Folks, your financial expertise is appreciated, but what the heck is this having to do with PAK-FA again ?! Isn’t it enough that some useless trolls are derailing this topic (and others) already? Please, use the general forum if you want to talk GDP and other such stuff. Thank you.

Yeah, point taken and I concur.

Very true, it’s completely inaccurate. However, measuring GDP in dollars gives a false impression. For example, Britain and France spend approximately the same amount on defence as Russia, but the Russian military is somewhat larger I’m sure you would agree.

Similarly, in reality, measured on physical output rather than dollar-value, China’s economy has already overtaken that of the US.

If a person earns $50k/year and the basic cost of living is $30k/year, is that person better or worse off than someone who earns $20k/year where the cost of living is $5k per year?

Hence the PPP method, that takes those very differences into account as has been stated before. The “dollar” is still used in this context, but in the form of the hypothetical/fictional “Geary–Khamis dollar”, more commonly called “international dollar”, which is adjusted to represent actual purchasing power in a given country and not how the USD or any other specific real currency would fare there.

The issue however is that you need to conduct rather extensive price surveys of goods and services and what not, and the last major price survey dates back to 2005 (by the International Comparison Program/ICP) so current PPP figures are undoubtedly a tad off. The recent World Bank data does however utilize their own more recent 2008 survey, but the next major ICP update comes this December and it will make a serious imprint of the 2014 International Monetary Fund data (due for release in April) that is then used by the CIA etc.

Some of the facts you have presented are misleading if not completely wrong – Russia does not have the largest economy in Europe at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of…_GDP_(nominal)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Income

Hey, I’m merely quoting the World Banks most recent PPP charts, which were released a few months ago. This chiefly in response to the above “Brazil is richer than Russia” statement, which sounds a bit odd in light of the fact that Russia is the only BRIC to qualify as a “high income” country as of 2012/13 and it ranks above Brazil in GDP/PPP, GNI/PPP, GDP/Nominal/c and GNI/Nominal/c. Nominal values are usually less interesting in this particular context, though.

The Russian Federation also ends up above Brazil in Human Development Index (55th vs. 85th), and that’s an interesting marker on just how well the country is faring in general and what real effect the aforementioned economic markers have. Ergo, it would to me appear fallacious to call Brazil “richer” than Russia.

In regards to Russia in Europe, well, I can admit to jumping the gun there for effect, but in my defense it was an oft-cited headline in these neighborhoods this summer. Again, it is in PPP terms:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2012+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc

Do Russians have a higher social development index or standard of living than Portuguese?

It depends on just what kind of reports, indices and/or surveys you’re looking at, of course. The thing is that GDP/c appears not to be as disconnected from real social development when it comes to the RF as you seem to suggest. For instance the most commonly cited gauge of actual “practical” living standards, the aforementioned HDI, says that the RF is right now at 0.788 and increasing, whereas for Portugal it is 0.816 and slowly decreasing. They’re a mere 8 places from each other as of 2012/13, only separated by the likes of Belarus, Latvia etc. Ergo, they’re converging both in terms of hard societal economics and in more “real life” ways.

Of course, Russian income inequality remains high and the country has vast social issues, some of which are at levels unheard of anywhere in the EU. Nobody is denying that.

However, most things are in fact steadily improving and all in all, rapidly approaching reasonable Euro-esque levels, even outside of the two capitals. Russian demographics finally stabilised recently and the population is now growing rather than declining (higher birth rates, longer life expectancy). Deaths from drug abuse and other typical markers of a dysfunctional society has rapidly decreased and are now at levels lower than in the US per capita (!). Alcohol related issues has dropped significantly in the past couple of years, as has things such as suicide rates and what not. And in addition to that, real wages have more than tripled, the internet penetration is unprecedented, yadda yadda yadda.

Typically, this goes straight against the common narrative in the medias, which is a tad puzzling. It’s just not as fun as the “dying Russia” thing, I suppose. Mark Adomanis at Forbes commented on that earlier this year:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2013/02/04/five-myths-about-russia/

These things aren’t badly constructed RT propaganda pieces or anything of the sort, they’re just casual figures that nobody seems to want to comment on. I like to point this out from time to time because I have noticed that people in general seem to think Russia is still stuck in some kind of 1990’s limbo of perpetual misery. Last time I went to Russia my travel buddy remarked in line with that notion, roughly saying “wait, what, it doesn’t look anything like ‘Lilya 4-ever‘, I feel misled!”. Again though, I do not wish to glorify things either. What I’m saying is that while it is bad, it’s not as bad as many people think. And it is not getting worse, it is improving.

Personally I’m very glad that this big neighbor of ours is getting its s**t together at such an impressive pace now. The last thing I want is a totally dysfunctional and volatile hellhole armed to the teeth with nukes just around the corner.

