close to an actualy production aircraft, or will it be more of a pre-production/ proof of concept type?
Does anyone have an educated guess based on past Russian programs?
I think it will be a proof of concept/ pre-production type, it’s safe to assume it’s the most important Russian defence programme with alot of industry restructuring around it. KnAAPO recently added high-precision machine tools from Mitsubishi & Toyota to its manufacturing inventory.
It’s interesting to note that although NAPO (Novosibirsk) was tasked with producing the fore-section, they later said they simply didn’t have the precision tooling to do the job, hence the entire aircraft will be produced at YG KnAAPO. As you can hardly regard NAPO’s production Su-34s as ‘shoddy’!- it bodes well for PAK-FA.
Having said that, I don’t think the Russians can risk a back-to-the-drawing board scenario as per Su-27A, or (to a lesser extent & more recently) by Boeing’s SH.
I think they’ll seek to avoid, as far as possible, the F-35 LRIP ‘rolling test programme’.
Which is the ‘blue picture’? NPO Saturn’s (03/07)…I think by the number of times we’re hearing malo zametnost as a priority design feature -means canards can be ruled out.
[ATTACH]161143[/ATTACH] this one?
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