I know EADS like heavy proposal but wasn’t the US tanker competition (and debacle) enough for the bald head up there?

Think smart, think tailored (to the needs) and sell a lot of smaller platform easier to maintain instead of cross functionnal ones that you can’t handle (program)

Damned is that so much difficult?

What are they gonna do with 295 in a blue water scenario? Put them back in storage claiming that war is an unfair competition?

Well unfortunately it is simple math, unless it is a regional airliner travelling low and slow a Hawk hasn’t got a chance of doing a visual intercept on a transiting airliner when you look at the relative performance. A Hawk has a straight and level top speed of Mach 0.84 and a ceiling of approximately 45 thousand feet, a Boeing 777 will cruise at 35 thousand feet at Mach 0.84. A Hawk can’t climb at Mach 0.84 so when the call comes in a Hawk has no chance of getting out of the Q shed, off the runway and up to 35 thousand feet before the airliner is long gone. Other airliners like the 747 have even faster cruise speeds, there is no way a subsonic jet can hope to catch with an airliner unless they have warning and can get ahead of the flight profile which is rather unlikely. There have been a few recent incidents where Typhoon have been scrambled to do visual intercept of airliners that were not transmitting or where there was a worrying passenger on-board. In each case the Typhoon had to request permission to go supersonic over land to catch up with the airliner in question. In an air to air scenario the Hawk can at best be a point defence fighter operating over its launch airfield and awaiting targets to come to it. People often think airliners are slow bus like things but actually when they are operating at cruise altitude they are pretty fast, in theory many could actually break the sound barrier in a shallow dive if allowed. The Douglas DC-8 has even broken the sound barrier and is the first civil airliner to do it beating the Tu-144 and Concord! (Still waiting for that nugget to come up in a pub quiz :very_drunk:) Picture below is of the Canadian Pacific DC-8 that did it with an F-104 piloted by Chuck Yeager as the chase plane!

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/I-Was-There-Boeing-Will-Never-Try-It.html#

Aaah the great days of Douglas… Convair…

Thx for posting such a great pic.

I understand the meaning but it seems they hve pretty well surrounded their needs around the tight budget (and even comes around a tight budget without spending the money they don’t hve – follow my eyes?)

So if “beggars” sounds still ill-chosen for me, your clarification rounds your comment. Thx

As the old saying goes, beggars aren’t choosers,

Is that an offensive comment ? Sound weird in the Eu context.

They tail hook issue was blown way out of proportion. As was many of the other development issues with regards to the F-35. Really, compare to previous fighter programs it’s doing extremely well. As a matter of fact it was very common to test aircraft to crash during testing. Even the YF-22 crashed at one point…………Let’s also not forget that the JSF Program is developing not one aircraft but “THREE”.

Defining somewhat a crash in a dev program as a proof of concept is something that I would gladly let you explain to any test pilots :very_drunk:

Seems all is not well in Eurofighter land……

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/safety-problems-eurofighter-costs-soar-amid-mismanagment-a-910231.html

Excellent article (and picture to understand how the canard works). Thx! A must to read for every ones here.

Guys, the first IRST appeared on US warplanes back in the 50’s.

Another example of the Great Re-Writting of History thought the web I guess ?