HotshotEmh, not.
Ejection seat saves life but they often provoke vertebral compression fractures, it is not invalidating but need therapy.
Sometimes the pilot can be injured that’s right.
In any case, quality is not just a material thing: it enompasses also training, leadership,and operative doctrine.
During WWII the real advantage of Germans was about their cadre quality at all levels of the gerarchical scale and it lasted until the last days of conflict while the exceptional level of Japanese navy pilots was obtained thru a very long training and it backfired spectacularly after the Midway disaster as they were never able to recoverate the losses.
Well if the war goes all out new pilots would be rushed into combat ASAP, don’t expect them to be very well trained on both sides.
Hotshotswarms will be made up of UAV, not old fighters, unless the old fighters are turned into UAV
5th gen planes make 4th gen planes more effective. It might be possible to convert them into UAVs though, not sure how easy to do it would be.
HotshotThat depends on how they’re protected when they’re stored. If they don’t intend to reactivate them for sure they don’t don’t take much care of them.
This one is probably an F-16A, they use special coating on them. Note that they removed the engine. The engines are probably stored somewhere to avoid corrosion.
Anyways, what would you propose to increase the numbers, what could be built easily in large numbers to saturate the enemy? That sounds hard to do!
HotshotSurvival rate of ejection seat is around 80–97% so there is a big chance that you could die . Moreover, there is a significant chance of injury as well
Well humm no it’s the contrary. If you have a 80-97% chance that the ejection seat works you have a big chance of survival. Of course this probability has to be taken into account to determine how many pilots have to be trained on old planes. I would guess about 50% of being able to reuse a pilot, except for the A-10, maybe around 75% thanks to its armor.
Of course you try to continue to train former F-15 pilots for F-15, former F-16 pilots for F-16 etc… The question is, how many hours would be the minimum to keep a former pilot capable of flying his old plane. they could have the minimum of hours per year and a crash course on 2-3 weeks with 3 flights per day before they’re sent into combat on that plane.
It’s one thing to say that numbers matter, it’s another to propose something on how to do it….
Also often air forces have more pilots than planes, so as planes are getting shot down, there is more and more remaining pilots with no plane to fly.
HotshotEvery air force has hundreds or thousands of retired planes which can be reused immediately. They need at least a datalink to be able to communicate with the stealth planes, that would increase their effectiveness and survivability.
It may also make sense to keep some old dual seater planes in service in training squadrons to keep the pilots capable of flying them. The pilots could have like 50h of flight time on them per year plus simulator training. The ground crews could also get some training for basic maintenance. The plane would probably be shot down within 10-20 sorties, so there’s no need to be able to performed advanced maintenance.
Most pilots survive when their aircraft are shot down so they could be reused on another plane quickly. And if a pilot ejects, his JHMCS is likely not to be damaged. So if the retired planes are upgraded in advanced to use the AIM-9X, they could become potent in air to air, especially if the enemy is beginning to run out of BVR missiles. Modern decoys could also increase the survivability of the old planes.
So upgrade all the old retired F-15, F-16, F-18s that are still in flying condition with modern datalink, modern decoys and AIM-9X, and set up about 2 training squadrons with dual seaters for each type.
HotshotI think you need powerful and expensive sensors to track the enemy missiles at a range sufficient to use a CUDA. I was thinking something relatively cheap that just have enough range, say 50m.
HotshotThe quote from the F-35 pilot regarding supercruise is:
“What we can do in our airplane is get above the Mach with afterburner, and once you get it going … you can definitely pull the throttle back quite a bit and still maintain supersonic, so technically you’re pretty much at very, very min[imum] afterburner while you’re cruising,”
The F-35 should have had that kind of setting, all the more that its TTW ratio is not that great and it can’t supercruise.
Let’s say the F135 has 5 AB settings. If the first level is enough to maintain supersonic speed, that means an extra 10% total thrust ( 20% * 50% of AB thrust ) would be needed to supercruise. The F135 block 1 could maybe be sufficient. It wouldn’t be really impressive but it’s better than nothing.
Hotshotlol ok I shouldn’t have used the word supercruise. I was wondering about how much AB it needed for that to have an idea if a wartime engine setting could get the same speed without AB. If the F-35 right now needs 10% AB to stay in supersonic, a wartime engine setting might be able to increase mil thrust to be able to do it. If it’s 25% probably not.
