I don’t know, about 400 maybe. For a plane that has problems at transonic pitch, has a draggy airframe, appears overweight and underranged, well that sure makes me feel confident.

For every word of “monkey” you say, I will report that post, and I will request others to do so.

And what is the point of bring up your pictures, which are quite grainy and a bit of distance. By the way you do know that the Polish planes are quite well maintained, do you?

By the way, please note I had you reported to the webmaster.

Here you are, bigot.

hmm, looks like they are getting better at it. 😮

It is quite clever. Note the picture has the background of the foilage where the nose is supposed to be.

One should see the things from larger perspective than just who can what and who cannot.

For example the US-made cars frequently use V8 engines with extensive fuel consumption and poor characteristics. Does this lead to an assumption that US engineers are unable to develop a small economic and yet powerful engine just like found in Honda 1.5i VTEC (115HP) or BMW 2.0i (160HP)? No.. The market for US cars (obviously exclusively domestic) simply does not demand those (unlike in Europe or Japan).

During the seventies to eighties, the US simply could not develop an engine with high specific output that were reliable enough, that were smooth enough. Many engines for domestic US economy cars were in fact, imported from Europe or Japan, or used designs from Europe, such as the GM subsidiaries there (Opel) or through Ford’s German subsidiary.

The same for Russian way of building aircraft. Why should have they massively got use of composites if titanium, steel, aluminium and lithium alloys in exquisit quality were never a problem in Russia? There simply was no need for composites..

The Russians do use composites in non load bearing structures. The SU-35, the SU-30MKK, the SU-30MK series, the SU-27KUB, are examples of such. It’s just that I don’t believe that they believe in the wisdom of using joint metal-composite load bearing structures. I personally don’t believe in such structures.

Yes you hear the West has quality problems, but then they’re also a more open society where problems are more often reported than not. In closed societies like China and the Soviet Union, problems tend to be put under a rug. In an open society that happens to have Russian equipment, the Indians are only reporting 60% operability in many of their Russian built aircraft, and periodic complaints often lead them to looking for French alternatives. Let’s be honest and look around, there are many not satisfied customers there. And we don’t have to go to the even lower, and dismal operability currently with the RuAF, but that also has a lot to do with budget.

AK-47s and T-34s can afford to look bad, they’re relatively simple weapons. Quality management is really complexity management. The more complex a system gets, the more points it has for failure. To reduce failure, you have to reduce the possibility for each part in that system for failure. That means more and more attention is put into detail.

As systems become more and more complex, the kind of quality you have on AK-47s and T-34s will not be tolerated. This is true with weapons systems—the more complex a weapons system is, your rate for failure rises exponentially, and this you have to counter with even more sophisticated systems of quality management, problem spotting and debugging. Tell that to the F-22, whose sheer complexity has caused major problems (a system failure every 1.5 hours in the electronics). That will not be solved until we have another quality revolution taking place. Look at the Japanese—their ability to create reliable highly complex systems lies in their management of complex sets of details. Can you imagine the precision and tolerances that goes for example, the simple head of a VCR? Or the head of a hard drive? What about the gyroscope of a navigation system, like the INS inside a missile?

You scoof at the Toyota maxim, which just happens to be a shared ethic in the entire Japanese industry, an industry that has been extremely successful for what it does. You can find a few examples where crude weapons does work, but I can find a lot more examples where complex high quality weapons does work from the benefit of quality management.

If you want your defense industry to attain the next level of development, being crude with loose tolerances doesn’t cut it anymore. The key would be increasing levels of quality-complexity management, to keep bringing ever complex systems to usable levels of reliabiltiy.

You must have a sturdy airframe to survive a clip like that, as well as some stable flight characteristics.