Meh…the flight of 20 year old technology isn’t all that impressive 😉

By far the biggest news of the week was this:

One more thing too…. the engines dont appear to be inline, slighty canted outwards in the horizontal plane…

Same as Su-27

The the serpentine intakes of the YF-23 is much more extreme than that of the T-50

Which is my point. It has a similar layout as the YF-23…minus the extreme S-ducts of the YF-23 (and minus a lot of other stealthy features the YF-23 had)

But they, could have modified the intake to hide the engine-face. Possibly an F/A-18E/F like RADAR blocker perhaps? I think the X-32 also had something like that. They did some heavy surgery to the Su-35BM intake and engine face to reduce the RCS

Ok. The question is…how is the engine face hidden? Is it hidden to the same degree as the F-22? I just don’t see it being physically possible. There’s not a lot of room in the horizontal or vertical plain for it.

Second, measures to reduce RCS on the Su-35BM or the F/A-18…as good as they may be, are still not in the same league as F-22 measures.

Third, the underside itself seems pretty bad for stealth.

Fixed.

Can you think more one dimensional????

I bet you cannot see engines from front. I think engine trunk going up and then down like “~”

I’m only questioning where the room is for that. In the horizontal plain, the way the engine nacelles are laid out leaves very little room for such a thing. In the vertical plain, one can still see it takes a bit of a stretch.

Compare to the YF-23 which had both…resulting in big bulges on top of the fuselage. If the T-50 has the same vertical S-duct, I can’t see it in the above pictures.

I’m looking

…it has all the attributes of a VLO airplane”- djcross’ words, not mine.

It certainly does. That still doesn’t mean its anywhere near the standards of today. I wouldn’t bet on this thing being even two orders of magnitude less stealthy than the F-22 from the front (side and rear here seem to have big problems)

Not to mention there’s still big questions on the actual ability of the Russian aviation industry to manufacture with the same techniques and technologies as the F-22/35 had to be build…which provide a lot to their stealth. Certainly looking at the close-ups from now, thats still not the case (but it can change…given enough Indian money)

I think you and several other rabid fan-boys have had the shock of their lives today!

We’d seen this 5 years ago already 🙂

Ducted-S in the vertical plane (as the manufacturer alludes and certainly appear more sophisticated than F-22/35)

Certainly more sophisticated :rolleyes:

As far as the wheels go, the arrangement is not different from the Flanker…ie it doesn’t indicate S-duct in the horizontal plain. The Flanker picture shows this quite well. It seems as if the retract “into” the engine nacelles, but in reality its very similar to the Flanker. The engine intakes are just laid out in a different position and are angeled outward, giving that illusion.

As for it having S-duct in the vertical plane, I don’t see the space needed for that sort of thing from this picture:

Not enough room.

That can be seen here too:
http://www.kommersant.ru/dark-gallery.aspx?PicsID=415339&stpid=65
http://www.kommersant.ru/dark-gallery.aspx?PicsID=415340&stpid=65

If it were canted upwards there’d be a bigger bulge on top of the fuselage to allow for it

The underside with the engine nacelles itself doesn’t seem very good for stealth.

YF-22 vs F-22 changes were considerable but what we’re talking about here for the T-50 is something very deep. Look at this underside picture of the aircraft:

The engine nacelles are almost identical to Su-27 and I can bet there’s some very wide frontal angles where the engine face can be seen. To hide those, they’d have to get rid of the rear weapons bay and make it look more like the S-37. If they do that…thats a whole new aircraft. In fact I’m surprised why they didn’t build on top of the S-37 instead of the Flanker.

Its clearly focused on frontal RCS reduction, but right now given the alignments of the engines and the rest of the fuselage, that will be nowhere near F-22 ranges (or F-35). Side and rear seem to be getting little attention here.

I’m going to go out on a limb here but this seems like a dressed-up Flanker rushed into prototype stage in order to attract the Indian’s attention. Expect another 10 years of improvements on this.

Looks like a dressed-up Flanker. Congratulations to India for its new fighter 🙂

Does anyone think that the underside of the aircraft is very much un-stealthy? Look like round nacelles with a stealth-like intake attached. Also, doesn’t leave much room for covering the engine face with those intakes. I am thoroughly confused by all the angles on this aircraft that do not line up at all.

It may be all dressed up…but I’m not convinced. Clearly a huge step forward fro the Russian aviation industry, but certainly not near F-22 or F-23 stealth capabilities.

I believe Pak-FA can be brought online for VVS squadrons by 2015

Considering it took the USSR about double that time to get Su-27s into front line service since the first flight of the prototype…I really doubt Russia will do it twice as fast 😉 This plane will enter joint development with India…and you can be sure it will be in Indian service before Russian.

You’ve got something new to add?

or you’ve got nothing else to do?

Do you?

I see it the same way. The fact that 111 users bought Mi-17 and that 65 countries have evaluated SA330/AS332 as fitting their needs compared to 18 that use S-76 Eagle says much more to me than whether this or that individual customer use his helicopters more or less frequently

It says nothing much. Look at the prices of those helicopters, and see why more nations buy Mi-8/17 and not the others 😉