development budget as the “Super” Hornet would be capable of hoisting hypothetical AIM-54E for over a hundred miles guided by a big, massive AESA radar.
If you wanted to put a CVBG into the South China sea or perhaps more topically, into the Barents, its chances of survival would be significantly better if the USN had developed the F-14/AIM-54 combination rather than going with the F/A-18/AIM-120 option.
Yes, the SH can turn a bit better and yes, it is easier to maintain (although given the typical comparisons drawn was between 20 year old airframes and brand new ones it is questionable if the difference would be as pronounced as oft proclaimed).
But, if the lack of outright fleet interceptor performance means your runway is now resting on the bottom of the ocean, then was it really such a good idea?
The USN has got by till this point, which is very good work from their threat assessment folks – but they are now aware of their Pacific limitations… hence the F/A-XX noises.
I find it endlessly amusing that people around here spend half their time trying to convince everyone else they are experts, and the other half their time writing posts like the above…
The F-14 was a cool plane, but it went away because its mission went away. A hypothetical heavily modernized F-14 with a similarly heavily modernized AIM-54 makes for an interesting discussion, but there was never any serious chance of such a thing happening.
If the Navy had had more money it would still have bought something else for one simple reason… it didn’t need a long range interceptor and it certainly wasn’t interested in funding ongoing production and upgrades for a specialized long-range bomber killing missile.
The AIM-54 went out of production in 1992, the same year its planned replacement, the “AIM-152 Advanced Air to Air Missile,” was cancelled.
In 2004 the then thoroughly obsolete AIM-54 was retired, two years before the F-14 itself.
What is the point? There was never any chance of what you described happening. If the Soviet Union had hung around a little longer perhaps the AIM-152 would have materialized (certainly not an “AIM-54E”), but then if the Soviet Union had hung around we likely would have seen a new airframe to carry the new missile… In the real world the Navy made what in retrospect was a brilliant decision. They abandoned an expensive and specialized aircraft built around an expensive, specialized, and obsolete missile in favor of an extremely cost effective and versatile airframe that has allowed the Navy to replenish its inventory with modern aircraft within a realistic budget. Keeping the F-14 around (and relevant) would have cost the Navy dearly elsewhere, which simply couldn’t be justified to guard against a non-existent threat.
Now that may be changing, driven primarily by China, and the F/A-XX may prove to be something of a spiritual successor to the F-14, but that won’t in any way call into question the wisdom of the Navy’s decisions to pursue the Super Hornet in the 1990s.
hopsalotCrow11,
You will find pretty quickly that discussion of the F-35 is dominated by certain less than rational, and in all too many cases, less than polite types.
The Su-35 and F-35 aren’t easy to compare directly as they are designed with completely different philosophies.
The Su-35 is a primarily air to air aircraft with a heavy emphasis on speed, range/endurance, and maneuverability. It along with the Eurofighter, Rafale, Super Hornet, and the latest versions of the F-15 will likely represent more or less the ultimate evolution of the medium to heavy-weight 4th generation fighter.
The F-35 is a multi-role fighter, but with a comparably heavy emphasis on its strike capabilities. The F-35 prioritizes stealth, sensors, and networking over pure kinematic performance. The F-35 was also designed to serve as a naval aircraft with both STOVL and carrier (catapult and arrested landing) variants, which drove many design decisions.
Which is “better” has everything to do with what the intended use of the aircraft is and the ever present political/compatibility concerns. If you need a big aircraft that can travel long distances without heavy reliance on tanking, needs powerful long range sensors, and that can attain very high speeds if necessary, and will primarily operate in airspace you control, then the Su-35 (or something similar) could be a good option. Aircraft of this type do continue to sell as seen in fairly recent purchases of the F-15, Eurofighter, and Su-30 variants, but the Su-35 itself has not found an enthusiastic reception on the export market. (Though it has quite the fan club among more casual observers in the aviation press and internet/blog world.)
If you are purchasing a single airframe to serve most or all roles in your air force, or if you intend to use the aircraft primarily for strike missions, and especially if you wish to maintain compatibility/commonality with other Western equipped forces, then the F-35 will likely be your choice. If you are seeking a STOVL aircraft then the F-35B is your only choice. The F-35 is also the best option available to penetrate and operate in heavily defended airspace, if strike missions are what you want then the F-35 is likely your best bet. The F-35 has found early success as an export product, with recent sales to Korea, Japan, and Israel, in addition to the original developers of the F-35, the US, UK, Italy, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Norway.
