Did you not understand the point that its operationally proven that STOVL allowed a non deck rated RAF pilot to make his first deck landing on his deployment to theatre. The anecdotal part is that the pilots flying the aircraft state its three times easier to land vertically than Harrier.

CATOBAR deck quals take multiple launch/trap slots in the flying programme times the number of pilots needing to qual. You deck qualify your pilots before you need to commence ops with them. Not during. STOVL has been proven to have no such limitation.

I’m not sure what you think is significant with the hands off Hornet?. You believe that autolanding means pilots don’t need to deck qualify?

A CATOBAR carrier will do that much more effectively (and I guarantee, cheaper over full life than the STOVL crap).

When we need and have the justification to spend the money on CATOBAR that can be done. There is no operational justification for that now, funding challenges that mean pushing upfront and recurring costs to the right is a really good idea and a Govt that is going to give whip hand over JCA to the RAF regardless. The only issue with STOVL is currently the outstanding question of reliability. Given the question mark over F-35C’s ability to trap a wire it looks churlish to single STOVL out on technical grounds.

And? So? I can show you videos of a Rafale in service performing useful jobs right now. I can show you videos of a Hornet in service performing useful jobs right now. Both are possible options on a CATOBAR carrier.

Can we find one point and stick to it?. CATOBAR is whole-life cheaper in your view yet we are going to operate an interim type with less surviveability than JCA stipulates and will be obliged to replace it with a new type when becomes non-viable?. An early STOVL group for Carrier Strike, should we determine a need for CATOBAR in 15yrs owing to a changed threat environment, can easily chop to RAF ownership and provide useful capability.

But, a STO F-35B will never be able to hoist anything like the payload an F-35C will for the same fuel load… which means compromised payload range.

So what?. Libyan ops we saw the shift to lighter ordnance progress from the evidence in afghanistan. If we have to hit a hardened target with a heavy penetrator we either use CASOM/BROACH if the threat environment is high or external carry if its not. Big deal?.

It seems to have an inflation rate of 10-15% on every post you make…

Try again.

Yep… ‘cos all fast jet pilots train in vertical landings on moving targets that have extremely turbulent air flow.

Quote from AvWeeks article entitled Vertical Validation:

“Beesley’s flight in the second F-35B, BF-2, on Jan. 19 marked the first vertical landing achieved by a non-Harrier-trained pilot. In addition, at least one other pilot in the initial cadre did not have legacy Harrier experience. However Wilson says ab initio conversion training for hovering and vertical landing qualification took as little as half a day, compared to “at least” three times that for the Harrier….”

You make your own mind up. Qinetiqs ‘Bedford Gear’ is set to make SRL an even easier task but you do, seriously, have to remember that SRL is an approach and landing at only about 30knts overtake on the ship with a max 400ft braking roll. Its not a CATOBAR approach.

Buzzword buzzword buzzword from what appears to be little more than a powerpoint expert.

Which word were you having trouble with?. I’ll explain it to you.

Pretty simple really. There is always more than 1 pilot per plane. If the RAF gets F-35C… then I’m sure you can connect the dots. Suitable aircraft, with trained pilots…

…and kept deck current how?. We’re getting a duty deck and one on maintenance standown!. Of course we will have more pilots than planes….aboard ship you always aim for that anyway…the RAF are going to send out a squadron or mores worth of its pilots on secondment to the MN or USN permanently are they?. Otherwise how are those CATOBAR skills getting kept up when the -35C pilots have rotated to a shore-base deployment enforcing a no-fly zone somewhere in the back of beyond?. There is nothing simple about this!

Probably because you didn’t want to see it.

See what?. So far I’m seeing a pie in the sky fantasist who doesnt realise deck skills are perishable?!.

Because you don’t have an AAW destroyer available. SAAM-ESD & FREDA are meant to make up for not having enough Horizons to be sure of having one available when it’s needed. If you don’t have a Horizon to send (e.g. one in refit, & the other escorting the carrier on another task), what’s better, FLAADS & CAMM or SAAM-ESD & Aster 30/15? It’s not a choice between Type 45 & SAAM-ESD.

SAAM-ESD and FREDA are half-assed make-and-mends lashups of the vessels that both services should have ordered more of in the first place…the Horizon DDG’s. What you are left with is a lesser capability combat system on a less capable hull trying to fill the boots of the vessel optimised to do the job. Again I make the point that if you are facing the air threat that is greater than that a FLAADS type ‘cheap’ system can handle then you need more than a solitary SAAM-ESD ship. Its claiming a capability where only a percentage of it exists

Budget, budget, budget. A Type 26 with SAAM-ESD equivalent/SAMPSON should be much cheaper than Type 45 or Horizon, & more capable than SAAM-ESD/KRONOS-NVER.

