Some more Russian cargo aircraft that are yet to fly.

MTA

IL-112

http://s017.radikal.ru/i417/1210/08/bdfd673f4bf7.jpg

Nice chart of the warships under construction for the Russian Navy, as of October 2012.

You can also add the Project 949 Belgorod submarine to the list.

Very nice.
i.e 31 combat ships are to enter service in the next 3 years. Not bad, but not much either and also late.

Btw, what happened to the rest of the Pr.11356 & Pr.636.3…. weren’t all units (6 each) supposed to enter service by end-2015. Also, lack of orders for Pr.11661 is very bad. If they want to beef up numbers in Black sea (& Baltic), the best option would be to go for Gepard class. Though it may not have any bells & whistles & the “looks” to boast of, it has good capability and cheaper than Pr.20380.

Snake,
Thanks for the info. Any good chart/map on the whole navigation route centered on Moscow?

The payments & technology transfer is a very important part of the deal. In deals with Western companies/Govt, a major part of the contract value (or even full payments) are surrendered in the initial stages itself where as it is almost the opposite when it comes to deals with Russia (including carrier deal) where it is/was parted in small batches. The benefit of the Western approach is better as the company gets to make a “financial reservoir” for that specific project/order without having to go back to the customer very often asking/begging for money to continue the order/project. It also allow the company/concern to gamble/roll & utilize the funds by investing it on short-term maturity and reaping the interests. The negative part is that customer will have to pay heavily initially and also loose some control over technology transfer where the suppliers can delay it citing Indian industries not yet “advanced” to absorb superior technologies. Scorpene SSK deal might be a good example on how not to and hope the lessons learnt from it might be put to good use in the new deal.

I’d earlier asked a question on Spectra suite. Will it be part of technology transfer?

http://www.asianage.com/columnists/school-hard-knocks-632

School of hard knocks
Sep 27, 2012
Bharat Karnad

The lessons of Operation Vijay other than the value of self-reliance are that no foreign country will pass on professional secrets

George Tanham’s scathing 1995 RAND report on the Indian Air Force excoriated the service leadership for much of the service’s ills — doctrinal incoherence, multiplicity of combat aircraft types in the inventory that has produced logistics, servicing and training nightmares, the emphasis on platforms and, despite the evidence of the First Gulf War in 1992, rather than on high-technology suites (avionics, ground-based electronic support) and force multipliers.

It is only after the report was published that Air Headquarters (AHQ) woke up to air war in the modern age and began contemplating tanker aircraft and airborne warning and control systems.

Last week, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a monograph by a former RAND staffer, Benjamin S. Lambeth, assessing IAF’s performance in the 1999 Kargil border conflict. It is a straightforward rendition of what happened and how the missions were carried out, coming to what are by now stock conclusions in any study on the Indian military in wars, such as the absence of inter-service war and operational planning and, once into the conflict, of cooperation and coordination at least in the initial stages. The still bigger problem was of the complete lack of preparation for fighting an air war in the mountains because nobody in the IAF command structure anticipated an operation “at such elevations until it was forced to do so by operational necessity.” Why not? Well, to tweak one of Tanham’s conclusions, because “traditionally Indians do little formal thinking”.

Lambeth refers to the “jugaad” mentality, which all Indian organisations live (and die) by. Had the IAF planners kept abreast of technology developments, such as GPS integrated into the avionics of all fighter aircraft as standard equipment, and if the Tactical Development (TacD) cell, then in Jamnagar (since shifted to Gwalior), had been tasked by AHQ to develop fighter tactics for use in mountains before, rather than after receiving the hard knocks of three aircraft downed in the first three days of entering the war by man-portable heat-seeking Stinger and Pakistan-produced copies of the Chinese Anza missiles, the service wouldn’t have sullied its record.

But jugaad has limitations, as improvisation by its very nature is a sub-optimal solution. There would be no need for it if the IAF brass and the Indian military generally did their homework, foresaw contingencies instead of practicing missions by rote and meshed new technologies with novel tactics during peacetime preparedness regimes.

Lambeth, however, exaggerates the role of the US-sourced laser-guided bomb — the Paveway-II. Only nine of these LGBs were dropped during the entire conflict, eight of them by Mirage 2000 and one from a Jaguar and successfully took out the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry (NLI) battalion headquarters atop Tiger Hill. But destruction, especially of the Muntho Dhalo supply depot and base camp that made sustaining the intrusion impossible, resulted from an innovative use of dumb bombs — the 250 pound bombs left over from when the Ajeet (the licence-production version of the Folland Gnat) air defence fighter carried them in the 1970s. He also does not mention the fact that the LGB kits purchased from the United States by IAF prior to the 1998 nuclear tests had a grievous flaw in one of the internal circuits, which prevented integration of the Paveway with the Mirage 2000 fire control system. Americans refused to help correct the flaw because India was then under US sanctions owing to its nuclear tests the year before. None of these aspects find mention in the Lambeth study.

