Spitfire9Fast jet enthusiasts indifferent to the noise they make – or who actually like the noise they make – are a tiny minority in any society.
It is facile for some in that tiny minority to suggest that people living near military airbases should move home rather than object to the prospect of an increased level of noise. If the F-35 (or any new type) makes more noise than the type currently being operated from an airbase, the views of the vast majority adversely affected by this change need to be taken into account.
Spitfire92. the Rafale costs more than the F-35
Who says? The Rafale has been traded. There will be a record of the price at which it was traded. The F-35 has not been traded so nobody has a record of the price. (I disregard the limited production price of the F-35).
3. the Rafale costs more to operate than the F-35
Again, nobody has operated the F-35 so how it compares with the cost of operating the Rafale is unknown.
Spitfire9The question was: “Will the Eurofighter flop?”
Sales of 600+ to partner countries makes it difficult to see the aircraft as a flop. If that number is sustained, I would not call it a flop.
Export sales to 2 customers is floppy, agreed. I do not find that surprising since the A2G element was too limited compared with other possible choices (eg Singapore’s rejection on these grounds).
I will not be surprised if Eurofighter fails in upcoming selections through lack of commitment to AESA by the partner nations. Floppy approach IMO.
Further along when the aircraft offers full A2G and effective AESA I think its prospects of export sales will improve. If it gets through the first selection phase for India’s MMRCA then my opinion might change although I do understand that an aircraft that meets specifications but offers better technology transfer, offsets etc may be preferred to another even more capable aircraft.
Spitfire9The F-35 is two times louder as a F-15.
I had think that a stealth plane should quieter as legacy fighter. :confused:
Does it matter in military terms?
I can see that it could cause problems for those living near bases operating the type. That could be a major consideration, depending on the country concerned. Exposing the local population to elevated sound intrusion would generate a reaction.
Spitfire9Rafale had entered official in Romanian;) AF tender…
Got a source, please (so I can read a bit more about it)?
Spitfire9Most countries already know the real price of the F-35 & it is LESS expensive (both to procure & to operate/maintain) than a Typhoon, Rafale, F-15, F/A-18E/F, et cetera
I don’t know where you get get your information from. LM have already said that they aim to give a price for export F-35’s mid 2009 – and that price would depend on all parter(?) customers taking the numbers anticipated.
I think they did this because most countries did not want to commit to ordering without knowing the price. LM recognised that the absence of a price was a big problem.
How can you know that an LM manufactured product is LESS expensive to procure than other products when the manufacturer itself has said it cannot give a price?
As to through life costs, did you spot that the estimated cost to the USAF was recently increased from ca $300 billion to ca $600 billion? Doesn’t sound too much like it is going to be cheap to operate/maintain.
Can the future UK carriers have catapults fitted? Yes.
Are there other aircraft capable of flying off carriers available? Yes.
Britain has a limited defence budget. It would be foolish of the British government not to consider alternatives to the F-35. Carrying on with the F-35 on the current nebulous basis could result in a serious reduction in the future capability of the UK armed forces.
Spitfire9The only major one now is the Indian fighter order and I have a gut feeling that will go to the Dassault Rafale.
I think Switzerland decides before India.
OK, South Korea did not count (F-15 is American). But Singapore was due to insufficient multi-role development. Brazil – out because of cost?
I’m curious about the Indian MRCA competition. What comes first, selection of the GE or Eurojet engine for the Tejas or selection of the MRCA? Would selection of the Eurojet engine for the Tejas have any bearing on the MRCA chosen?
Spitfire9There are HUGE benefits to the UK for committing to the F-35 now.
There are huge RISKS to the UK for committing to the F-35 now except at a fixed cost at specified performance levels with swingeing penalties for non-compliance with the contract and cast iron guarantees about sovereignty.
Spitfire9With respect, I don’t think that Britain will stop reconsidering the F-35 because of aspects of its performance, such as combat radius.
The British government – and an awful lot of other foreign governments – face serious financial problems due to underwriting their banking sectors. Foreign buyers are being subjected to pressure by LM to prematurely commit billions of dollars to ordering an undeveloped aircraft with uncertain performance, delivery date, price and through life costs. LM’s attitude has been to magnify the risk to its foreign customers. Have they gone too far? Norway’s decision in a few months may be an indication.
Spitfire9I would like to start a historical aviation website relating to the Middle East but I have absolutely no idea how to go about it. Could someone tell me what is involved – particularly how the site is set up and who do you have to contact to set it up? Also roughly how much does it cost? I have seen one or two non aviation websites where the people who run them are complaining about the cost of it. Any advice /help would be gratefully appreciated
Thanks
Keith
I would suggest some things:
Register a domain name eg middleeastaircraft.com. Don’t use a so called subdomain such as bt/middleeastaircraft.com since if you want to change the company that connects your computer to the internet (your Internet Service Provider), your web address will change, too. Also you will lose your email address eg [email]keith@bt.com[/email].
