Well, halloween, you should consider that there never has been a previous stealth aircraft design that was particularly outdoors friendly. I mean, when you think about all the different types of chemicals that are needed (https://militarymachine.com/b-2-bomber-facts/) and that everything needs to have conductive layers built into it, then corrosion (particularly galvanic…all of those conductive materials with different electric potentials) is going to be hard to control. Yet the F-35 is a remarkably outdoors friendly stealth aircraft. Like Spudman mentioned, you are overplaying the corrosion bit. Despite all the different materials, they aren’t finding any. There’s only a risk, and it is already known how to reduce it.

And, by all means, if the French can do better, please do so. Good luck!

Forty one people died from what I understand. May they RIP. The Superjet has been struggling on the world market. This could be really bad news for them depending on what investigators find.

Yup, old news. Here’s something a bit newer: weaponized Orion-E in 2021.

https://defense-update.com/20190403_orion-e.html

Tyndall AFB repair work is stalling out.

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/04/30/the-air-force-is-spinning-toward-a-4-billion-financial-disaster/

Honestly, considering where Tyndall is, I don’t see why the Government doesn’t take the opportunity to downsize it and move assets elsewhere. It’s always going to be at risk of storm damage and it’s not like the Cubans are going to invade.

I’ll post a few Turkish articles and we’ll see how Bayar’s predictions turn out. Here’s news on Hurjet passing its preliminary design review with first flight planned for mid 2022.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/idef-turkish-aerospace-approaches-hurjet-design-rev-457877/

If everyone would please refrain from posting economic articles it would be appreciated. For one, it’s pretty heavily off topic. Also, most of the MSM is utterly incapable of competently discussing such matters and so, if you continue, this thread will be filled with mountains of BS. Here, I’ll give you all an example.

Bussinessinsider:

The 1.44 trillion ruble allocation actually represents a significant drop in expected annual procurement…

Get that? It’s not actually a decrease. The allocation is actually an increase, just a smaller one than was anticipated. About the only worthwhile statistic in the article was that the period brought on by low oil prices and sanctions set them back by a little bit. They are only going to reach around 67% by their 2020 goal and not 70%. A setback, yes, but not the end of the world.

haavarla already brought up that their economic output is measured in rubles and so basing it in dollars is very much an apples and oranges comparison. But the real gem – the part displaying staggering levels of incompetence – is this bit from the stratfor article.

In 2018, 38 percent of Russian industrial enterprises purchased equipment from abroad; two years before, the figure was just 6 percent. Ultimately, if Russian arms producers are failing to find sales for defense customers at home, they’re unlikely to find any more of a domestic civilian market for their wares.

But, as you can see below, there is a problem with that. The top major economies lead in the lists of imports AND exports. This is not a coincidence, the theoretical reasons behind it is not something to discuss in an aviation forum, but high imports is a mark of economic strength!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_imports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

A recent (Russian) example of this characteristic has been their work with the Northern Sea Route. The Russians don’t have the capability to build icebreaking LNG carriers such as the Christophe de Margerie until they renovate their shipyards, and so they procured the first batch from Daewoo in SK. They are finishing Zvezda shipyard for further domestic builds but lack the efficient capacity for heavy lift cranes (those well over 100 tonnes) and so contracted them from China. To speed the development of their Yamal projects they brought on Total as a partner. And the result of a few billion dollars worth of imports is…well, see the shipping increases here.

https://www.kbnn.no/en/article/shipping-and-the-northern-searoute

And Russian enterprises are working to reinvest some of the profits of that to further develop the region (with rail lines to the industrial Urals, more ice rated shipping, further upgrades to deepwater ports and anchorages such as Sabetta and Dikson to economically utilize the far north for decades and increase shipping to over 80 million tonnes by 2024. (Might be a bit optimistic on the year but they will easily surpass 100 million tonnes in time) This boosts the value of their economic influence (their exports are already nearly back to all time highs and rising; their imports are lagging a bit more but also rising).

https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/exports
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/imports

And it will also gain them a great deal of influence via the trade transport route. Asia-Europe fuel costs are much lower on the NSR. Once the infrastructure (deepwater stopovers and icebreaking capacity) is in place to drive insurance costs down it will be mighty valuable to not just China, but also (maybe of more importance) Japan and South Korea. Yes, economic influence does translate into political influence. And all from a few billion dollars of imports (which, like with debt, is of great value when properly utilized).

But that goes over some’s heads and Scooter and the MSM are simply out of their league. Anyways, I’ll step off of my soapbox. I’ll again say it would be good to avoid economics here, and I apologize.

The gap between the F-35A and the B/C is interesting though.