US Air Force Retains Requirement to Carry 9 Troops in Draft RFP for Huey Replacement

The platform must be armored and capable of carrying weapons, which could be a barrier to entry for civilian helicopters.

Source:
DefenseNews.com

It’s completely impossible to fit 1900L in the current envelope. The pod would have to be even bigger than the 2000L tanks (which would make sense though).

Nic

Statically, Fr Navy have much lesser plane in flight around the carrier than its USN counterpart. It would probably be the same for the Indian Navy if equipped with Rafale. So why bother with an expensive larger redesign when the existing fits the needs (and the bill)?

What would make sense would be to have a dedicated replenishing/tanker aircraft now. at 20M$ plus per year of maintenance fee and 33% carrier availability in one single year the Fr Navy could certainly order one Osprey and Still increases its OP tempo.

you forget the Tejas is a delta… you can’t just put flaps on it as they’d make the aircraft pitch down.

To get to an acceptable approach speed Dassault had to develop close coupled canard configuration… India is far from there. As a result, it has to take off with a higher speed as well, which means require higher acceleration… at some point you can’t reduce weight anymore as you need strength as well… and so on

humm

Pitch down is there because of the increased curvature resulting from having the flaps down. Curvature is also dependent of the ratio b/w flaps length to chord section. A delta will be less affected with similarly sized flaps.
The problem lies in the resulting size of those on a delta. That’s it. Delta naval fighters are only embarrassed by the aircraft attitude and variability of sink rate (dependent of drag) during approach. The levcons add curvature (hence lift) minimizing the chord of the Flap at equal level of lift.

Often repeated, but have a look at the attitude of a landing B29/57/97 (or your jodel) 😉

Thank you TR1. Interesting.

During WW2, US fighters sometimes used drop tanks made of paper…
They were not very expensive.

You also need to drop tank to evade a missile threat. What is a very serious issue today.

F104? 😀

@Obli: It’s all about transonic drag. The tail cone is what it is on the Grip because the wing is a delta and the vertical fin has to compensate for the reduction in volume. The Mirage 2000 would have been probably quite similar if fitted with large close coupled canards.
The tail boat drag is reduced effectively by the funnel formed by the twin canted fins on the F35. The exiting gasses pulling the air all over the fuselage and funneled it that way (more lift, less parasitic drag and friendlier expension after the nozzle. All are major drag reduction).

On the Grip, the Swede had also to find a suitable location for large airbrakes (take-off and landing on small runway and rolling stability). Remember that those were the 80’s 😉

What the pictures in effect show (as was the vid I posted earlier with a dual formation of Thunderbird’s F16 and F35) is that the Lightning’s wing is tailored for higher cruise speed relatively to the Viper and (the video) demonstrates the ease at which the 35 get into high AoA at slow speed.

Lot of talking.

A video: