X 2 🙂

What a rubbish argument, why do people assume that ingestion = crash ?

probably because it ends quite often that way (not to say every time) when a big bird is ingested by a single engine fighter…

a pigeon or a sparrow may cause just a hiccup, but something like a goose has good chances of messing the engine for good

well, to be honest (and I have no idea of the real motivations they have), no politician will ever admit he just looks to justify his previous and contested choice…

However, if there is a transparent comparison, it may become difficult to justify a choice if it doesn’t make sense considering the data provided for comparison…

in any case, we’ll see how it turns out. Funnily, though, they seem to have asked only to boeing and EADS, rather than making it a wide competition in order to get the best possible deal (dassault and saab may eventually find it interesting to propose something, for example…)

one thing that is quite laughable is that argument about russian bombers… to get to Denmark they only have to pass through or just beside several of:

– Baltic states airspace
– Polish airspace
– German airspace
– Swedish airspace
– Norwegian airspace
– all of them

so, unless they use some space cruisers right out of star wars, methinks they’ll have some trouble long before getting even close to danish airspace… not to speak about the reason that may motivate Russian to go especially after Denmark (they may have much more interesting targets to attack elsewhere long before getting there)

we’re talking about humans firing… 😉

if you have automatic (radar) guidance, with a computer to do the calculations for a successful aim, it’s another story…

to be honest, chances of hitting anything with your gun at 9G are pretty much close to 0, and even lower to record it on camera, as at such G-load, your target would be somewhere below your nose (unseen on camera).

@ djcross

on that video, when raptor’s engines are at idle, it is basically dropping… descending, falling, call it the way you like… while one may consider it as “high AoA flying”, it’s more like a controlled stall…

considering that at 50° AoA you only have vortexes around your wings, you produce, basically, drag, and … er… drag…. and a lot of it… while your aircraft doesn’t necessarily fall like a brick (thanks to the huuuge thrust at the rear end), it can probably control its roll (meaning, avoid falling to one side) by differential moving of the tail surfaces

Trying to do anything else than straight line would result in a serious loss of altitude (considering that even a simple roll as visible in various videos they posted, results in a significant drop)

In this case, “remain controllable” seems more to be “doesn’t fall immediately out of the sky”. In any case, for “hopsalot”: about rafale’s limitation to 29°, during flight tests, it went up to 100° without loss of control, however, besides loosing all its speed, the use for such insane angles is non existent.., which is why the FCS was limited to “useful angles”, pure and simple

a simpler way to answer would be how many F-35s have been delivered?

How much did the program cots until now?

make a division and you get a figure around $1bn+ per aircraft as of today..

once the program is finished, you can calculate how high was the cost, and in any case, your figure of 120 million is “without development costs”, if you iclude these, even by the end of production, chances are that no F-35 will get below the 100 million dollars figure