Spitfire9Indian Rafale deal on backburner
According to article, contract for supply of Rafales to India may not be signed in 2013/14.
The article mentions a delay due to Dassault having fiscal problems. I had not heard that Dassault has fiscal (did the writer mean financial?) problems. Is this article inaccurate?
Spitfire9Good idea – possible F-16 successor 2030+.
Spitfire9If you want to reduce operational costs for adventures like Afghanistan or Mali, people need to start thinking outside the box.
VERY true. Something military planners are almost incapable of doing is thinking outside of their boxes. In particular they do not appear to be capable of appreciating that they should make effective use of the funds made available to them. That is one, two, probably several boxes too lateral for them to even start to grasp the realities that face them…
The idea that extremely expensive and capable 4G+ / 5G aircraft can do all they are able to do is mistaken. Sounds like nonsense? What I mean is that those aircraft cost so much to actually use that their use will have to be limited. If no alternatives which can accomplish missions more cheaply are available, the options are to cut the hours the 4G+ / 5G aircraft are used or to leave them in the hangar (or cut overall capabilities by reducing expenditure on other elements of defence). I do not recall any 4G+ / 5G aquisition being marketed with the proviso that the rest of any buyer´s defence will suffer very badly should these assets ever need to be used in anger over any length of time. It does not make economic sense to set out to provide a defence capability, make a large investment in developing the IP to allow that capabality, a further large investment in manufacturing the designed product, then realising that you cannot use the capability achieved due to the cost of using it. Am I mad? If so, I look forward to the arrival of all those Typhoon tranche 3b aircraft in a few years time.
Spitfire9Wrong. You expensive platforms are expensive to operate as well. The more you use that, the more you have to pay as well. You have a lot of missions at home and abroad, where a second cheaper platform can do that cheaper as well. Your mission demand will tell you what is the total number in need and what will be the best mix in numbers of that. Clever people will use something at hand already for such secondary needs not justifying fast jets for that waste of resources.
Maybe you end up in a much lower number of fast jets for some time. Nothing wrong about that. It is much more important to have some money left for development than a big number of fast jets getting dated and be used up in secondary roles to justify what?!
As far as I understand reports of analysis of the conduct of missions over Libya, the use of Rafale and Typhoon on a prolonged basis was considered inappropriate given the high cost of operating these aircraft. Something like Hawk could enable similar operations to be conducted long term without consuming great chunks of governments´air force budgets + emergency contingency funding. The Eurocanards were not designed for a world where they would get involved in low threat environment conflicts lasting as long as the world wars (more like the length of WW1 and WW2 combined in Afghanistan´s case).
With the enormous CPFH of contemporary sophisticated MMRCA aircraft I think a low CPFH limited capability aircraft is sadly lacking and that governments will look to acquire such aircraft. Supersonic or sophisticated aircraft are not necessary to drop bombs on defenceless opponents, after all. They just need to be reasonably quick and able to drop bombs accurately on target a great deal more cheaply than the aircraft available now.
Spitfire9Yeah, but if there’s no low capacity truck on the market to buy & you’d have to pay the cost of designing one, it may make more financial sense to stick with an all high-capacity fleet.
Agreed. On the other hand, I imagine you don´t need an all singing, all dancing radar to provide a ground attack capability in undefended territory such as Afghanistan or the next Madinterventionstan that comes up.
If there are likely to be scenarios over the lifetime of Typhoon where 20%/30%/40%/50% of combat missions flown would be ground attack, I would think it worth doing one´s maths and considering an alternative. Low cost radar/ targeting system/ munitions might be far cheaper than using Typhoon.
Spitfire9Buying a Hawk 200 variant draws funding away from other programs and gives the UK a type that is only useful in a narrow set of circumstances. Fitting an uprated Adour is not going to give the performance you are hoping for within the fatigue restraints of the airframe.
It can’t intercept transiting airliners, it can’t get to an intercept point for any probing Russian aircraft until they are well inside our ADZ or well on their way home.
I think the answer to that is that the capability offered by Typhoon is well beyond what is needed in a narrow set of circumstances. I think the government should get a few business people in to tell the forces how you use resources to optimise overall capability. They are not capable of doing so.