Anyways I think a wartime setting should have been a requirement from the start in order to help the F-35 for the a2a role. The typhoon and F-22 are said to have had such a setting from the start. It should at least have been an upgrade for the F135 that have already been built. For 60 billion R&D, I think it’s not too much to ask for.
HotshotThe F-35A is said to be able to supercruise at min AB. How many AB settings does it have?
The F135 block 1 upgrade seems to focus of fuel consumption, but increasing the thrust is another possibility. They should implement a wartime setting for more thrust, maybe it could supercruise with it. That kind of configuration could be set before a sortie depending on whether the mission requires more range or more thrust. Or even maybe in flight. If the F-35 has to intercept an enemy fighter it can chose the extra thrust. Wartime settings for engines are kind of common these days.
HotshotSAAB do have an example on a time critical mission.
as one F-35 pilot would have it, it doesnt really matter how you achieve supersonic cruise as long as you achieve it,
for a meaningful time, (and on the face of it, he does have a good point)
but 150 miles is still a far cry from 250 nautical miles, and no on station time at that, except perhaps 1 min.
which is nothing
so its still a huge advantage if you can make it on dry thrust.
also notice this SC profile include a remarkable 50 min. on station,
altho this being time critical it would perhaps have been more appropriate
to make a wild guess how long it would fight on station
I wonder, would the close coupled canard help for loitering with minimum consumption? The canards increase the lift so the plane doesn’t have to fly at higher aoa when loitering, so is less draggy. hmm..
HotshotBomber class like B-52 or Tu-95, Tu-160 are equipped with cruise missiles that can reach 500-1000 km or more. So they will launch missiles and start to turn home before you can even get to where they are.
strike-bomber like su-34 can carry missiles to defense themselves so some agility would be necessary to protect yourself.Gripen NG get a significant fraction of its combat radius from external fuel tank. If you dropped them, your range/combat time will be very short.
I think the best config would be 2 large pear shaped tanks for the wings and 1 centerline supersonic tank, but a thourough evaluation has to be done to determine what’s most optimal. The gripen NG still has a pretty good internal fuel and is said to be able to supercruise when all the tanks have been dropped, which obviously, would save fuel.
Hotshotthere’s another problem: how fast can it fly with these drop tanks?
today, if the argument is that it has to intercept bombers, over large distances, it is enough for these to shift slightly their path to make the intercept difficult as the fighter would have to fly longer and faster to catch up with the bombers. Even if the Gripen can fly for a long time at economical setting, if it has to run after a bomber heading away, it may have to accelerate to speeds where its external tanks represent too much drag penalty for its small airframe
The configuration with 3 large tanks would be used for CAP at extended range. It is not extraordinary at all, given the fact that the mirage 2000 can carry 2 2000l tanks, 1 1300l tank and 6 missiles, and weighs about the same and has about the same thrust.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]250211[/ATTACH]
If it is launched from the ground, it would be in a different configuration, probably with only one centerline. The centerline can be dropped when empty to help the gripen supercruise. Really I wouldn’t care at all about the cost of tanks, given that bombers are high value targets.
Hotshot665*25/100 +665 =831 km , slightly longer range than superhornet. Gripen is very small too , so 3 tanks will affect its agility and speed significantly. If pilot has to enter combat and those tanks are dropped , it probably cant fly back on internal fuel
What the … ?? why would you care about maneuvrability for intercepting bombers. And obviously the tanks would be dropped before accelerating in supersonic doh!
HotshotI still fail to imagine a scenario where both Typhoon and a vlo theatre bomber would complement each other. It’s either lightly defended airspace (some fixed SAM installations, some legacy fighters) then Typhoon will handle it with ease. (no need for a fancy stealth bomber with bomb bays large enough to carry alcm’s internally)
Or it’s heavily defended airspace with mobile double digit SAMs and a notable number of modern fighters then Typhoon won’t operate in said airspace until air defenses are decimated.
The VLO platforms would open a corridor for the non VLO.
HotshotDoesn’t mean much. The gripen doesn’t have the same kind of optimally designed drop tanks ( 3 subsonic pear shaped drop tanks ). With the same kind of tanks and 3 tanks ( vs 2 in the picture ) you can give it 20-25% more range probably.
The ability to carry 6 missiles is almost useless to defend against bombers over such a large volume of space..
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