Maintenance and reliability. The move to fixed AESA saw a benefit in both maintenance and reliability. Moving from one TWT to many provided the radar head with graceful degradation over time. The other benefit was moving away from a radar head that was reliable on mechanical movement for its scanning. For example the F-35 radar head is essentially sealed within the nose cone. There is no current planned need for maintenance and the APG-81 is expected to outlast the airframe.

By going for a moving head, irrespective of its perceived mechanical simplicity, the Captor E fit introduces a potential point of failure. It may have FOV advantages but at some point the swash plate mechanism will break.

That’s why you have scheduled maintenance. Hell, a jet engine is far more liable to failure than a swash-plate if you look at it that way.

Why the B and not the A?

How to tell which websites have most honest figures for Eurofighter?

Spanish air force official website claims, for example, 11,5 tons as empty weight figure.
German air force official website claims 11 tons as empty weight figure.

Spanish AF site claims mach 2 as top speed.
German AF site claims mach 2,35 as top speed.

Then RAF web site claims mach 1,8 as top speed.
While Eurofighter consortium web site claims mach 2.
Neither of these two offer any info on empty weight.

RAF also states M1.3 for Tornado. It’s basically what it can fly at with tanks, or an operational limit for the benefit of maintenance, not an outright limit. The original official claim was M2+ and a DA achieved M2+ even with RB199s fitted, whereas EJ200s have 20% more thrust and a lower BPR.

Most sources say 11t for the empty weight. 11.5t seems like the weight for a 2-seater.

That’s so obvious that nobody ever feel the need to implement such an esoteric feature until now.
There must be a reason.

BVR became more important. I also believe Flankers had it some time ago.

I was thinking more along the lines of:

* in the “2015” Swiss eval the Rafale consistently outperformed the Swiss Hornets (which are no slouches) in all categories
* in the Danish eval the Typhoon (and SH) did not consistently outperform the Danish F-16.

Now, if we assume that the F-16 and Hornets have roughly the same technology level, one may start to wonder if not an a/c that is consistently outperforming one, would not also consistently outperform also the other…

No one has assessed the 2021 or even 2019 export version yet, so all irrelevant.

I

Define “fine”?

One is designed optimal efficiency at M1,6 @ 20k feet, it will work “fine” from zero to 50k feet, from M1,0 to M2,1. That is you won’t have a problem if
a) your inlet struggles at subsonic speeds or high altitudes, because your throat area is fixed, and whole inlet has to work in suction. (to be honest Typhoon has mechanisms to mitigate that)
b) your inlet struggles at high speeds or low altitudes, because again your throat area is fixed, you will encounter spillage.
c) your inlet stuggles because your oblique shocks fell inside the engine cowlings and reducing recovery pressure above designed speeds,
d) your inlet struggles because oblique shocks fell outside the engine and you won’t be recovering any pressure from them.
e) your diffuser geometry is fixed engine will be recieving air at varying velocities.

That is “fine” as long as everything works “ok”, its a simple, cheap and reliable solution, but not really comperable in terms of *performance* to an inlet design that doesn’t have any of those problems, and works next to optimal efficiency throughout a wider speed/altitude range.

You simply have no understanding on the subject. “Nosewheel lift” is not the same as aerodynamic lift. From what I’ve read, and what I’ve see from the pictures I’ve posted, canards on Typhoon are not to improve lift, but to improve controllability. Hence, go back to my comment regarding aerodynamic similarity of Mirage-2000k and Typhoon.

Actually as altitude increases aircraft became more and more lift limited, and all ITRs at any altitude are lift limited before 9G structural limit. The problem with F-16 is its FLCS limits AOA to 15 deg at 9Gs, increasing linearly to 20,5 deg @ 7,33Gs then increasing at a higher rate 25,2 deg @ 1Gs. F-16 has aerodynamics to create tremendous amounts of lift, but has pathetic structural strength to withstand at high AOA angles. Its simply too focused on STR (that is high Gs at low AOAs for maximum efficiency), and forgoes ITR.

Vortices are not the concern, pressure difference is. As vapor clouds form by reduction in air pressure, they show all there is to see. It also shows two things about canards; 1- Vortex from Canard is completely unattached to the main wing’s own vortex at this high AOA condition, unlike the tiny vortex generator, which nicely feeds and enhances the vortex above main wings on both pictures. 2- Canards are not producing lift, but they are producing a downforce to keep the aircraft’s nose down. I don’t see how that is more efficient than a F-15 with its negative lift generating elevators.

You haven’t demonstrated a s***. I’ve just used your own Cl0 +kCl^2 formula to prove you wrong. Though you are right, eventually **all else being equal** larger wing area is better at higher altitudes. However if larger wing area comes with worsened L/D due to aspect ratio, lack of Cl improving mechanisms like LERX and inherent NECESSITY of using thinner airfoils that inherently have lower L/D, it doesn’t always translate as you claim.

This is the only factually correct thing you’ve ever said.

Your generalisation may be true, but T/W is nothing without L/D. You brag about 10% wing loading, or 10% higher T/W all the while ignoring the fundementally low L/D of delta wings.

You are comparing two extremes. at 50% fuel, M2k is a delta with lowest wing loading of 4th gen aircraft, its lower than Typhoon, F-15, everything. On the other extreme, F-16 is a conventional design with highest wing loading of 4th gen aircraft.

This is by no suprise -and irrelevant of T/W ratio- if both aircraft climb sufficently high, one with lower wing loading will eventually have superior STR. Climb to 70k feet, and a U-2 will have better sustained turn performance than a F-15/16/22 Typhoon etc etc, just because it has very low wing loading.

The problem is, Su-27 F-15 MiG-29 Typhoon ALL have very similar parameters on T/W Wing loading etc, you can’t even remotely compare them on by just looking at those.

Yes the Typhoon has various bleed mechanisms to mitigate all of that, so, as I said, it works fine up to M2.0. Variable geometry intakes don’t work as well as pitot below M1.0 either.

No, you simply have no understanding of the subject. It was about instability margin and lift, not just lift and the analysis refers to that. The solution achieved overall was optimal.

So the larger wing area may be preferable at higher altitudes.

That depends on what they are at various points, one picture does not show everything and I’ll frankly take an eval over a ley man’s analysis of a picture. The canards do produce downforce, but in doing so they speed up the airflow under the canard and over the wing and hence increase lift.

Keep up with the conversation, I changed the air pressure and speed in your calculation to a more lift limited situation and the larger wing won. GO BACK and READ!

And why your calc was flawed.

M2000 does not have canards, it is a less advanced design. No they don’t, the Typhoon has much lower wing loading and higher TWR than an Su-27 at similar fuel fraction, so the two are not comparable.

The Russians say –
1) We didn’t do it
3) it was a legitimate target because there were rebel mortars mixed up with it.

And neither of those two would surprise me. Terrorists have massively abused the use of charity status to smuggle people and weapons into Syria and back, that much is a known.