Unless BAE are going to fire up the SAMPSON run again and not pass on sunk costs it has to be an expensive option. The metric that UKPAAMS/Viper comprised near half the cost of T45 is well known…that did of course include development costs which you would assume they’d have recouped now, but, its still an expensive system. To my mind if you have a threat that requires Sea Viper then you have a threat that justifies the full system bolted to the platform it was meant to be deployed on!. If you want to play at having a sort-of area missile capability SAAM-ESD on a frigate should be fine for the keeping-up-with-the-neighbours effort.

The problem with sticking a straight Italian SAAM-ESD fit onto Type 26 & trying to sell it in competition with an Italian-built FREMM is, why not just buy the Italian FREMM? Bigger, as well (i.e. better suited, according to the criteria you’ve just given), IIRC.

Absolutely. To me though a T26 with SAMPSON is a logical non-sequitor in the first place. If you want extra AAW capability on the T26 bolt in 24 VLS cells and embark 96 Sea Ceptor on each frigate. Three frigates would have the capability to comfortably missile soak the entire ‘few dozen’ AShM’s in most smaller threat states inventories and stop anything closing to within range to employ dumb ordnance. Forget the stupid spend on bells and whistles wide area capability. Obviously if you are planning to go toe-to-toe with the PLAN you might need to look again, but, would the answer to that kind of a high air-threat be FREDA?. Answer is no!.

It looks to me as if Type 26 could have a major competitive disadvantage anywhere that an area AAW (albeit limited, compared to T45) ability is desired. I fear we’re in danger of painting ourselves into a too-specialised, too-RN-centric corner – again.

I think local area AAW off a ‘cheap’ missile like FLAADS/Sea Ceptor with quadpack potential is going to be a damnsight more attractive to many than the ‘golden bullet’ approach of Aster30’s on a couple of frigates.

Jonsey the NSW of 12 aircraft minumum was based around the F-35C and aircraft with better performance and reliability.

Not the case Geoff. NSW was being continued directly from the GR9 force. 801 was due to stand up again but that was quietly pushed to the right. Basic tailored airgroup on CVF was to be the 12 stovies, of whatever type, belonging to NSW and rotaries. Augmentation of the NSW would come from the RAF depending on mission requirement up to the maximum 30+ airframes to support the ships max sortie generation rate. Thats UK Carrier Strike in a nutshell. As stated before look at the airgroup that embarked on Charles de Gaulle for Libya ops. The CVN in that case stood about 200nm offshore with 14 strikers aboard and had a very successful deployment. Nothing CVF and F-35B couldn’t do with a ‘peacetime’ tailored airgroup.

Sticking with 12 just degrades the power projection capability as those aircraft will be worked harder to cover the roles and with their greater complexity from their additional STOVL hardware & software they will have a lower servicability

…and CATOBAR doesnt put any stresses on an airframe?. Its unheard of for a pilot to come in too hot on his approach and whack his airframe out of action in the recovery?. Certainly happened when we were operating the F-4’s. STOVL is very hard to get wrong if you can cut out hot gas ingestion etc. The issue of asymmetric thrust induced roll as suffered by Harrier shouldnt be a problem for 35B either as the thrust posts are single column along the centreline.

I didnt see anything fall off the cabs in the USMC testing and I was looking. Everything I’ve seen from that stated that they operated quite happily in the environment. You have to balance complexity of aircraft maintenance against ship maintenance as well. Have an arrester engine fail, a wire thats a bit close to its limit, an electrical switchboard issue that hits the EMCATs or any one of hundreds of issues and your flying programme is in bits. F-35B will be more mechanically complex, but, one broken aircraft is only one broken aircraft. You drop it from the program and shout louder at the plane manglers.

BTW is SRVL still on the development shedule, i know we got the bill for it prior to us switching to the F-35C, but the USMC are only interested in conventional or Vertical landing at present. Until its been programmed in, tested and certified we have no idea how much bring back load we can claw back.

SRL is the technique that Harrier pilots routinely use to land on airfields. Thats regardless of conditions as well. Its not like SRL is some mythic new concept thats just sprung up to grant bringback to F-35B.

As I said the Qinetiq trials were quite clear on feasibility and they’d come up with a new system of deck mounted lights to show the SRL’ing pilot where he was going to hit, on deck, given his current heading and glideslope. As to how much bringback well thats a function of lift generated by the wings at a given airspeed….generate 5000lbs of lift and you add the greater percentage of that to the safe landing margin for the airframe.

Amiga,

Understand that the reason the Navy exists is not solely to operate aircraft. This may be difficult for you but try. We have to recapitalise the frigate force and try and find the money to stop the SSN fleet actually dropping to 7 hulls. Things that actually dont revolve around the carriers and can see deployment on taskings that actually dont have a carrier present.

The simple fact is that I can show you images of an F-35B operating off a through deck. I cant show you images, yet, of an F-35C catching a wire. Worldly and knowledgeable proclamations about the state of F-35B are precisely worthless then. The very simple fact is that if the 35B variant gives the 450nm strike radius advertised even without 2000lb internal carry it gives the capability required. It does that without training/operational limits and 2 billion quids worth of catapults and arrestor gear.

