Surely the criteria for the most pointless airforce is one with the most pointless mission ….or fihghting a most pointless war?

:rolleyes: Don’t tease us, tell us what you really want to say.

Aren`t all wars pointless?

For me, the real plane to watch from the Russians is the MiG-E. The mystery plane.

MiG-E? Could you elaborate a little ?

This is the difference between these two major blocks…east and west. Us easterners were grown with this “clutter” as you see it. We became acustomed to it. It`s easier for us to work with switches and other round things with dials and needles. I see all the info I need in only one view. I don`t need to press a button to change the page on the MFD. In one view I see the vertical speed, artificial horison, speed, engine rpm, rotor rpm, EGT, altitude, compas…and then I look back outside. It became as a reflex now. It`s easier to read a dial than to read a bunch of numbers on a screen.

You are acustomed to screens, auto-trimmers, FADEC, other automatic-stuff. We are trained to do all the job manually. You only learn about it in flight school, but when you`re flying you see all the entire flight course on the screen. I do my navigation with the map on my knee. It`s harder but it does make you a better pilot in the end.

So, as a conclusion, it`s nothing wrong with steam gages. At one point you become acustome to them. Not every moron can be a pilot, afterall.

Rokosowsky, just out of interest what were you doing in 1987??? As for NATO being optimistic, we trained our guys to do more than take off, attack a target and land, by adding some important phases of the mission, like fly hundreds of miles to a target at low level (a lot of navigation skill and some very good equipment required), evade the enemy air defences (low level terrain masking and very good ECM systems that actually did work, Europe is not Iraq), hit the target on the first pass and fly back to base, again evading the enemy air defences. (Ingress and Egress, anybody). To add to that as well as training against Western systems on large scale training exercises, our pilots trained against simulated Soviet systems, both airborne (Aggressor Squadrons) and ground based emitters. Did the Soviet airforces train to anything like that level. I don’t think so. All they did was try to use numbers (fine, it still helps if at least one of your aircraft can hit the target however, which for a NATO airfield in Germany was a hardened, very well camouflaged large facility in front of which are located a number of very good light air defence systems (the Rolands, rapiers and light flak) which are waiting for your aircraft to pop up and try to locate their targets because they are off track by a small margin. Also there are teams of engineers just waiting with a lot of kit to fill any holes you make, and again these boys practised a lot. Would have NATO won the air war, in the light of what I know now, I’d give them a bloody good chance.

Like I said before…no bird poop on our helicopters..and we didn`t use them for pleasure cruise either.

the ones that where subjected to Lancer updates where the planes with low flight hours… They where somewhere at 20% of their airframe time.. Last aquistion of Ceausescu , then the fuel consumption was “saved” bassically grounding the planes.

And press , Israel provided the electronics kits only. The whole thing was done by romanians from Aerostar.

I know how that went. I kept a close eye on the project.

But I was missunderstood. The Israelis get their planes…put them in hangars…strip all the things that can be stripped and replaced by other things the Israelis want (God knows…they have). I`m talking from the technological point of view and let`s forget the wrath of US if it finds out (cuts spares and who knows what else).

Let`s say they don`t like the system that takes care of firing missiles. They take that system down (computers, wires, whatever) and replace it with a “Made in Israel” system that fires their missile of choice.

That`s what I ment.

What’s stupid about wanting control over who gets your technology? What’s stupid about not want your best technology to get transferred to a potential adversary?

Nice…UK…a potential adversary. :rolleyes:

I doubt all early American missiles worked :p