It is obvious that the driving issue for Thailand is how to get rid of tons of chicken meat it couldn’t sell in its traditional market, not any specific hankering for Sukhois.
“We can’t leave all this chicken in Thailand.”
HA HA HA HA HA HA HASorry.
Besides Sukhois what else Russia exports. I have been told that Russians make very energy efficient air-conditioners (though they don’t look that nice compared to western ac’s)
At least one Russian plane, with seemingly, no visibilty-from-cockpit problems.
Why FC-1 is so expensive compared to F-7MF. How much more expensive will be fuselage of FC-1 (basic aircraft without engines and radar) compared with fuselage of F7-MF.
Western stranglehold on the commercial engine market is tighter than a boa constrictor around a rabbit.
An air force might risk a shaky but high performing engine with potential but not airlines.
The new players aren’t even considering their own engines for their own market.
The largest market for new commercial carrier aircraft is China and all their big commercial projects, the ARJ21, the Y8F series and the MA60 series use GE or P&W turbofans and turboprops. The projected sales for all three types are in the hundreds each for the Chinese feeder market alone and their production run will probably go way past 2020 with western engines.
I don’t think you’ll see a non-western commercial engine before 2050. You need a new country to build one and run it on its own planes for a few decades before the engine series is considered economical, reliable and safe enough for it to be put into widespread use.
Russia, by all rights, should have produced a competitive world-class civilian turbofan by now since it had run its own liners with indigenous turbofans for years. But the most promising Russian jetliner, the Il-96M, uses Pratt & Whitneys.
The aircraft used by Mr. Putin (for visting foriegn countries) has Russian or PW (or any other American) engines ?
Appears the other way around mate. Their latest processors, techniques appear ok, but they dont have AESA antennas yet.
AESA antennas require hundreds of monolithic microwave integarted circuits chips, so far countries that have put AESA in ‘practice’ are also the ones who make CPUs and DSPs. I was referring to Russian radars based on passive phase array technology, which are otherwise good radars except low processing power.
So how far behind are russians in radar technology compared to west. It does seem that they are only lagging in signal processing department. In terms of antenna design they have finally caught up.
The myth about MiG-25 will never die?!
It suffers from heat-stress, so dash-speed time was very limited.
Payload for the record-books means in most cases, fuel left at that time.
With AAMs (semi-acessed), it could fire at Mach 2+. Max Mach with AAMs was
well below Mach 3. Mach 3 was reached briefly during record-flights in optimum
clean condition and no care about engines.
Designed as high-speed intercepter, the price for a relative lightness, was less g-strength. Similar to SR-71, when you fly nearly at a straight-line. Safety-margins in mind a careless pilot can pull 2-3 g more without destroying the MiG, but the ment. people have some extra time ahead.
The MiG-25 was designed to counter the SR-71 and “B-70”. Not to run down those, just to achive an intercept course for the incoming thing. Still very limited to be successfull in this.
In the former GDR the SU MiG-25s had a spectacular alert scramble, every time, when a SR-71 from the UK passes by. You could red, at the same height and speed the MiG-25s shielded the WP from intrusions. Some day an East German journalist comes through with some more details. The starting procedure of a SR-71 was time-consuming. First warnings about a SR-71 start was given from intel. hours before. After the start of a special tanker ac to go for an aera over the North Sea to top-up the SR-71 there. Scramble becomes iminent. With good timing the MiG-25s could be at
70000 feet and Mach ~2,5 , when the SR-71 passes by. At least usefull for the selfconfidence of the AD-people. We had our MiGs near by!
To be fair, most western/eastern AD-fighter were limited below Mach 2 with AAMs load and would have problems to intercept a Concorde at full speed. Many had those when trained for that in a few exercises.
An unkown shortcoming of the MiG-25 was, if the closing-speed was too high, the “weapons-computer runs out of steam”.
Today “you” can buy high-resolution pics from every-part on earth for money. Which is much cheaper than “you” have to pay for a flying/hour of a MiG-25. For a short-notice update about a special place, an ordinary recce-flight will do. If not covered by SAMs, with Mach 1,5+ at height, you are fast enough to avoid interception from most fighters. Otherwise near ground level close to Mach 1 and you have good chances too.
The MiG-25 is just too expensive for that.
Can’t MiG-25 be constructed out of the same metal as SR-71 (Titanium perhaps). One of the reasons for using steel was the rather poor state of Russian technology in those days.
fft, isnt the F22 the first ever a/c to launch munitions from internal bays at supersonic speed ?
I read somewhere the main problem is to prevent the missile
‘floating’ up into the bay once released. So they must have solved it somehow.
Actually I always wanted to know if there was an optimum speed for launching missile be it from internal bay or conventional pylons. The usual answer is that greater the speed the better it is, but it seems that past a certain speed (say the ‘launching speed’) the drag acting on missile due various forces may be so high that speeds above ‘launching speed’ would never be used.
GD, my bad, I should have worded myself better. In the context of my post Europe/US was considered to be one entity depending upon the price sturture of their products and availability of products due to political reasons.
Is it possible to launch missile from internal bay at mach 2.8 or so.
Whilst MiG-25 is obsolete, but conceptually is good threat for AWACS with some long range missiles, by the way whats the longest range missile in Russian inventory and how is its performance.
Golden Dragon is quite right, outside of US and Russia, no country can match china. China sells total solutions and the product range has good breadth. With in a few years, China’s semi-conductor industry will take-off resulting in great avionics also.
top speed mach 2.3 (preserve engine life!)
with a top speed of mach 2.3, it would’nt be MiG-25.
Jai your answers seems to be logical, though I suspect this ‘reduction in angle of scanning’ problems only happens to passive phase (because of difficulty in shaping beam with passive components). I guess Thales also has a few passive phase-array radars, are they also ‘hybrid’ i.e. electrical+mechanical like BARS.
If this ‘steeribility’ implies moving the antenna, does’nt then it defeats the whole purpose of phase-array.
Any idea about the weight and signal processing capability of this new radar.