The biggest attacks/complaints about the F-35 center around its troubled development, the high cost of early production models, and its emphasis on strike missions.
The biggest attack/complaints about the Su-35 are that it is late to arrive (a decade after the F-22 and only a few years ahead of the J-20 and PAK FA) and expensive both to purchase and operate relative to earlier Su-27 variants while offering essentially only incremental improvements.
If you want to talk about which aircraft would kill the other in an imaginary “fair” air to air engagement… you aren’t going to find a definitive answer here or anywhere else. If the F-35’s designers/supporters are correct, the F-35 will be able to detect, track, and identify the Su-35 well before the Su-35 is able to do the same to the F-35. The F-35 would either avoid the engagement altogether, or enter it from a position of advantage. (both in terms of positioning, and from the standpoint of having had precious time to assess the situation and decide on a course of action) The F-35 would engage the Su-35 from well beyond visual range with a late model AMRAAM or Meteor missile, (or whatever comes next), and the Su-35 would be either destroyed, or find itself on the defensive from the moment the engagement commenced. From that point on the F-35 would be able to continue to prosecute the engagement or disengage.
If the Su-35 supporters are correct the Su-35 would be alerted to the F-35 presence either through some supporting asset (possibly a low frequency radar, etc) allowing the Su-35 to close with the F-35 sufficiently to detect it with its organic sensors, either its radar or IRST. The Su-35 would exploit its speed and maneuverability to fire its weapons from higher and faster, and to avoid the F-35’s missiles. If the fight proceeded all the way to visual range the Su-35 would expect to have a maneuverability advantage, though the extent to which that would be decisive when fighting with modern HOBS missiles is subject to debate. The problem for the Su-35 is that even in this scenario it would expect to have to survive one or more missile shots from the F-35, while still closing distance, before taking its own first shot.
Who is “right” in the end will primarily come down to the efficacy of the sensors, weapons, networking, and countermeasures involved, as well as the F-35’s stealth. None of this information is available on the internet.
I would suggest that while this topic generally results in a spirited discussion on message boards like this one there really isn’t much of a debate in the professional world. Russia/Sukhoi has implicitly acknowledged that the Su-35 is a technological dead-end with their development of the PAK FA, and the world’s other major operators of Su-27 variants (India and China) are following suit by pursuing 5th generation designs as well, either the PAK FA in India’s case, or the J-20 in China’s.
From the Western perspective, senior Australian officers have stated on the record that their simulations pitting the F-35 against an unspecified “advanced” threat resulted in favorable outcomes for the F-35. Given Australia’s threat environment it is reasonable to assume that the threat they simulated was at a minimum an advanced Su-27/30/35 variant. (because that is what states in their region operate, Indonesia with the Su-30MK2, Malaysia with the Su-30MKM, Vietnam with Su-30MK2, and China with Su-30MKK, J-11, etc)
hopsalot.
Because jamming etc. Are dedicated to spectra antennae (remember, the ones GaN made flying this year, if not already done)? Btw there are some nice functions like very low level automatic followground.
:stupid: The Rafale is hardly the first fighter with a RWR/jammer integrated. An AESA radar offers jamming, communication, and potentially directed energy capabilities far in excess of what something like Spectra can manage. That is why even on dedicated EW aircraft like the Growler the APG-79 will still see use as a jammer.
A radar since the beginning aimed to evolve to an AESA? Yes.
I guess this is where the bucket of salt comes in… :eagerness:
The RBE2 has its origins in the late 80s/early 90s. Clearly it is possible to fit it with an AESA antenna, but equally clearly the Rafale has received a technologically modest capability relative to newer designs such as the APG-79/81 that were designed from the start as AESA radars and benefited from another decade or more of technological advancement beyond the RBE2.
The point people are trying to make to you is that while you are quick to trumpet achievements such as an AESA upgrade to the RBE2, even when it is only being produced at a trickle rate of ~ 12 per year that the US wouldn’t even consider LRIP.
The same is true of the “first” GaN antennas for the Rafale… the US simply wouldn’t regard this type of effort a real world capability. A single aircraft or even production of 11-12 such aircraft per year just doesn’t count for much.
hopsalotAbsolutely not, RBE2 was always designed with AESA front end in mind so AESA is not an upgrade, but a planned evolution. In fact PESA was a stop gap.
