The Royal Saudi Air Force is looking for 2 squadrons of F-15s.

Saudis Mull Another F-15 Purchase

[I]The Middle East newsline has confirmed that Saudi Arabia has advanced in negotiations to purchase a fighter jet from the United States.

The Saudi leadership, in wake of receiving the first Eurofighters, has been examining the U.S.-built F-15 for a procurement contract in 2010. They said Saudi Defense Minister Crown Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz has supported the prospect of an additional purchase of at least two squadrons of F-15s in a deal that could top $5 billion.

Could it be that deliveries of Eurofighters will be slower than expected? The order was reported as being for 24 UK-assembled aircraft to be followed by 48 locally assembled aircraft. I have heard nothing of anything actually being done. By that I mean digging holes in the ground and starting to build an FAL, not just talking about doing it. So where are these 48 Eurofighters going to come from if there is no local FAL? I don’t suppose the RAF would be in a position to delay procurement of 48 Eurofighters because SA had no FAL line set up in time to assemble theirs locally.
The article mentioned that SA was interested in accelerated development and production of the F-15 variant discussed. I wonder if they would be procured because the parties involved in setting up the the Eurofighter FAL have proved themselves incapable of getting things done on time.

“The assessment is that the Royal Saudi Air Force requires a platform that it is comfortable with, yet much more advanced than those it now operates,” an industry source said.

Could it be that setting up for induction of the Eurofighter is proving more difficult than anticipated?

Rubles were very cheap when the first contract was signed. The dollar prices of all Russian goods are much, much higher now.

I was unaware that the rouble had strengthened a great deal against the rupee. I wonder if the MiG-35 has stopped being comparatively “cheap” since the MRCA contest started. I actually don’t know when it started (20th century or 21st?) but it has gone on long enough for big currency movements to take place.

thanks for the link
first delivery of the f-35 to the forces this year

“Production trends indicate that we will be back on schedule” by 2011, Kent said.

“Labor hours required to complete each aircraft have dropped by half, and the time required to manufacture an F-35 has dropped by one-third. Parts shortages have gone from 300 on the first aircraft to 16 on the most recent plane rolled out”

What LM says above sounds good.

From the same link:

Winslow Wheeler, defense policy analyst with the Center for Defense Information’s Straus Military Reform Project, praised Gates and company for taking on the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and demanding a realistic appraisal of the F-35 program.

But Wheeler said it’s a mistake to continue buying more F-35s in 2011 and beyond, before all the quirks and capabilities of the airplanes can be determined by extensive testing. That’s a view that the Government Accountability Office has voiced repeatedly when it said the F-35 plans were far too ambitious and optimistic.

“Gates is committed to the program and doesn’t want to change its fundamental nature, the concurrent testing and production,” Wheeler said. “He’s crossing his fingers and hoping for the best. This program is going to get far worse than [the Pentagon] is predicting.”

What Wheeler says above sounds bad.

How many times is it newsworthy? How many times do we need to hear the same story? And when they get the thing under control and it enters service and the pilots and maintainers love it will Bill be telling us about it? Nope. When it goes into exercises and dominates will Bill tell us week after week how fantastic the jet is? Nope.

I agree that there is no need to post the same story again and again. However where the F-35 is concerned there are multiple delays and multiple increases in cost. Each one merits reporting IMO. The management of the program has been deficient when performance is measured against targets and continues to be so. Each failure merits reporting IMO.

since they are talking about “performing sub par” could that indicate that they are talking about the a/c they have actually tested so far?

I cannot see what else it can mean.

Perhaps I am being terribly biased, but I wonder if the Mig-35 could be one of the two?

It seems a popular guess. Of the aircraft tested so far, the one aircraft I would not expect to be an underperformer is Rafale.

Will Typhoon join the underperformers due to its A2G limitations? If so, the partner country governments can take credit for that due to dithering over that capability. Same comment if lack of AESA grounds the Eurofighter bid.

What I find so stupid is that Typhoon is going to get these capabilities so why delay them, allowing massive export contracts to be lost thereby? You can’t blame the world economic turndown – the governments were dithering over giving Typhoon full multi-role capabilities when everything was just fine with the world economy (at least, appeared so).

Here is a recent Pentagon report.
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=4588&from_page=../index.cfm

I perused the November report at

http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/2009-11LMFWJSF.pdf

There were some reassuring on-target figures but others that looked really, really bad. Worst of all, the getting things done on time and overspending trends appear to be downwards.

Some quite interesting handwritten comments on the report. Page 19 shows a chart with target and actual data covering Feb-Oct 09. The chart concerns “Verification of the F-35’s physical configuration to the design requirements by performing PCA’s (physical configuration audits)”. The target is 95% and is met or exceeded in all 2009 months shown in the chart.

I like the handwritten comment next to the chart: “ergo a/c are built 5% wrong and that’s OK?” 🙂

From the FT report:

“….EADS has warned in past weeks it might have to raise new capital should the A400M burden be too great.”

The customers have a duty to pay extra to shield existing EADS shareholders from losses due to Airbus screwing up, do they? I don’t think so.

When was the last time that a manufacturer approached a customer saying that it had screwed up, so the customer should damage its financial position to protect the financial position of the manufacturer’s shareholders?

England –> Great Britain –> United Kingdom.

Fairly sure they’ve been the United Kingdom for 200 years, and Great Britain for a long time before that.

I’m fairly sure (and must be fairly lazy not to look it up) that Britain and Great Britain are geographical terms. I think Britain is the island with England/Scotland/Wales and Great Britain is that island plus another island with Eire/Northern Island.

Anyone less lazy than me is welcome to enlighten me if I’ve got it wrong.