To try and make the claim that F-35B also has training requirements is an absurd statement. Find out what goes into deck qualification for CATOBAR pilots and try to understand that we wont have a fixed pool of CATOBAR rated pilots beyond the small FAA cadre of the Naval Strike Wing. F-35B’s operational flexibility would be a key enabler to UK deployed airpower. Understand that we NEED F-35B to work for Carrier Strike to work. As, the way it stands, no-one has answered the simple question of how we put extra (RAF) squadrons, quickly, on a CATOBAR deck when we need to augment the NSW component. Small, operational, details like that not being something you would consider though eh Amiga?.

I could go on but I wont bother.

Geoff,

SRL allows bringback of Storm Shadow. Far from the absurdly difficult manoevre Sharkey Ward tried to make out Qinetiq have proven that an SRL at 30knts over carrier speed of advance with a 15 degree glideslope gives a 400ft braking rollout on a wet deck. A run that leaves hundreds of feet of deck remaining.

We end up with STOVL and we’ll see about as many F-35B’s onboard as we did when the RAF had control with JFH, so the power projection aspect of Carrier Strike goes out of the window.

NSW is the permanent deck component. So 12 aircraft at minimum at all times. Care to go check how many Aeronavale fastjets Charles de Gaulle had embarked for the Libyan operation?. For instances when we need more aircraft on deck its going to be a lot easier to fly-on RAF F-35B’s, just as the GR3’s did in 82, than scour round for pilots with current CATOBAR deck quals to get out to the ship.

“Local” in this case means eight ASTER 30 in the air at the same time with a detection range of 180 km´s versus a RCS of a fighter. Think of the French FREDA´s but with the anti submarine hardware still on the ship.

Ahh okay so the new AESA is doing the VSR job without any reduction in capability in horizon scan, target track, surface scan modes etc???.

The limiting factor, as I’m sure you know, on antiair missile engagements is horizoning effect so, without CEC, against a lo-lo profile attacker whether you are on a Daring or an IT-FREMM you are shooting Aster30’s a long way inside their maximum range. In terms of deliverable effect, i.e looking at real capabilities and not raw numbers, whether you are shooting a smaller number of Aster30’s at a 10ft ASL skimmer from 20nm or salvoes of Sea Ceptor at 10nm is largely academic.

Principally then the big, expensive, area missile becomes a denial weapon as opposed to an actual interceptor and is primarily in place to prevent closure of wide area surveillance/cueing platforms at altitude or is a system to shoot down the big clunky hi-lo profile supersonic weapons favoured in some quarters at a healthy standoff distance. If you have that in your escort group on a nice big, VSR equipped, destroyer or two why do you need to spend the money to duplicate the capability on the frigates?.

No, the capability is not the same, and the Italian ships are not “AAW-optimised”, they are GP frigates with a realistic ASTER 30 capability. The only way that we can say the capabilty is the “same” is we dont look at specifications

So unchanged CDS to handle the new radar and area missile?. Again with nearly all of these area SAMs, discounting CEC, you will spend more time ‘shooting at the arrows not the archers’. That will be true with Aster/Sea Viper as much as for Sea Ceptor. Functionally engaging inbound missiles targetted on your fleet/assembly area is the ‘same’ task despite the difference in performance and cost specs.

And no one was asking to delete the CAAM´s capability in every Type 26, quite the contrary, do an “Italian” on three or four ships, and you get a very decent AAW area capability that can suplement the “Darings”. If three or four sets of SAMPSON and C2 kit are too expensive, ask Selex how much they want for the KRONOS, its a less capable, smaller piece of hardware, should be cheaper.

Three or four sets of SAMPSON would be, likely equal to the cost of a couple of T26 hulls….too expensive by far. As would inducting a completely new radar system, and establishing its support infrastructure, to plug into a few of the 26’s. Especially when FLAADS/Sea Ceptor is already intended to be providing the ability to missile-soak for high-value units.

You have to consider the wider picture – even a very modest RN escort group of a Daring, a T26 and a pair of 23’s is going to be sporting, if we assume just 48 Sea Ceptor as a min, nearly 200 active-seeker SAMs with precious little by way of a fire-channel limitation anywhere. You look at a likely threat state with a few squadrons of modern strike fighters and air launched antiship capability tasked, perhaps, to one or two squadrons supported by modest marpat capability that, modest, group is plenty tough enough to stay on station for a few days.

Wrong topic, i know, but…

Having its AAW Destroyer fleet halved the RN could do worse than to stick something like that “SAAM-ESD” into a handfull (three or four) of type 26´s.
Something like SAMPSON and a PAAMS C2 “lite”.

It is doing so on all of them. The FLAADS concept is for the provision of local area defence based on the Sea Ceptor missile. That is slated for initial deployment on the Dukes passing to T26 as they replace the older units.