It is at end of page, so to ease use of translator. And it also have a precise confirmation about what CNN said.

Just to note that the journalist claims that this information is coming from the Syrian regime media. Since he’s not in Syria, it’s basically hear-say information only. I’m not saying that it’s not true, just that the linked article is just an opinion peace.

The US and Russia should really start working together on the IS problem because the outcome that is looking most likely at the moment is that Assad government falls and Western moderate rebel experiment continues to fail and IS is going to take all of Syria and leading to a bigger crisis then exists already.
These air strikes that are being lead by the US which are the equivalent of throwing money down a sink hole. It been one year and what have they achieved against IS? Nothing. They still holding on to the territory they captured in Iraq and Syria. IS is not going to be defeated without boots on the ground the problem is no one is willing to commit.

The US bombing campaign has somewhat contained the IS advance. They can’t really do more than that currently unless getting directly involved on the side of the Assad regime which is the one thing they are trying to avoid. And even if they somehow turn their policy by 180 degrees by e.g. sending special forces to coordinate the air support with the regime forces, the latter don’t seem to have the troops capable of going on the offensive and the numbers needed to garrison that vast (albeit mostly empty) area.

Unfortunately, there are no good options on the table and no easy solutions to this mess. Some political compromise certainly needs to be found which would give most of the Syrians something to rally around (including the Sunni tribes in the IS controlled area), but the Iraqi experience makes it seem unlikely to succeed in the long term (e.g. politicians bringing their sectarianism to the fore to consolidate their power).

Back to the topic, given the rebel advances in the area, Russian troops seem bound to get directly involved in defensive operations if they want to keep their Syrian port options. I’d expect helicopter gunships to get involved soon enough.

They could have simply transferred them to Uganda or Vietnam, instead. The fact is that no Su-27UB upgrade has been materialized within the Russian VVS and the Su-30M2 is the closest option to the Su-27UBM.

Yes, it can come handy for operational conversion training for the SM variants having similar radars, but the small numbers on order and the different cockpit sets don’t indicate that this was planned from the start to be the new trainer variant. Then again, is there a definitive decision on the SM upgrade standard which the old planes will get upgraded into or even newly produced?

Yup. The technology is deceptively simple, as I said, and in no way unique. But the thing with the Vihr is that nobody has to manually adjust the beam, all of that is taken care of automatically by the launching platform.

Manually adjust? You mean track the target? But that’s common to all laser beam riders except shoulder launched SAMs due to obvious reasons.

Beam-riders, wire guided missiles and what not are still going strong all over the place despite their apparent “obsolence” vis a vis high-tech fire-and-forget missiles because they’re cheap and difficult or impossible to jam.

That’s not necessarily true, especially for the SACLOS wire-guided missile systems. Since the missiles are not self guided, you don’t “jam” the missiles, but it’s control system which tracks the missile’s position and sends the guidance correction commands.

They have been making new canopies and windsheilds for MiG-31 for a couple of years now too, doesnt mean they are restarting production with just new landing gear and canopies…

The recent Air Force Monthly article stated that there is some top speed limitation imposed on the MiG-31 fleet (maybe 1.8 M, I don’t remember exactly) due to canopies. I presume it wasn’t always like this and they have degraded, which would explain the need for new ones. A similar reason might be behind the orders for the new landing gears.

Rockwell Delivers First Gen 3 Helmet for F-35

I guess they won’t be redesigning the seat then as some people here suggested (not to mention the canopy redesign ideas 🙂 ).

Hope there’s enough left to determine the cause of the tail rotor failure.