Really, France launched development of a “stop gap” radar in 1989 with the intention of replacing its antenna ~25 years later?
Development of the initial version of the radar started in mid-1989, and series production is about to begin. This will be mainly capable of air-to-air operations, but will have some air-ground capability. Funding for development of the more advanced standard that will be applied to F2 Rafales was approved at the beginning of this year, with first deliveries set for 2003. This version will have full air-ground capability, including “some terrain following” ability, and enhancements to the air-to-air mode. The F3 version, still unfunded, will provide improved terrain following at lower altitude, along with air-to-surface and nuclear warfare functions.
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/rbe2-radar-gets-ahead-51952/
…and if the RBE-2 was always designed to be upgraded to an AESA design, why doesn’t it include the features the more modern US radars do? Why is it -just- a radar while the US has moved on to radars that are so much more?
The fact remains, France has to date produced only a handful of AESA radars, none of which are competitive with the latest US designs.
hopsalotThat’s necessarily going to involve a rather large aircraft…
Indeed, see this earlier article:
“We’re talking about a 70,000- to 80,000-pound airplane,” Rear Adm. Mike Manazir, the Navy’s director of air warfare said in a 20 December interview. “We’re talking [Grumman F-14] Tomcat size.”
…
The Navy hopes to use the UCLASS as an aerial refueling tanker to extend the range of the tactical fighter fleet—particularly the Lockheed Martin F-35C Joint Strike Fighter. “We’re going to put a refueling capability into them and they’ll have an endurance package in them,” Manazir said. “They’ll be able to give away something like 20,000 lbs. of gas and still stay up for seven-and-a-half hours.”
http://news.usni.org/2013/12/23/navy-uclass-will-stealthy-tomcat-size
To put that in perspective, that is the fuel load of a fully fueled F-35C, and after staying aloft 7.5 hours…
That should be plenty to provide recovery tanking for a full day of flight ops.
hopsalotsry, but i use a bucket of salt as far as i hear modular and F-35 in a single sentence, see ROVER…
Yeah? And I feel the same way when I read the ridiculous claims of some around here of European technology leadership in a field where they have produced all of maybe a dozen operational radars, all of which are technologically modest upgrades to an existing design.
In fact, an AESA flew on Rafale in May 2003. According to Ramstein, a migration to AESA has been considered from the early days of the programme, and the RBE2 is designed so that an AESA front end can replace the current passive antenna and TWT. Power and cooling are adequate for the job. A programme called Demonstrateur de Radar a l’Antenne Active (DRAA) started in 2000, and the radar flew on a Falcon in late 2002 before flying in Rafale B301. “It was a difficult integration, taking two or three days,” jokes Ramstein. The problem, however, is that DRAA relied on US-sourced high-power processing chips – which, after Korea and the Iraq war, no longer seemed like a good idea. A new AESA version of the RBE2, DRAAMA (DRAA modes avancées), using all-European technology, was launched in July 2004 and will be ready in 2007-08. “We have a firm commitment to AESA, which allows us to propose it for export,” Ramstein says.
However, Dassault and Thales are not proposing to make the AESA the all-encompassing RF Cuisinart that Boeing (for example) envisages for the Super Hornet, with features such as passive detection, multi-beam operation and jamming. Nor does the team intend to exploit the AESA’s wide bandwidth, which would mean a new radome. (This suggests that the current radome is a bandpass design, transparent at the RBE2 frequency but stealthily reflective at any other.) Rather, the approach is to minimise cost and risk by keeping the same modes as the RBE2, while harvesting what are seen as the most valuable advantages of the AESA. These include a 50 per cent-plus increase in detection range – a better match for Meteor – much better performance at the edges of the elevation and bearing envelope, better reliability through the elimination of single-point failures and lower through-life costs. With only 120 aircraft planned by 2012, the pace of the Rafale programme has been influenced more by budget considerations than by technology.
