Given the amount of BS we have seen from the program officials thus far I will safely lean on the claims made by the nameless friend of mine. Not that disclosing his name would mean anything.

What is important is that the claims of the nameless friend of mine have thus far been very consistent with cost planing of at least two other JSF partner nations. That means either there is some evil conspiracy of all accountants involved with the cost planning for the F-35 or … you are being fed with bull**** .. Your choice..

I am aware of that. But for some reason, operating the APG-81 still costs more than operating an older slotted array radar of similar size. No idea why..

Here I have what? There is not a single mention of the cost compared to other designs.

Again, you choose what you want to believe despite all of the evidence to the contrary. :eagerness:

I got a friend who has enabled me to see briefly the official acquisition proposal our govt has got from LM. I have called him today and asked about the planned operating cost, as well as confronted him with the 10% claim. He said following: “Whatever that guy claims is not what I see in the files. Every single part on the aircraft costs at least double of what they we are charged today..” [loosely paraphrased]

I have specifically asked about the AESA and alleged reduced maintenance effort but he again denied this. “I don’t know what exactly does or doesn’t it take to maintain an active radar but I got it black on white here, projected cost on operating the active radar are much higher than with our [type purportedly undisclosed]”

Unfortunately, he did not provide exact cost breakdown for me to check if at least antenna maintenance provided substantial cost savings, as claimed. Anyway, this is the first hand info I can work with. Whether you believe it or not is your decision but I certainly do care about what should I pay to my govt to operate this fighter.. If there are some substantial efficiences with this design, then they are not visible anywhere..

:eagerness:

Ah yes, the good old “my friend told me…” approach. Naturally I will assign an appropriate level of weight to your nameless friend’s information relative to the official testimony of the F-35 program chief or the cost estimates prepared by the professionals studying the program.

Just for a moment I would like to single out your “friend’s” info on AESA operating costs. :dev2:

This is about the APG-79, but the same applies to the APG-81:

Even with its advanced capabilities, the APG-79 is simpler and more robust than conventional radars.

“You no longer have moving parts,” says Navy Lt. Comm. Marc Preston, also with the fighter readiness office. “Like with anything else, when you have parts that move, they wear out. With a fixed array like in the AESA, your maintainability and durability go up significantly.”

“In the off chance that something does need to be repaired, it can be repaired much quicker,” Goold says. “That leads to lower life-cycle costs. The AESA array itself will outlive the airplane. And it’s built to allow for graceful degradation. … Over a number of years, you will lose some of those modules, but the system can compensate for that. As a maintainer, you don’t have to do any work at all [on the radar].”

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,103141,00.html

This is about the APG-81 :

Reliability

AESA’s solid-state technology and elimination of mechanical moving parts will enable the radar to far surpass current standards for systems reliability. The radar system also features a “replaceable assemblies” design for faster, easier repairs or upgrades to hardware and software modules. For these reasons, AESA life-cycle costs are expected to be significantly lower than those of MSAs. The active arrays on the F-35 should have almost twice the expected life of the airframe.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/ANAPG81AESARadar/Pages/default.aspx

So there you have it. On the one hand we have your nameless friend. On the other hand we have the official statements of the F-35 program head, an actual US Navy officer’s direct experience, and the official statements of Northrup Grumman.

Naturally I know who you will choose to believe. :very_drunk:

Clearly looks like Boeing thinks there is an international market for a fighter other than the F35 in the near future.

Nic

Of course, so does Lockheed. They just picked up another multi-billion dollar sale of F-16s to the UAE.

I love it when idiots are trying to be funny. It ain’t really funny but it’s nice to see them having a good time for a change..

Now now, I am not the one that made you look foolish. You made you look foolish. I am just helping you to understand your mistakes so that you can avoid making them again and again.

The facts here are simple. You know next to nothing about China’s 5th generation designs other than that the exist and a few very general things that can be learned simply by looking at the available pictures/video.

All the rest is just your own personal assumptions, which are worth little given your overall level of understanding of the concepts at play here.

If we applied your same reasoning to the Indian LCA we would conclude that is must be a cutting edge design complete with an AESA radar, advanced datalinks, sensor fusion, an advanced EW system, likely supercruise performance, a highly capable IRST, perhaps a towed decoy, etc etc. Afterall, that is what a Western 4th generation fighter of a similar vintage would have, right?

