Take it with a grain of salt because it is from Lockheed. But it sounds nice.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/middle-east-demand-could-boost-f-35-sales-to-4600-u-458548/

FFS, Turn on your spellcheck.

Now let’s be fair to him. He writes English better than I can write French.

Those RCS “estimates” are based on basically nothing- some open patents that study overall rough shaping, not an actually produced, tested and RCS treated airplane. Ditto for Butowski’s “estimate”. If you think they are actually posting real RCS figures of the Su-57 for public access, I have a bridge to sell you.

Yup. A bunch of people not in the know coming up with numbers and an aerodynamic patent. (Not a stealth patent!) And I would wager most of those claiming 0.3 or 0.5 are simply drawing from the patent. I’m putting my money on the statements suggesting around .004.

But, hey, it’s a phase. The F-35 went through the “is it a lemon?” phase too.

[USER=”4563″]Trident[/USER] – A ‘platypus’ flat ducted nozzle has proven to be difficult to maintain. It’s always been a problem area for the B-2. The Russians are likely using the Okhotnik airframe with the regular 117 nozzle for early flight tests. The mock up shown in the initial leak will just be used for ground tests until they got the flat duct figured out.

Do you think is a mature airplane when they had thought to buy only 16 units untill 2028 only 2 days ago?

From Cambridge dictionary https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/an-elephant-in-the-room

Elephant in the living room (informal) – there exists an obvious problem or contradiction that you do not want to talk about.

You suggest that the previous smaller contract award suggests immaturity, but very obvious explanations for the jump in purchases exist.

1) Russia is in much better financial shape now with a stable growth outlook. A year ago they were coming out of a recession.
2) The Izd 30 engine now has 18 months of flight tests behind it. So, although it is far from fully verified, they can see that there are no catastrophic design flaws.
3) The belief that the purchase decision changed from 15 to 76 over two days is simply ridiculous. It is patently obvious that altering the contract has been discussed over a lengthy time.

…and can have a new and mature Su-57 if they would want at 35 million dollars per unit. Crazy indias.

India doesn’t want to purchase a foreign stealth fighter (they’ve made no move towards buying F-35s after all). They want to acquire the technology and assistance with building one for themselves. The Russians offered that – for around $8 billion. That was too much.

We should have like 10 planes per year until 2028, probably starting in 2021 after the pilot run is over.

Eventually. It will take at least 3-4 years to get the production line up to speed. They’ve built fighters before, yes, but not like this.

[USER=”55194″]RadDisconnect[/USER] – I disagree. For one, Tupolev hasn’t done anything in a long time and it remains to be seen what kind of shape they are in. How well they do with this refresher (the upgraded Tu-160) will show a lot. Additionally, a next gen bomber will need to be a flying wing design. It is better for the Russians to spend some time mastering that with the Okhotnik drone before going about a far more expensive bomber.