What you see on a website is broken down into “pages”. These are computer files containing words and pictures with instructions as to how they should be laid out on the screen. These pages can be prepared and viewed on your own PC, but for others to see them using the internet they need to copied onto a computer known as an internet server. Storing your files on such as server is known as hosting. There are many hosting companies.
Hosting companies will provide a certain limited amount of disc space for storing your web page files. Additionally they will provide a certain limited amount of data transfer – every time someone looks at your website data needs to be transferred from the internet server to their PC.
Music and video can also be stored in a webpage. These take up a lot of space on the internet server disc and involve large amounts of data transfer from the internet server to the PC of anyone listening to music or watching video.
Broadly speaking, the amount of resources used in transferring data from the internet server to all the PC’s of people looking at your webpages is known as the amount of bandwidth used.
“Professional” web site design tools such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver will certainly take scores or hundreds of hours to learn. I don’t know anything about low cost tools that will let you build your own website but I suspect that they will generally be geared to producing simple websites.
Spitfire9To quote the Flight article:
“To help phase out the air force’s Dassault Mirage 2000 and Hindustan Aeronautics-built Sepecat Jaguar strike aircraft by around 2015, the proposed twin-engined MCA would also augment the service’s Sukhoi Su-30MKIs and its planned future fleet of at least 126 medium multirole combat aircraft.”
The way I read this is that the aircraft would be available around 2015. There must be something wrong with my reading. EIS of the MCA by around 2015 would be impossible, would it not?
Spitfire9The situation is really difficult at the moment. LM wants fixed orders to get a basis for production planning, the partner nations want fixed prices before they order, and nobody wants to make the first step.
For the F-35A, I don’t see that it is that important to the manufacturer to know exactly how many export orders will be forthcoming. Now if the USAF only wanted 500, I can see that it would be important to know how many extra export frames would be required. 500 USAF + 100 export would be very different to 500 USAF + 400 export. Gearing up to make 600 would be quite different to gearing up to make 900. This is not the situation, so why is it so important from the point of view of production planning for LM to get all export customers to sign up?
Of course, if we were talking about USAF and export aircraft being different, that would help to explain things. Along the lines of how many do we need to plan to make, 100 or 400?
Spitfire9If you’ve been following the Tejas thread then you’d know that the engine that the IAF is cribbing about is not the Kaveri, its the F-404-IN20. The fact is that as per its original ASR, the Kaveri was to have more thrust than the F-404-IN20, but its only met about 90% of its dry thrust and there are other technical issues (some metallurgical, some production) that we do not know of clearly.
As far as I know (and you will certainly know more than me, so could confirm or deny this) the LCA project was intended to produce an Indian aircraft with an Indian designed and manufactured engine – for delivery some 10 years ago.
I understand that a GE engine was selected for initial aircraft so that a flying aircraft could be developed while the Kaveri was developed for production aircraft. The F-404-IN20 was never intended to be the engine used in the production aircraft, was it?
again wrong. The Kaveri is not completely abandoned. the M-88-Eco core will replace the Kabini core of the Kaveri, but there will be several elements of the Kaveri that will be carried over to the new engine. So, even though its a new engine, much of the basic design and analysis work would have been done, and now there will need to be a lot of new integration work (which also involves design and analysis, but a lot less than starting from scratch as you’re implying).
OK, when I said the Kaveri had been abandoned as a military engine, I was simply quoting the person running the GTRE, responsible for developing the Kaveri. If you prefer to describe the engine to replace the Kaveri as the Kaveri, so be it.
Also, the re-engined Tejas that the ACM is referring to will be powered either by the F-414 or the EJ-200, not the Kaveri-M-88Eco mix. 8 years is more than enough for ADA/HAL to integrate the new engine with the Tejas, and test fly it to certify it.
If a bought-in foreign engine is to be installed in the LCA, what is the JV engine for?
Both the GE and Eurojet engines will make the Tejas more expensive than a Tejas using a locally manufactured (mostly) JV engine. In saying that, I assume that one can be reasonably certain that SNECMA can provide the knowhow to make the engine work.
It looks to me like the whole project – which set out to make a low cost 4th gen Indian aircraft – has turned into something of a disaster. It’s a shame. Had the project been better managed, it could have resulted in India offering a low cost aircraft which could have sold well on the export market.
Nevertheless, an enormous amount of experience has been gained. I hope that lessons will be learnt and applied to the MCA, should that be pursued.
Spitfire9Concorde held cruise speed without reheat although it was used to punch the a/c through the transsonic range.
It could actually go through the sound barrier without reheat but it cost more fuel.
That is what I have always heard, too. I have never before heard of Concorde using afterburner except for takeoff and in the transonic range.
Spitfire9Possibly it may have been as in singapore, i.e timescales, or the prohibited purchase of a T3 typhoon to brazil,(
I can understand the timescales bit – I have long criticised the Typhoon “organisers” for increasing capability too slowly, thereby compromising its chances of selection in competitions. But your “prohibited purchase of a T3 typhoon to brazil” I do not understand.
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