Of course the reality is quite different and that should teach you the lesson of not making wild assumptions about planes based only on pictures from the internet… 😀

Sure, from US

That is an 64% increase in operational cost, every year, or 2/3 extra.
From Norway & Canada we learn that in order to sustain F-35 operations they will have to
reduce nr of aircraft
reduce flying hours of those aircraft
close air bases
allocate more tax money
divert more from other branches of military

Canada also due to expected operational cost opening up bids including F-18SH,
and from weight & thrust alone we can tell that SH cost more than 10% more than F-16 to operate, which begs the question:
Why in gods name would they contemplate F-18SH if it cost more to operate than F-35 ?

ed: i believe i’ve read a dutch examination that rime with Canada, US, & Norway,
Norway is a unique F-35 buyer being the richest country on earth they do have the cash to increase spending

The estimate you are referring to is just that, an estimate, and one that is proving inaccurate with further study. (The same thing happened with the concurrency costs. They were projected by some to be gigantic, but are now projected to be quite manageable.)

A new cost estimate will be out later this year and will be in line with the program chief’s latest statements.

– – – Updated – – –

F110-GE-129 (16,600 – 28,000 lbf) – @ SFC 0.745 dry 1.971 wet lb/lbf hr
F135-PW-100 (28,000 – 43,000 lbf) – @ SFC 0.886 dry and 1.920 wet lb/lbf hr

F-16 burns 12,367 lb of fuel in a hour at maximum dry thrust
F-35 burns 24,808 lb at the same setting. Granted at more lbf but that hardly results in better flying performance as we have learned.

If you need to pay twice as much for fuel, I wonder where do you want to find savings to push the figure back to 10%..

Primarily through reduced and simplified maintenance. For just one example an AESA radar requires far less maintenance than older radar sets.

There is a lot of material available on this if you cared to actually read up. (which seems unlikely based on your behavior in other discussions…)

There is also a new engine under development that is targeting a 25% reduction in fuel burn, in addition to increasing thrust and reducing drag that is not part of these most recent cost calculations.

Dream on buddy ! What next they can make a J-50 from the parts of a Toyota land cruiser at 1/100 the cost of the F-22? I Love how you always CLAIM China can do this, can do that and US technology is inferior to the MYTHICAL TECHNOLOGY yet when it comes to BASHING US technology you go all out to find out the specs, the performance data etc …Why not just treat the F-22 and F-35 with the same GLOVES in the future? Only look at pictures and look at HELLADS and then you’d have to agree that by the time the J20 is in IOC the F-35 would be carrying the HELLADS system…Just do not ask me for proof…. And do not think that the US radars are set in stone, already plans to bring the Apg-77 up to the 81’s computer procceseros and the back end…yet the chinese will design a radar for th j20 in 2013 and field it in 2014 which is a BIG BS , as their first generation AESA would probably take them 10 years , so they probably have been working on it for a looooong time….Debating with you is a pain in the back side because you seem to want proof and claims on everything US and then dont show any claims for your faith on the chinese equipment, when nations right across the world are strugling with advanced radars, advanced propulsions etc etc, when they could have just bought a few Playstations and toyota land cruisers….

Bingo! The Chinese are so smart they will just put a state of the art fighter jet together from bits and pieces of whatever is lying around. It should be no trouble at all!

This really is comical to observe. You wouldn’t find someone saying that China is going to roll out a new airliner to beat the 787 or A380 in a few years and at a far lower cost because they have access to the latest Samsung phones. :eagerness:

Naturally when it comes to 5th generation fighters it is no big deal. Just stop by your local electronics store and you are good to go.

As for that fighter’s capabilities? Top of the line, absolutely. They wouldn’t have painted it black if it wasn’t going to be an all-around super plane. Just look at it. It looks cool. It will no doubt be highly maneuverable, and really really fast. It will probably fly high too. Oh, and doesn’t it look cool? I bet it has a great payload and range and will be reliable and cost effective. I bet its all around fit and finish will be right there with the best!