The innovation worked out by the ASTE (Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment) staff and IAF pilots even as the battle raged was to first correct the circuit and then to drop the bombs in precision-mode using the bracket-mounted bazaar-bought GPS units in the Mirage cockpit with its onboard computer. Lambeth does not relate the story behind this innovation either. IAF asked the French for advice on how to use the dumb bombs on low-value targets. True to their mercenary reputation, the French refused to part with any free advice, even though they had previously used dumb bombs successfully in precisely the manner ASTE-IAF had worked out, and suggested instead that they be given a contract for upgrading the avionics mid-operations! :p
(^ make it as Dassault)

The Lambeth study states that the initial series of dumb bomb attacks by MiG-23s and MiG-27s were wide off target because of inaccurate target coordinates supplied by the Army. What he does not reveal — perhaps because the senior IAF officers he talked with did not apprise him of this — is how the Army’s 15 Corps spotters risked their lives to close in on the entrenched NLI encampments and dugouts on the ridge line and mountain slopes to get an accurate fix on these targets. This more precise data led to the dumb bombs hitting their marks dead-on in the latter phase of the conflict.

The main lessons of Operation Vijay in Kargil other than the value of self-reliance and preparing for unforeseen tactical missions are that no foreign country will pass on professional secrets. And, as regards the French suppliers, their money-grubbing attitude and their propensity to default on contracts on technology transfer, the Indian government has to ensure that on the Rafale Multi-role Medium-Range Combat Aircraft deal, as I have iterated in this column, the payments be timed with every technology package actually transferred, including not just the source codes and flight control laws, but manufacturing technology for every last sub-assembly and component, and that there are no technology “black boxes” that we, the Indian taxpayers will keep paying for the lifetime of the aircraft.

The defence ministry’s Price Negotiation Committees, in past deals, have invariably ended up favouring the foreign supplier because they have not conditioned payouts on suppliers meeting stringent and time-bound technology transfer criteria for the smallest bit connected with the aircraft, and provisions be inserted for cancellation of the deal if technology is not transferred in toto. These sorts of boondoggles cannot be tolerated anymore. Insiders, however, claim that owing to the usual lax approach of defence ministry-defence production department bureaucrats and the private sector company fronting for the Dassault Avions Company, a host of irregularities may be embedded in the Rafale deal; these will doubtless be investigated by the next government.

The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

^^^
IL-78MKI tanker is dual purpose which can be converted to normal transport by removing the fuel tanks inside the fuselage. So, it it possible to convert the whole system of boom type to hose & drogue and vise-verse as per refueling needs?

The total number of aircraft that is to use/likely to use the probes are over 650 aircraft..

272 x Su-30MKI
214 x PMF
69 x MiG-29UPG
51 x M2k-5
45 x MiG-29K
Jaguar

other likely probing candidates include
IL-76
Tu-142
A-50
C-130J
EMB-145

Those who may need the boom type are minimal and probably wont need it in the near future as both of them have good range for their missions.
12 x P-8I
10 x C-17
Things could change though if US decides to make more sales and does another FMS for US standard refuellers.

Neither can the Il-476, nor any other modern airlifter for that matter. What is it with these non-sequitur arguments of yours?!

what JSR tried to explain is simple math based on specification of the C-17.

C-17
Empty weight – 125 ton
Fuel load (max) – 82t
Payload (max) – 77t
MTOW – 265t

Since maximum take-off weight is 265tons, C-17 will have to compromise either on the max fuel of 82tons or on the max payload of 77tons. In simple terms, it is not possible for C-17 to have maximum of both at the same time.

And yet this half assed project will guarantee the A400m never sells abroad.:cool:

At 117 million a bird this thing is so dirt cheap they have guaranteed no Chinese or European export breakthrough for the next generation. The An-70 may be a better design but in series config its probably going to run in excess of 200 million an airframe — not competitive in Africa or SE Asia. No one really believes the An-70 will be cheaper than the Il-476 do they?

Agree.
The only part I dislike is the same fuselage width. I’d have loved to see the 476 with a wider body than the current version.