If you run a trucking company you don´t buy 100 44 ton capacity trucks when you only need that 44 ton capacity some of the time. You buy a mix of 100 high capacity and low capacity trucks. You would otherwise be commiting financial suicide.
Spitfire9It only confirm Meteor is short range missile that current Gripen radar can fully exploit it. and even that is not integrated and bought for Typhoon.
Strange that so many air forces see Meteor as a long range missile, isn’t it? Yes, not fully integated on Typhoon.
There is alot of radar manufacturers. so i am not sure why such claim of best M Scan radar.
Acknowledged to have outstanding performance, performance so good that it may be the best performing M scan radar?
I find your logic rather weak. There are a lot of manufacturers in many different fields. Why a particular product is claimed to be the best in its field is not connected to the number of manufacturers of that type of product. It is due to its performance exceeding that of available alternatives.
Spitfire9Chill out guys
+1
Spitfire9Surely it isn’t actually feasible to develop a competitive civilian airliner from a military transport base platform. Or is the plan to deliver a **** airlifter instead? I could see India could accept a more civil-oriented MTA given that they have C-130J also… :confused:
I think the key is competitive. Airlines expect immense reliability and fuel consumption per seat mile within a few percent of the alternatives. It seems extremely unlikely to me that a sturdy military transport design could be modified into an airliner competitive on fuel burn. The weight penalty of the structure would condemn it to unacceptably high fuel burn IMO.
Perhaps a stretch might mitigate the weight problem to some extent. I would suggest no compromises on the military transport design then deciding if the design could be altered to make it competitive with civil designs in production or coming up for production. Unless the expected performance of the ‘civilised’ design was so close to the offerings of Embraer, Bombardier etc that a much lower sales price made it attractive, forget it. The prospects are that there would be zero sales.
Spitfire9Niether one would be sold to Taiwan. China forbits France and UK from selling military equipment to Taiwan.
There is no legal embargo on military supplies to Taiwan as far as I know. I imagine that China has simply made it clear that countries making such supplies to Taiwan incur the displeasure of China with attendant consequences along the lines of: if you sell military kit to Taiwan we will avoid buying goods/services from you.
Looking into the future, unless Taiwan is prepared to dispense with its air force it will have to buy aircraft from someone. Will Taiwan be forced to switch to non-US, non-European suppliers? India might be happy to supply Tejas Mk2 in the future but would that be blocked by the US due to having an American engine?
Spitfire9Hi Aereo. Thanks for the numbers. Does the 571 total order number include the delayed 48 for Saudi Arabia?
Spitfire9I think you missed the error in the article. There are not 700 Typhoons in service. There are not 571 ordered waiting to be delivered. I’m pretty sure that the number delivered to all customers (partners + export customers) is more like 400. With tranche 3b not being ordered by the partner countries total orders for the type are around 600-650 I guess.
The article gave the impression that over 1250 had been ordered of which more than 700 had already been delivered.
Spitfire9http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/uae-air-force-locked-in-eurofighter-talks
The journalist tagged amustapha is rather generous towards Typhoon: “There are more than 700 Typhoons in air forces around the world, with 571 aircraft on order by seven nations including Saudi Arabia and Oman.”
A re-order by Saudi Arabia and success in one or more of the current selections will see Typhoon orders getting close to 1500 then… 🙂
Spitfire9F-35 is the new F-16, not Gripen NG.
I agrre with others who have said that is definitely not the case. F-35 can do things that F-16 cannot do and vice versa. For example, one is suitable for first day strike while the other is not because it is not stealthy. One is suitable for air patrol while the other is not because it is too expensive to acquire and fly.
Spitfire9Reading the above post one has to wonder if Typhoon will ever be a finished product.
Yes, many systems are years late coming onto Typhoon, thanks in part to different partners wanting different functionality at different times What is stupid is that makes development more expensive so you get what you always knew you wanted later and at a higher development cost as well as incurring additional expense on the aircraft that you always intended to replace with Typhoon and failing to get deals you might have got had you not delayed finishing the product.
As to aircraft intended to be in service for decades ever beng finished, I guess that enhancements will be made for many years after entry into service.
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