The gripen NG will be able to carry 3 meteors on its fuselage stations with relatively small pylons with ejectors instead of rail launchers. So the drag will be relatively low, that would affect the performances probably less than if they were carried on the wings ( less drag and asymetry ).

It isn’t so much the missiles as it is the fuel.

Also it is probably possible to build pear shaped drop tanks for the wing stations for less subsonic drag and more fuel like on the rafale. Performances with the tanks would not be very important because they would be dropped when necessary.

That might help slightly, but it won’t solve the fundamental problem. The Gripen is a very small aircraft that isn’t suitable for long-range operations. (take a look at who built it and why… Sweden anticipated fighting a defensive war over their own territory)

Dropping tanks would help slightly, but this is something modern fighters do only in an emergency. Also, given the Gripen’s extremely limited internal fuel once it dropped its tanks it would have to return to base almost immediately. (especially if one imagines it operating at long range)

I think there are only three contenders: F35 for self preservation in denied airspace, Gripen E for EW and cost and the SH. The Gripen and SH work much better for dispersed basing. If there was another NATO partner willing to do weapons certification then maybe the Rafale could play. It can handle dispersed basing and has exceptional EW capabilities.

The F-35B or F-35C are just as capable of dispersed basing as the Gripen or Super Hornet.

Lol, a temporary deployment on land is “not looking good”?

The drama of some of you re. the Kuznetsov is just too much. :highly_amused:

Because the carrier broke on the first day? Is there a positive way to spin this?

SAAB states combat radius 800 nm +30 min. on station for A2A,

The Gripen can fly a long way and the Gripen can fly like a fighter… but the Gripen can’t do both on the same mission.

If you load a Gripen down with enough fuel to fly anywhere near 800 miles it would be little more than a flying fuel truck, strictly subsonic and minimal maneuverability.

If you loaded a Gripen such that it could actually perform like a fighter… then it is a very short ranged plane relative to its competitors.

This is a fundamental limitation of physics and engineering.

A plane of the Gripen’s size, with its thrust, wing area, etc, can only carry a modest load a modest distance. If you load it to near its maximum load with fuel tanks then it can fly a long way, but it is in no way comparable to a fighter in that configuration.

This was demonstrated beyond question in the Swiss eval where the Gripen was unable even to intercept a simulated airliner within Swiss airspace and return to base. (the scenario required the Gripen to climb rapidly and achieve supersonic speed… something it was unable to do while carrying enough fuel to fly across Switzerland and back)

The mission of Wednesday, August 13, 2008, however, promised to be simple. A plane flies north towards the Alps of Ticino and is the intercept. To do this, the evaluation team placed the Gripen D 39-822 registered on alert on the military base of Zion. The tarmac is dry, it’s beautiful weather. At the controls of the fighter, the Swiss test pilot Peter Merz, aka “Pablo” behind him, the Saab Gripen manufacturer, to ensure that everything goes smoothly. After taking off as planned at 15 h 32, the plane goes into Swedish supersonic speed to stabilize at Mach 1.42. But suddenly, in the middle of his approach: “Bingo Fuel”! The LED Alarm fuel placed on the left of the cockpit shows the need to abort the mission and return to base.

Gripen arrived barely in contact with the F/A-18 to intercept, but was unable to intervene and had to land in Emmen (LU). Ground, the head of the Swiss Air Force Markus Gygax is stunned: excluded to buy such a flying pan. In comparison, the French Rafale, tested under the same conditions two months later, has made the interception, returned to Zion, and has been able to achieve another successful missions. On the twenty-six test flights at the time by the Gripen, the plane landed with four times the reserves of fuel below the minimum security.

…

When, today, an F/A-18 taking off from Payerne and flies to Davos at full power, it still has enough fuel to intervene on the spot. “With the Gripen, it can get tight, admitted Jürg Weber […] And it may be necessary to patrol continuously over Davos to be able to intervene.” But, he says, we’ll certainly find solutions in order to fulfill reasonable that air policing mission, “even though it will not as effectively as with other aircraft or the F/A-18.”

