Not sure why the waste of bandwidth on a purely hypothetical scenario. Why would the US or “West” ever be in a position where they would copy, steal or license produce their own version of the Flanker? Under what circumstances would this ever occur? National pride and given the fact that the Flanker was an “enemy” aircraft made this a complete impossibility of ever happening.

As already discussed, the “West” already operate a Flanker “sized” aircraft in significant numbers. Pointless discussion.

Nose landing gear is now single wheel and looks flimsy compared with the previous twin wheel gear, probably done to lower weight and offset the rest of the weight increase, although I would have thought the extra weight would need a twin wheel nose gear.

How is such a fighter going to fare against any further potential aggression by the Russians? It is safe to assume that Ukraine/Russian relations will be latently hostile for the foreseeable future, and with the absence of Russian-derived hardware, the Ukrainian armed forces will be under severe pressure to present any meaningful deterrent. As far as I can see, Ukraine has nothing to lose now by jumping into bed with NATO and seeking significant military assistance to recapitalise its inventory with advanced Western (i.e. US) equipment.

sigh. It has already entered production and the first squadron of Tejas is to be formed by July. the IAF will receive its second series production fighter before that..SP2 having already flown.

But it still won’t be operational when only two aircraft will be inducted into the first squadron. These will still be used for ‘testing’ purposes, and not operational duties such as CAP missions. It seems the first IAF Tejas squadron will be a ‘testing and evaluation squadron’, so to speak. The deadline for operational clearance if the end of this year, but as with previous deadlines….

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/with-two-planes-india-to-raise-its-first-tejas-squadron-in-july-1391301?site=full

India will get its Tejas fighter squadron — indigenously built Combat Aircraft — on July 1, with two planes. The squadron will be based in in Tamil Nadu’s Sulur.

Another two fighters are expected in the next financial year, 2016-17, a senior Air Force commander told NDTV. The total strength of the squadron – normally they have 14 to 16 aircraft — and its name will be decided later.

The first two Tejas fighters, however, won’t be used for operations now. They will undergo test flights to resolve certain flaws. The clearance for operations is expected in December.

The Tejas still has 19 unresolved issues – including nose wheel vibrations, high noise level in the cockpit — which need to be sorted out. “The HAL (the manufacturer, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) and IAF are working closely to sort out these issues, we expect them to go through it quickly,” the commander said.

Imperial Japan

Luftwaffe

North Korean

North Vietnamese

Iraqi

Serbian

In that order.

It seems the Russians may have already paid the price for Putin’s entry in the Syrian conflict with the recent airliner crash in Egypt, seems too much of a coincidence to me. If that does turn out to be true, how soon before we see Tu-95s carpet bombing ISIS territory and Spetznaz mopping up the rest?

Number 1 squadron flew the FT-5 (Chinese JJ-5 trainer) between 1975 and 2012 as a trainer. In 1987 they were assigned a wartime role with AIM-9 Sidewinders.

Anyone have photos of PAF FT-5 armed with Sidewinders?

I believe they used 400 L drop tanks? What is their internal fuel load?

I stumbled across this recently. It might be worth checking out some of Peter Steinman’s photographic work, he’s spent a lot of time with the PAF since the late 70s and 80s.

i dont see the sense in this, the HJT-36 is a lemon and a decade to late, why cant India just admit that the project is a failure, cancel the whole thing and buy new aircraft off the shelf? (M-345, PC-21, L-39NG or more BAe Hawk AJT’s)

Probably because of the same reasons why the LCA is still in development. If you applied the same logic to the LCA, it should have been scrapped years ago given how late it is.