If Russia needs a VTO fighter I think the best option would be to design a VTO fighter from the start instead of a VTO PAK-FA, and anyway it would ruin the PAK-FAs good looks.

It would ruin the entire platform and all it’s designed for. It’s completely unfeasible on every imaginable level, it’s ludicrous to even loosely speculate about a hypothetical VTOL version ever springing out of the PAK-FA programme at any stage, past, present or future. Hence my earlier smoking remark…

STOBAR is a different thing, even CATOBAR is heaps more realistic.

So, Cobra is nothing, even Draken can do it?!

What Draken is doing is not a Cobra at all. It is an example of a serious drawback to the high aspect ratio, high sweep compound delta, ie. its tendency to go into an uncontrollable deep stall/superstall if the airflow was sufficiently disturbed.

All it took was a quick jolt in the roll axis at a moderate AoA (as you can see clearly in the footage) and the entire aircraft would pitch up violently and eventually enter an irrecoverable spin toward terra firma if the pilot did not react quickly enough with precisely the right control input before the machine passed the spin threshold. This inherent design issue was well known, it killed a whole bunch of pilots and ruined many more airframes, but it was kept largely under wraps for the time being due to the negative publicity it would have caused. Being a highly novel design, the developers knew that they took some serious risks and they had to persuade the government and the public opinion that taking such risks were worth it to stay in the game and produce a competitive aircraft. The same thing applied to the oftentimes overwhelming teething issues present in the earlier J 29 and the later AJ/JA 37 and JAS 39 (the A 32 was less controversial I think). There was a lot of negative press about them all in Sweden and both SAAB and the Air Force constantly had to defend themselves.

At the end of the 1960’s the Swedish Air Force decided to address it by commissioning four trainer Drakens (Sk 35C) modified with anti-spin chutes and additional wing fences in the role of letting pilots familiarise themselves with this problem and learn how to recover from it should it occur.

All videos are from these exercises, which began in 1969 and continued for a long time (basically for as long as the Draken remained in active service). Typically the modified Sk 35C would be piloted by the student, with an experienced test pilot in the 2nd seat. Even with the spin recovery chutes and airframe modifications, it was a bit sweaty and the exercises were carried out at 35-38,000 feet or more for additional safety as you still needed quite a margin for recovery should things go even a tiny bit wrong.

With enough training, the pilot could however recover from it fairly swiftly, which is what we are seeing in these vids. But do keep in mind that it was a dangerous and essentially uncontrollable “maneuver”, and it led to quite a few disasters over Drakens service years. I’ve heard from people involved that these exercises definitely weren’t something the pilots looked forward to…

Foreign Draken operators were also keen on putting their pilots through this superstall familiarisation programme, which was carried out at the former Swedish AF base in Ängelholm (F 10, Scania Air Force Wing). The most recent clips of these exercises involved FAF and AAF Draken pilots IIRC.

Lieutenant Colonel Göte Marcusson did a series of interesting presentations on this particular SweAF episode a few years ago. He worked on the superstall problem for a long time, starting with the 1950’s-early 60’s test flights. He later became one of the supervisors of the subsequent trainer program.

As far as the engine airflow goes, I think they had to be kept at idle over the course of the stall and recovery, or another heap of problems would arise.

EDIT: I see that it has been cleared already. Well, glad to provide additional info at least. 🙂

So with that F-7GS kill, no fighter involved in the list is without a kill of its own (i.e. the MiG-21).

Fascinating.

No A2A that I’m aware of in Latin American – last one was Cenepa War in 1995. Could’ve been some shoot downs of civilian drug runners that I’m not aware off.

Also not aware on any African kills but could be same as Latin America.

Yeah, that was what I was thinking. I’ve heard of tons of drug runner interceptions and such in South America over the past decade, including incidents involving aerial exchange of fire. Since you include UAV shootdowns, light utility aircraft shootdowns etc. there has to be something there that could make it to the list.

Same goes for (sub-Saharan) Africa. Not drug running per se, but various engagements there. As I said though, they might be hard to track down.

On the topic of the 5 day war, the Georgian drone was an Israeli Hermes 450 afaik. Also, there are rumors of RuAF Flankers engaging enemy aircraft there as they established air superiority, but records are sketchy.

Obvious size mismatch.

The single most striking giveaway is the gun, OLS etc.

PS46/A , Skyflash and AMRAAM.

The PS46/A was designed from ground up to facilitate the use of Western AA missiles, much like the earlier Swedish systems integration of AIM-4 and AIM-9. Even if the Skyflash had a foreign origin it was part of the entire JA 37 system from the beginning (together with the Sparrow-F, which was eventually dropped) and adding to that, parts of the missiles were being produced domestically. Hence, I don’t think it counts. The later AMRAAM integration was technically a mere follow-up to this, but did involve the kind of retrofitted milbus integration and such as the topic alludes to.