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?116740-Rafale-Thread-13&p=1890004#post1890004

Note that they are comparing the Gripen to the original Hornets the Swiss operate… not particularly long-ranged aircraft themselves.

Of course the Gripen E will have better range performance than the original Gripen, but not nearly enough to make it competitive with larger aircraft.

In air policing mission, for example, the first two devices are able to stay 180 minutes in flight, against 120 minutes for the future Gripen. Provided that the Swedes manage to keep their promises.

We know from other sources that the F-35 slots in between a Eurofighter with three tanks and a Rafale with three tanks in terms of range.

The CUDA is even too large. I’m thinking of something maybe 3 times smaller. Such a missile may possibly be manufacturable in 10-20 years. I think what would be important is that the aircraft sends frequent target update in the last kms, because the missile would acquire its target relatively close due to its small sensor.

Yes missiles have gotten far smaller and far more capable as a result of advancing technology. For example the Cuda concept called for a missile half the size of an AMRAAM and yet with greater range. (The AMRAAM meanwhile is far smaller and longer ranged than the Sparrow it replaced.)

If you want a rough idea of what current technology allows in the realm of miniature missiles look at MANPADS as they are the smallest anti-air missiles anyone has actually brought into service. They may not be BVR weapons, but is that important?

If you embraced the swarm of relatively small inexpensive drones concept do they need a BVR capability?

The catch here is cost. The more capable you make the drone and its sensors and weapons the more expensive it gets. If you want a supersonic stealth drone with a capable radar, IRST, EW system, decent range/endurance, etc… well it won’t be much cheaper than a traditional fighter with those same things.

What are you willing to give up?

I am sorry but you are wrong.

A change in external customer from Switzerland to Brazil obviously has a huge impact on the project, and in this case also the timelines of the project. What you fail to realize is that the requiments changed; Switzerland had one set of requiments, and Brazil had another set of requirements.

Obviously when such huge changes are made to a project, the plans need to change quite dramatically.

What you perhaps fail to realize is that Sweden was not pushing this project; Sweden could have waited until 2020 or even later for delivery. Thus timelines were driven by the external customer. When the external customer was shifted from Switzerland to Brazil, and the requirements were changed, the timelines obviously needed to be updated.

You cannot change a project plan without actually changing it.

Let me try a simpler analogy for you.

Imagine you are building a skyscraper.

You have borrowed/invested large sums of money to pay architects/civil engineers to complete the design, obtain all necessary permits, hire crews, rent equipment, buy materials and arranged for their delivery, dug out the foundation and are even part way along in constructing the building… when suddenly you decide to push the whole project back by a year.

You want to tell your work crews to go home, leave their equipment sitting there idle, leave pallets of materials waiting under tarps, cancel work scheduled to be performed…

From a programmatic standpoint that is a disaster. Officially Saab said they were honoring the original contract with the original deadline. Saab is a for-profit enterprise. If they have a contract in hand to deliver a product by date X they aren’t going to willingly shift everything by a year without major compensation.

I am happy to look at any credible source you can provide that shows Sweden and Saab agreeing to move the date over but otherwise I think you should just acknowledge that this is a delay of the garden variety. No doubt trying to add a bunch of Brazilian engineers to a project already well underway didn’t help things, but a delay is a delay.

Might have something to do with having the original Gripen flight test delayed 18 months, sticking two aircrafts into the ground and even after all that delivering the goods with “only” a delay of around two years from what was originaly planned (first delivery delayed from 1993 to 1995), then the upgrade to “C/D” went almost flawlessly. By comparison with virtually everyone else they seem to be pretty decent in terms of delays and costs, the most striking point of comparison would be the HAL LCA, it pretty much started at the same time, with almost the same specifications (BAE even offered the exact same design to HAL and SAAB, the P106B) and the timeline ended up, in, well… you know…

Well… everyone does better than the LCA.

In general though I would agree that Saab has done better than most. They just haven’t done the impossible. I actually like the Gripen quite a bit as an aircraft. It is a good solution for a certain set us users and if it had had more resources might have been a major player on world markets.