It doesn’t really matter which airframe France and Germany choose. They’ll not sell many of them outside their own requirements due to Uncle Sam’s mighty FMS program.

Why pay hard Euros for an MPA when you can get a P-8 within 6% of the US Navy’s cost on a nice 60-day-after-delivery zero-interest repayment schedule?

It’s just a national-pride exercise, when Japan has a perfectly good option available.

Because the film had to incorporate significant flying scenes involving the McGregor brothers there was not much choice but the Lysander although the Blenheim had also been on the list of flyers.

Another option would be to express dissatisfaction and walk away from the project.

TV producers will keep making shallow, character-focused, unchallenging ‘entertainment’ so long as people keep compromising to meet their ‘vision’. Maybe someone needs to point out that their vision sucks.

Not technically a ‘load’ but 48 B61s in one hangar seems a lot of firepower.

No. For one thing, the F-22 isn’t export-cleared – its systems haven’t been secured against leakage

Neither was the F-117, but it was also offered to the RAF. As was the B-1B.

Never ever heard that the RAF lobbied the RAF against acquiring the Viper in the nineties, and never ever read anything that sugested that the RAF ever considered the acquisition of whatever version of the F-16 for the Phoon missions.

I humbly suggest that perhaps you didn’t read enough. The “F-16 for RAF” was a fairly stable rumour from the mid-80s onwards, until about 1995 or so. Bear in mind that there weren’t really ‘Phoon missions’ in the RAF of the 1980s; other than close-support, everything was geared to two-seat long-range all-weather operations.

There was a contingent that favoured replacing the miscellany of tactical single-seaters ( Harrier, Jaguar, Lightning ) with the F-16 and reducing costs in that area so as to enable focus on the core interdiction & interception missions. There was even a senior officer with the car registration plate “F16ONLY” or similar.

The Typhoon wasn’t a good fit for the RAF’s role, and still isn’t. Grudgingly I have to admit that the Phantom-sized F-35 is probably a better fit.

I like the Mirage F.1 suggestion. I’d go for the F.1-M53, an excellent all-around performer. Mach 1.2 at sea-level; 50,000ft and Mach 2.2 in 8 minutes. 8.6g subsonic limit, 7g supersonic.

Plus the French like to sell aeroplanes and will usually find a way to do so as long as you put the cash on the table. In contrast I can imagine the USA’s response if Diddlystan or the People’s Republic of Noodlenoggin sumitted an FMS request for F-15s…

ZA717 was one of a pair of RAF Chinooks that ate their own rotors within the space of two days in 1989 due to a manufacturing error in part of the dynamic train, hence why it was never upgraded. I think the other one was reduced to produce.

Interesting topic and issue, these days you can chart the flight path of any aircraft using their transponder.

Many aircraft, but not *any*. Mode-S can be turned-off on operational missions, or on training missions that mimic operational profiles. We see this frequently in the UK on Typhoon quick-reaction alerts, where the tanker is visible but only one or sometimes no Typhoons are broadcasting.

And then you get into interesting tricks such as deliberately feeding bogus Mode-S data to systems that you think your opponent might be watching.

And large proportions of military aircraft and small private aircraft don’t have Mode-S transponders at all.