You know we could argue also that “best at everything” or “world premiere” is a French idiomatic… At least in some sphere.

Well, until the F-35 becomes operational the Rafale may well be the best multirole fighter jet out there… Clearly above and beyond the Typhoon, of course in a2g but also in a2a (according to Swiss leaks). And the Typhoon is no slouch according to the Danish eval.

Is it a 5. gen fighter?

No.

However it can still perform all missions very well, and will serve France and the other Rafale users for many many years to come.

True, but in a low threat scenario we can start to talk about Air Tractor, Super Tucano, Scorpion, etc. It is awfully hard to justify spending >$100million/jet if you aren’t worried about operating in at least a medium threat environment.

And how many of the countries I mentioned as examples have decided to purchase any of those as their “fighter”?

Those were just examples; there are many other countries who want something more than a Super Tucano, but does not see the need for an F-35.

I am surprised that you seem to believe otherwise.

Of course there are countries that will be happy with super tocano, but that’s another story.

We can probably split into tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 and tier 4 countries. Tier 1 countries will go for F-35, J-20, PAK FA, (or if those are not available, Rafale, Typhoon or SH).

Tier 2 will typically be Gripen E/ F-16V

Tier 3 will be second-hand F-16, Mirage 2000, or Gripen C

Tier 4 will be the Super Tucano crowd.

“there is a lot of space at the bottom” 🙂

Energo at Norwegian forum “milforum.net” says he believes the huge differences between Norwegian and Danish life cycle cost estimates are because the Danes have made calculations using “present value” whereas in Norway they use an estimate which is adjusted for inflation instead. In 2008 Norway also used present value, and at that time the figure was 145 billion NOK (which corresponded to 254 billion NOK when adjusted for inflation).

Economics is not really my strong point (to say the least), however it sounds reasonable — if so, then perhaps there is no big discrepancy between the Danish and Norwegian numbers after all! Of course there will still be differences, for a number of reasons, but the numbers should at least be in the same ballpark now.

The implications are in any case that Rafale, Typhoon, and SH are doomed to lose any competition moving forward (unless politics strongly favor one of the 4.5 gen)

However one interesting thing to note when looking at the Danish evaluation is that if one ignores the “high threat” scenarios, perhaps one could conclude that a 4.5 gen would still be adequate for the job. E.g. countries like Brazil, Switzerland, Austria, etc. Such countries would probably look more at the price tag. This probably explains why Saab is modestly optimistic regarding the future of the Gripen E. For countries looking at a low-cost solution that can handle anything but the most demanding scenarios, the Gripen would probably be the way to go.

Dassault, Eurofighter and Boeing will probably focus their sales efforts on the ME moving forward…

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the Finnish competition — no doubt the F-35 will be ranked similarly in terms of survivability and effectivness as we have seen in the Danish reports; however it will be very interesting to see if the Finns arrive at similar cost estimates.

In any case the numbers for Typhoon (and also for Rafale, for other competitions) confirm what I have said previously: both are way too expensive and offer no advantages over F-35 (other than being non-US, which is a big advantage in some countries). Therefore I wonder why they bother participating in Finland.

I think it will be between the F-35, SH and Gripen in Finland, with the F-35 as the most likely winner.

The “Typhoon 2015” of the Swiss eval was P1E, nothing more, nothing less, its implemented, and if i understood the report correctly, in the danish evaluation the SH got better evaluations in Recon and in ATG, and worse in ATA, i doubt that anyone in this board will be particulary surprised.
The cost numbers for the F-35A are surprisingly low, so much in fact that i will make the exact same comment that i´ve did in 2008 when the Norwegians released theirs, there´s an awfull lot of wishfull thinking in there.

So the “2015 Typhoon” offered to Switzerland did not include AESA radar? I was not aware of that.

Please see my previous post regarding the cost numbers for F-35 in the Danish and Norwegian competition — clearly the Norwegian numbers (updated in 2013) are more realistic.

Something else that looks rather odd: in this document:

http://www.fmn.dk/temaer/kampfly/Documents/typevalg-af-danmarks-kommende-kampfly-reduceret-vers-20160509.pdf

the estimates shown in e.g. figure 0.2 (page 10)

are quite different from the figure shown here: http://nytkampfly.dk/archives/8475

Why is that?

Perhaps I missed it but so far I saw nobody link to this document:
🙂
http://www.fmn.dk/temaer/kampfly/Documents/typevalg-af-danmarks-kommende-kampfly-reduceret-vers-20160509.pdf

OK it’s in Danish however google translate is your friend; besides some of the tables and graphs hardly need translating.

Very interesting. Starting on page 45 they present the “technical evaluation” of the three a/c but they also include the Danish F-16 as a reference. Look for instance at table 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4. I am surprised they rated the SH lower than the Typhoon for the SEAD/DEAD mission! However this probably just reflects that the SH is not very impressive without the Growler?

A pity the Rafale (IMHO the only 4.5 gen fighter out there) did not participate; I strongly suspect it would have been more “in the middle” inbetween the F-35 and the F-16, fully justifying the 4.5 gen label.

I am still struggling to understand the price — it seems they claim life time costs will be 56,4 billion DKK for 28 F-35? Sounds surprisingly low to me.

Norway budgets 69.7 billion NOK (56 billion DKK) for 52 F-35 (including munitions, simulator, some spare parts, etc)

The lifetime costs are in Norway estimated to 261.3 billion NOK (210 billion DKK)

So the estimated lifetime costs in Norway are estimated to 4 billion DKK per plane (over 30 years), but in Denmark they estimate 2 billion DKK per plane (over 30 years). That’s quite a significant difference, in particular since one would expect the cost per plane to be lower when you operate a larger number of planes…

Edit: looking at figure 3.3 I am also very surprised to see that the F-16 is rated higher survivability than the SH/Typhoon in the SCAR mission!? I wonder why?

Edit2: one should really look at figure 3.3 (survivability) together with figure 3.4 (mission effectiveness) to get “the full picture” 🙂