:very_drunk:

Iran is a moot point.. They have not been involved in serious aircraft design and is under embargo for most technologies.
Today’s Chinese technological level in electronics is way ahead of the US level fifteen years ago. The same counts for Koreans, French, Italians, Germans, take your pick.. Whatever AESA radar any of these countries are designing now, small or big, is superior in technology used to what APG-77 has.

Iran has been trying to carry out serious aircraft design… for all the good it has done them. They don’t have the technology base.

As for electronics, we aren’t talking about consumer electronics here. There are some related technologies, but if designing an AESA were simply a matter of buying some parts off the shelf and putting them together you wouldn’t see countries struggling to the extent they have.

I agree completely about the F119 and the reason is that there is no COTS to speak of when it comes to aircraft propulsion because there are no billions of civilian jet engine users.
It is simple: wanna have an engine core comparable to F119? Invest few billions $ and 10 years into CFD, single crystal turbine blades, advanced superalloys and other specialized technologies.

You could hardly be more wrong. The civilian jet engine market is huge, and it is not uncommon for civilian jet engines to share high pressure cores with military engines. The reason jet engines pose such a problem for new entrants into the market is they require mastery of a range of extremely challenging technologies and the holders of that technology are few and guard it jealously.

But at the same time, wanna get a T/R module comparable to what APG-77 uses? Get a Samsung phone for $350 at your local store, take out its GaAs power amplifier and have it modified to fit your needs, multiply it by 1500 and attach the assembly to a backend of a modified existing radar system.

Sure thing dude. :very_drunk: I recommend you give that a shot. If you can get it working you would find buyers for your cell phone based radar.

The real advantage the US can sustain cannot be electronics, such thinking is totally flawed, there are too many worldwide civilian companies doing similar things for civvie applications, often more quickly and effectively than what US DoD can have. Even better, their products are easily accessible to anyone interested. The real advantage lies in technologies which are specifically tailored for military needs and as such non-profitable for civilian giants – advanced jet propulsion, combat aircraft layout etc… An aircraft capable of flying at M6.0 would not need even stealth or AESA radars to fulfill their mission.

Again, you are completely wrong about the engines, and the US is a world leader in electronics with no sign of that changing.

That’s a moot point because you know exactly as little about F-35, F-22 or Typhoon. Have you ever flown one? Have you ever measured their RCS? Have you ever turned on their radar to see how it tracks targets? Do you know anything specific about these aircraft other than what their manufacturers and user say about it?
If not, then your thoughts about what APG-77 can really do are exactly as speculative as my thoughts about what radar the J-20 will field one day.

Actually I know quite a bit about those aircraft, but that is beside the point.

Even an amateur with access to only the internet could find a great deal of official and semi-official information on the F-35, F-22, and Typhoon, including their general design goals, philosophy, schedule, costs, etc.

The Chinese meanwhile have announced essentially nothing about their aircraft, no schedule, no budget, no publicly stated goals. If the J-20 were grossly over-weight, would you know? What if it were suffering from wing drop? What if its software is crashing continually?

The fact is that you know almost nothing about the J-20. You can look at pictures and form some general impressions, but that is all. Naturally you choose to assume that the Chinese will master numerous technologies needed to build an actual competitor to the F-22, and naturally they will leap ahead while they are at it… :very_drunk:

This is like arguing about religion. You have no proof, just strong beliefs.

Agree to elevate maturity. UAE purchase for F16 took place in 2000, Rafale wasn’t operational yet (May 2001, limited F1 standard)… There wasnt any real contest.

France pushed the Rafale aggressively for the original UAE deal. A fighter that isn’t yet operational can certainly compete for orders, but the Rafale just wasn’t competitive. Even 10 years later the UAE has demanded upgrades to the Rafale in order for it to match the performance it already gets from its F-16 Block 60s.

Going back to the SH vs F-35 business that Rii brought up childishly, my point is that the US Navy has an immediate need for more fighters and has been buying Super Hornets continuously since 1997. Just because the US Navy continues to buy an aircraft to replace aircraft that are aging and being retired doesn’t mean they prefer the SH to F-35. It just means that the Navy has kept up a steady stream of fighter purchases to maintain its fleet. (Which is certainly smarter than what the USAF has done.)