The same fuselage presents the problem of a tight fit for MBTs. In the late 80s, IAF had airlifted 30 xT-72 to Leh @ over 10,0000ft ASL for deployment and then flew it back. The same thing could happen in the future and it could be one of the reasons why C17 was chosen by the IAF, where the wider fuselage makes it easy to load & unload the MBTs.

well the Il-96 was also quite cheaper than any Airbus/Boeing equivalent and look what happened to its sales.

The A400M has more orders on its books than the Il-476 has it not?

You completely ignored a major factor and that is, IL-96 & Tu-204 went through the most troublesome decade which was the major reason for the lack of sales.

Il-476 is a political project. An-70 is what the Soviet armed forces wanted, because of the deficiencies of the Il-76. After the fall of the USSR, the Russian armed forces still thought those reasons valid, but instead of completing the An-70, all the military analyses were thrown out of the window by politicians, together with the cost & market analyses, & the Il-476 project begun, to spite the Ukrainians.

We can say the same with Europe. Politics. They took the poor Ukrainians for a ride with European dreams and when it came to real matters, they sidelined An-70 and went in for the political A-400.

———–

IL-476 related news release from Aviastar-SP
http://www.aviastar-sp.ru/aviastar_ru/index.htm

Your calculations are way off! The capex need to be recovered from operational profits and not sales. If you assume that there is a 15% profit margin and sale price is 60mn USD, you get only USD 9 Mn from each aircraft. You need to sell 67 aircraft to just recover it! Plus, you need to add the time value of money (ie the interest rate for debt and IRR for equity on this capex) to find the number of aircraft needed to make an absolute profit.

Ok, then let me correct the terms used so that it doesn’t confuse.

I think, the usage of “recover” was a mistake. Let me change it to the proper term – revenue.
As you know revenue =/= profit…
And revenue = profit, only from the Break-Even point, which is why it is the most valued term for any business venture or a products commercial success.
That is why I never used the term break-even point in what I wrote as I don’t know how much of a margin will be there….

So what I meant is @$50million/unit, a sale of 12-13 MTAs will generate a revenue equal to the sunken cost and 8-4 MTA will do the job if it is priced at $80million/unit. w.r.t the profit margin and the break-even figure you mentioned, I’m not sure if your figures are correct mainly due to the profit margin you took.

Let me base some figures on the Tu-214 unit price which I suppose is/was around $33-$35 million/unit.
So if I’m to consider that MTA can be produced @ $33-$35 million/unit, instead of $9miliion you mentioned, we are likely to see nearly $15million/unit in terms of margin, which gives us the following figures….

@ $50million/unit, 12-13 MTAs will give a profit of $180million – 195million
Or, if we talk that in terms of breaking-even, it will come from the 41st MTA rolling out and not with the 67th or 68th aircraft.

@ $80million/unit, the margin would be $45million/unit, in which case the break-even will happen from the 14th MTA produced.

And if Russia can sell MTA in an open tender against C-130J by clinching it for $120million/unit against $160million/unit of its competitor, the profit margin is going to be huge…

All the above are on speculative figures, so take it like that only and is meant to give just an idea… but the point I was making earlier or wanted to make was that even if India pulls out of it, it is not going to affect Russia or UAC. They can do much better without the JV which will only be putting a cap on their margins in the long run.

Also, w.r.t to capex you mentioned, in the case of Russia, it will be basically the R&D fund (that we are talking now) & the material/production cost. There won’t be any need for capex on fixed asset as the aircraft will be produced in Aviastar-SP @ Ulyanovsk which already have undergone some sort of revamp/up-gradation in the past years….
http://www.aviastar-sp.ru/aviastar_en/gallery/year30.htm

What Russia is getting through this deal is:
1. assured sales
2. a partner to share capex if project is unviable (this can happen – not all aircraft developments are success)

What India is getting is:
1. Workshare and experience
2. Cheaper plane

So, as you can see, this is a deal benefitting both parties. That is why it is happening; Neither Russian nor Indians are fools

As we see from the figures itself, Russia is going to be the biggest user of this aircraft and IAF needs only 45 aircraft (for now, though it can in crease in the future). And no one in the open market gets work share or technical capability for just 45 aircraft. That is why I mentioned, it is/was too good in favor of HAL. If the deal is cancelled/torpedoed, the biggest looser will not be Russia, it will only be HAL & India.

Neither Russians or Indians are fools….. but there is a saying in/w.r.t Russia, which goes something like this – Russia’s greatest sorrow are its idiots & roads. And what is true for Russia is true for India as well!

And we see the living examples of that in various projects/plans that is happening in both Russia & India due to the idiots in the system.