From a Jane’s article, text here: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?137433-Rafale-News/page94
While the RBE2 AESA does not add any additional modes of operation compared to the Rafale’s earlier passively electronic scanned array (PESA) RBE2, the performance in each mode is significantly improved, Thales stated. A key feature of AESAs, a lack of moving parts, has reduced the mean time between failure on the RBE2 AESA by a factor of 10 compared to the RBE2 PESA, according to Thales. The RBE2 AESA will also continue to “deliver full performance if a certain number of TR [Transmitter Receiver] modules have degraded”, the spokesperson added, although they did not specify what this number was. While some early components, including TR modules, are understood to have been sourced from abroad, Thales has now “produced a complete supply chain [for the RBE2 AESA], with no critical component coming from abroad”.
http://www.ihs.com/events/exhibitions/paris-2013/news/jun-20/aesa-rafales.aspx
The bottom line? The RBE-2 is an upgrade to an existing radar improving range and reliability but is much closer to the The APG-63(V)2 than clean slate designs such as the APG-77, APG-79 and APG-81, which feature a much more complete set of features.
It is a big step forward for Rafale and for Europe, but hardly puts the Rafale on the level of the US’s latest designs.
hopsalotWhy don’t you bring us some statistics about the MiG-21s crash rate with all of its operators, not just one, before making an assumption that it is unsafe.
Nothing new from you though.
Nothing new from me huh? I see my links as the only actual sources in this thread. You are right that that at least is typical for how things go around here.
If you want to make an argument go do some research and come back with sources.
hopsalotThis from someone who seems to do nothing but.
I suppose this is about as close as we are going to get to an admission you were wrong.
:rolleyes:
hopsalotSee — I didn’t even mention MiG-21, but you know what the discussion is about. 😉
Undoubtedly the MiG-21 has a high accident rate in recent years; in addition to the aircraft’s inherently challenging characteristics — many of which are par for the course for aircraft of the era — much of this can be attributed both to the age of the airframes, and the high operating tempo the IAF subjects them to — which is unusual amongst nations that fly similarly elderly aircraft — as well as deficiencies in the training syllabus coupled with the fact that MiG-21 is usually the first aircraft new IAF fighter pilots step into. And at the end of the day, Russia has nothing to do with India’s MiG-21s anyway, yet this does not prevent Indian media from conflating MiG-21 with Russian aircraft in general.
Don’t try to defend the indefensible.
The C-130 in general, including the C-130J, has proven itself to be an extremely safe and reliable aircraft over many many years of service.
The Mig-21 meanwhile has proven the opposite.
Just drop it.
On Wednesday, figures divulged by defence minister A.K. Antony in Parliament reinforced in numerical terms how the ageing Soviet-era fleet had shockingly been on a wing and a prayer for such a long period but still not grounded.
The Rajya Sabha was informed that over the past 40 years, India had lost more than half of its MiG combat fleet of 872 aircraft. The minister disclosed that “482 MiG aircraft accidents took place till April 19, 2012″.
Antony also revealed that these crashes led to the loss of precious lives of 171 pilots, 39 civilians and eight persons from other services. The minister went on to state that the cause of the accidents were “both human error and technical defects”.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/iaf-lost-half-of-mig-fighter-jets-in-deadly-crashes/1/187061.html
In general, the Lockheed C-130 Hercules is a highly reliable aircraft: the Royal Air Force (RAF) recorded an accident rate of about one aircraft loss per 250,000 flying hours over the last forty years, making it one of the safest aircraft they operate.[1] United States Air Force Hercules (A/B/E-models), as of 1989, had an overall attrition rate of 5 percent as compared to 1 to 2 percent for commercial airliners in the U.S., according to the NTSB, 10 percent for B-52 bombers, and 20 percent for fighters (F-4, F-111), trainers (T-37, T-38), and helicopters (H-3).[2] However, more than 15 percent of the approximately 2,350 production hulls have been lost, including 70 by the US Air Force and the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. Not all US C-130 losses have been crashes, 29 of those listed below were destroyed on the ground by enemy action or other non-flying accidents.[3][4] As of July 4, 2012, this is thought to be a complete listing through July 1, 2012, but omits the JC-130A tested to destruction (53-3130, c/n 3002) and airframes retired or withdrawn from service in the course of useful operational lives. By the nature of the Hercules’ worldwide service, the pattern of losses provides a barometer of global hotspots over the past fifty years.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Lockheed_C-130_Hercules
One way of looking at it is that if you were to apply the same kind of loose reasoning to this incident that is often applied to Russian aircraft, you would indeed come to the conclusion that C-130J is a ‘flying coffin’: one loss from six airframes in three years? I suspect India’s MiG-21s actually compare quite favourably on an accidents-per-flight-hour basis. Of course such a conclusion would be absurd, the point of the comparison is to highlight that absurdity and invite more careful analysis of IAF accidents across the board.
Seek out a remedial course on statistics.
Sign In
