The battle for air passengers on the busy Australia-US route has grown hotter with US airline giant Delta launching its inaugural Los Angeles to Sydney flight….

I can’t believe Delta actually started the service, I thought they would be too scared to compete against those QANTAS A380’s!!!

Nonsens, what wave length use the Home Chain? The inlets are smaller as the home chain wave length and produce therefore no Radar return!

I seriously doubt the Germans were aware of that. I don’t believe they designed with that knowledge, more likely it was a fluke. They certainly didn’t have the capability to test a la NG as you talked about in your second post. I’m sticking by my assertion that the primary goal of the design was for performance, and that stealth was a secondary consideration.

The Germans don’t appear to have shielded the engine inlets at all. The primary emphasis of the design appears to be performance, with stealth being secondary.

Sigh. Hasn’t this subject been done to death already? Did you use the search function?

Levsha and Grim….not sure what history books you are reading but may I suggest you investigate War Plan Orange? This was the plan for a naval war with Japan, not the UK or Germans, that dominated U.S. Naval thinking during the inter-war period.

Wow, this thread is completely off topic….

John,

Military procurement is political…its is only political.. the technical side is merely a sideshow..if it wasn’t for political will to do X,Y and Z that demands an armed capacity then the military and its hardware aspect is irrelevant.
So the politcal and commercial aspects are the prime drivers of these programmes and the issues that pcfem and irtusk are bashing about are the real issues, the ones the USAF do need to pay attention to.

Both proposals provide a step change in refueling capability and transport..so the USAF is a potentially a winner with either…mind you the reality that the KC767 could not use UK airbases at MTOW is a bit of an issue requiring a reduced MTOW (but still allowing far greater range and off load than the 135…)

The real issue is whether or not the creation of an all new airframe/ aircraft assembly plant in a new area of the US is desirable or not and regardless of pcfem exhortations the 767 airframe is by no means wholly manufactured in the US…but he is right that whilst the percentages may be small (its actually a 10% difference, not 27% of the declared contract value) the sheer numbers make a vast difference…saying that c. $5billion of US tax payers money is gonig overseas to Europe, percieved as mainly France is a political issue that needs to be addressed. Mind you with the recent lavish spending on Gm and other car makers perhaps the US population has become blase about these sums.

Michelf….thank you for inserting reasonable and coherent comments.

To say that one is ‘better’ than the other is completely wrong…as due to thier relative sizes and capabilities they are only comparable in very limited areas….

What would be more interesting would be to for the USAF to require a true ‘theatre tactical refuller’ and a ‘strategic refueller’, a mix that could have been delivered via a mix of the A310MRTT and KC-45… or a KC-757/777 or 747/8 mix…

The former being much more comparable to the 135 in size and range…and the later giving a serious uplift in capability…but then again perhaps they knew that getting one new tanker was ambitious enough and tried to cover the bases in a single hit.

Rene J. Francillion commented years ago in Air Interational that the best option would be perhaps a 737NG derived platform for tactial tanking and a 767 or 777 based platform for strategic tanking and transport. The NG could easily handle routine fighter drags as it has a payload range capability approaching that of the orginial KC-135A models.

If we can shift some of the existing weight, use the -5M’s new engines and cockpit, then we might, I repeat, might, be able to get EAGL on the cheap. On the other hand, this may be the worst idea, if it risks being more expensive than a clean sheet design…

Alternatively, it might be possible to buy a license for a US-built Antonov An-124, based on the work done for the An-124-200 series. This would use the same engines as the C-5M, i.e. the GE CF-6, and could even be given a common cockpit with the -5M. This option would allow for some commonality, both in spares, and in training. New build An-124-200s would make some sense – arguably, of course, we could probably just produce new-build C-5Ms with only modest headaches though…

Why use 20 year old CF-6-80C engines? Why is USAF putting them on the M when the GEnx is available and burns 15-20% less fuel? Imagine the payload range capabilities that the GEnx would provide.

I’ve got a 777 training document in front of me that says that 2 spoilers (numbers 4 and 11) and the Horizontal Stabilizer (through the Alternate Pitch Trim Levers) have mechanical (cable) backups. Apparently, only the rudder and ailerons are ENTIRELY fly by wire.