And people tend to go a bit nuts with Sentinel, when in actual fat it has a shorter sortie time, can’t be refuelled and can’t carry enough crew to work in shifts or properly analyse the data it is collecting, unlike the Nimrod.

Yep I can’t help but feel it should of been the same/adapted airframe as the Nimrod.

A nice cheap MPA like those suggested above makes a lot of sense.

The bun fights over what each service gets in the press is exactly why I hope that Liam Fox and his advisers are able to make high level decisions with enough understanding of what is going on. If the RAF choices are bad for the RN then the RN has two carriers at the cost of say 5 more T-45 destroyers (or the equivalent number of C1 Frigates) without suitable or too few aircraft and someone above the head of the respective heads of service needs to bang heads and kick butts until they get them to see sense.

Are you suggesting the RN should be binning CVF so it can get more Destroyers?

Personally I hope we get F-35’s (possibly a mix of all flavours to replace Tornado GR4, to replace Harriers for ops from austere airfields and switch the carrier to CATOBAR and use F-35C’s and Hawkeye’s). However I worry that if we purchase 40 F-35B’s (which is a figure I have seen floated around) the RN will be lucky to get 24 of them on the carrier at any one time.

I guess what we have to do is take a gamble we either go for F-35’s and hope they do not cost to much, the programme does not fall behind to much, and we end up with too few fifth generation aircraft to cover all the missions we need them for, or we go for F/A-18E and hope that it takes another 10 years for the Su PAK to go into full scale production, and another 5 years before they export them to South America and the Middle East. Sadly the one choice they will not make is to buy 80 F/A-18E for delivery between 2015 – 2016 to operate of QE and PoW and then buy say 40 F-35b’s for delivery around 2018 to replace the Harrier’s (so we could operate a few off the carriers), with an option to increase the F-35b order (or buy F-35 A/C’s) at a later date!

The RN will almost certainly only see a squadron or 2 of F35s on its carriers at any one time, unless in an all out war scenario (or very rarely an exercise simulating one), this has been the thinking behind CVF for some time, there’s a lot of good info to back this up on Richard Beedall’s site.

What does everyone else think?

I’m sure the RAF would love that but where exactly is the money for designing and building a new strategic bomber going to come from?

One thing I do not understand; Why does the USN keep ordering more SH if it will be inferior to F-35 in all respects?

And why will the F-35 replace the old Hornets only and not also (in the longer run) the SH, given the above-mentioned superiority of the F-35?

Because the Super Hornets will still have life in them and dumping airframes with life left in them would be pretty wasteful.

Give the British Government more credit than that. They’ll find a way to be rid of them.

No they won’t, the naysayers have been saying the same thing for the best part of a decade now, the fact remains they got ordered, most of the contracts have been placed and they are being built.

+1 for Fan art.

Typical RAF bashing from the Army in there, but one or two key points, the PFI Airtanker is explicitly mentioned as stupid, as well as the usual interservice money grabbing by attempting to get rid of more fast jets.

Yep, Dannatt might want to compare how many combat aircraft the RAF has compared to the rest of the air forces around and have a little think about what he’s said.

It took 2 or 3 months for the results of the Mantis test flights to be released into the public domain, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for the details of Taranis test flights.

I don’t think it means anything above us getting a defence review at the moment.