I’d talk gently to my northern neighbors (brazil)….

Considering that France offered a deal for the Rafales where Brazil would be free to export the Rafales to all latin america, they may get some of these at “brazilian prices” with local support.. could be a good way to get high performance “do it all” fighters for an interesting price…

How about using an aircraft as capable as the F-35 as your basis for a comparison because the Gripen is simply a poor mans Eurofighter and wouldn’t be able to perform many missions sets that that the F-35 will be able to such as hunting for TCT’s in contested airspce, deep strike, deep interdiction of ground forces, CAP Sweeps through contested airspace etc etc.

And how about using reality as a basis for your calculation?

no serious conflict involving the countries considering the buy of the F-35 had taken place for several decades. The obvious rule for a long time was: “fight the weak and talk with the powerful”

IADS is something nobody like USA, France, or even India, China or Russia will willingly go against. They’ll talk with each other, gesticulate, communicate in all available media, but stay quite safely away from fighting each other, or anybody having a decent defense system. It simply doesn’t pay off politically to take such risks. Of course, once you go at war, you say to your population that you’re facing a very dangerous enemy and so on… but in reality nobody wants to take chances for some godforsaken piece of land on the other side of the planet, and since everybody is so involved economically with each other every significant player will play the same game. Only potential enemies you really have are small, pretty much isolated countries, that one or the other side will attack for any purpose it may find of interest and for these, the legacy (and cheaper) fighter force is already sufficient by a nice margin.

er, lacks technology compared to other candidates for Brasil, and, therefore, the technology transfer that Brasil wants

this what i can find
btw there something bugging me : what will stop the F-35 from hiding in ground clutter and cloud and then sneak up from behind these 4.5 gen fighter 😎 F-35 is very low RCS fighter and also a meteor fire from short range will be really hard to evade

@ 30000ft the only clouds as said previously, where you may be able to hide are storm clouds (Cumulonimbus), where your aircraft will most likely be in a pretty pityful shape in no time (large hail, extreme turbulence…) and, which wouldn’t hide it for long anyway as they look pretty much like big towers in the sky (narrow and high)

others are rather thin and transparent (allowing you to be seen/detected more easily), and, what’s another problem for the F-35, are made of ice crystals. Try to fly for a longer period inside these and you get your aircraft “VLO skin” pretty much peeled off by persisting friction, especially near the front edges, resulting in damaging seriously your frontal RCS

To the contrary.
F-35 anchor customers’ (USAF, USN) primary mission is to penetrate the IADS, find and kill CCD targets. Bits of data coming out of the flight test program indicate F-35 will be successful in achieving that primary mission capability. But Gripen, Rafale and Typhoon will not be able to perform that primary mission as they will be constantly defensive SAM magnets and they lack the sensor capability to find CCD targets.

so, according to you, USN and USAF will get a whole $1.5bn worth of F-35s? man they’ll love your idea… having a full half dozen aircraft will make them a really potent airforce…

besides, when you say that Gripen, Rafale and the Typhoon will be “constantly defensive SAM magnets”, it’s LM’s dream, you belief, but most certainly nowhere near the reality…; not now and neither in the next several decades… everybody is working on lower frequencies radars and other ways to detect an aircraft no matter its shape… anbd results start appearing… what will make these aircraft survivable or not is their electronics and, to a degree, their dynamic capabilities to, fast, get through or get out of the harms way when needed. In that regard (electronics) the F-35 is still a “hope” (not finished and nobody can say for sure how it will do when or if it ever becomes finished) and the others keeps working as well (and have budgets to do so as it’s not eaten by the basic developments like “keeping that damn thing in the air without overheating, stalling, etc”…). As far as dynamics come into play, well, compared to the european fighters, the F-35 is in a league of its own, a second league…

@ djcross

You’d miss the opportunity to earn good money quick then… :p

the idea of multistatic radar is something that today’s aircraft of any generation can’t defeat easily. it is only matter of what frequencies the receivers track, as you’ll always reflect some of them and, obviously, they’d be scattered over a wide area on the ground… all where you can have passive receivers anywhere. your chances to defeat it would lay in jamming enemy communications to prevent coordination of data received (not related to the generation of aircraft) and/or detecting the positions from which the enemy transmits received data to hit them (but then, spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars weapons to hit a transmitting truck/van costing much less than that may soon proove a very costly way of warfighting in the end)

Ink,

I guess the talk of potential threats in medium/long term is unimaginative because of assumption that NATO will continue to exist in the future.

NATO guarantees defence but it also limits action. Any offensive action against a neutral country could cause the offending party to be booted out of NATO, have sanctions placed on it and sabotage important economic links.

Obviously investment is required for the future, especially as Serbia isn’t part of NATO.

well, recent history proves that any country can be attacked… all you have to do is to pretend they are “the bad guys”…

after some communication, anything goes…

G-suit of course..at least g-pants.

no, not “at least”… to fly @FL700 you need a pressurized suit… your pilot is supposed to be dressed more or less like an astronaut up there…

well, another option is that he dies before even getting there… but his operational effectiveness would be pretty low once he’s dead, methinks… but I’ve been wrong on a couple of occasions, so, who knows? ^^

you compare it to the U2… but the U2 is a glider (without even making long calculations, you should just take a glimpse on its wings… the short stubby stuff you want to use simply won’t glide as you expect them to.

You talks about shooting your model to experience the equivalent of supersonic speeds… except that supersonic speeds mean also different behavior of the air going around you aircraft… your model simply won’t have that unless you shoot it really at supersonic speeds… which you won’t without a real power pushing it…

again, you’re dreaming things… the reality doesn’t work the way you imagine it