+1

the japanese pilots’ time you gave are their totals, while those F-35 pilots have on average 36 hours on type, but far more even if you just take into account their flight training as cadets when they joined the air force. with 36 hours total, they probably wouldn’t even be out of the initial flight training yet in today’s USAF.

not forgetting that while it will be able to drop tanks and get lighter (if they had anything in them), the F-35 will still have all its fuel on board ( unless they found a way to emergency drain tanks… last I’ve read about the subject – which was quite some time ago, they had problems in doing so)

Don’t need the translation, thank you 😉

a bit lower they also explain that most complex components will be less advanced as a LIFT aircraft doesn’t need top notch avionics suite etc… and that most of these are much easier to buy today than years ago anyway.

What they need is to build an airframe and then integrate all the stuff inside… pretty much everything being off the shelf for that project. While there is still a lot of work to be done, it’s mostly assembling parts (putting the aircraft together) rather than developing them, and in ex-yugoslavia, adapting parts was a speciality, even when these parts were absolutely not supposed to be used that way

Edit: don’t get me wrong, I don’t say “it’s a piece of cake”, just that the goal is quite achievable as they obviously plan to use “shortcuts” in order to simplify the development by using as much as possible what is already done

When you read:

“Krajem osamdesetih godina Jugoslavija je završavala taj projekat, ostvarena je vrlo sadržajna saradnja sa dve vodeće svetske kompanije iz Francuske i Velike Britanije, urađeno je devet varijanti za avion jednosed i dve varijante za dvosed. Sva potrebna ispitivanja u aerodinamičkim tunelima u Žarkovu bila su završena. Analizirali smo i četiri motora svetskih marki: „snecma“, „rolce-royce“, GD,„pratt & whitny“, tri vrste uvodnika vazduha i nekoliko tipova radara – „thompson CSF“, „feranti“, „ericsson“. Definisana je optimalna aerodinamička koncepcija, avion je zapravo bi kopija francuskog „rafala“, utvrđeni su osnovni elementi konstrukcije, mase i centraže, definisan je stajni trap, trebalo je da leti brzinom od 1,88 maha, urađeni su i svi potrebni strukturalni proračuni, usvojeni zakoni upravljanja i definisane četvorostruke električne komande leta, sa potrebnim magistralama podataka i računarom misije… “

It looks like the development of a lot of things has been already done (aerodynamic testing, precise shape, balance, avionics, FCS…) now, scaling the project down from a “4th gen project” to a LIFT aircraft (saùme airframe with simpler avionics, available “on the shelf” basically), it seems even more like a distinct possibility, not forgetting that such an aircraft could also be a good cheap alternative for countries needing a simple and cheap aircraft for everyday duties like air policing, and a simple “air defence”…. of course, it would be somewhat “light” for operations like those that NATO was doing lately, but most countries don’t need that anyway…

one thing that seems to come out of this discussion is that some people believe serbia is some third world country with no education to speak of… after the aircraft, someone points out “simulators” and immediately, a question: “serbia can build simulators?”

A friend of mine has been working and living near San Francisco (“Silicon Valley” for the last 25 years… he got there after a US company recruited him during his college (studied computers and programming) in Zagreb (Croatia today, Yugoslavia at the time), before the end of his first year in the US, he changed his job three times as he got much better proposals from other companies. Most of the guys he studied with followed similar paths and the same thing happened in a lot of Yugoslav universities at the time. Today, students in Serbia still receive a pretty high quality teaching, not to speak of student exchanges which allow for even better knowledge level overall.

So, basically, yes, you can find highly competent people overthere in most highly technical domains… the one domain in which Serbia is lacking is funding, which is the very major reason why they aren’t a bigger actor in areas like weapons sales and such… To quote a movie that probably most around here have seen:

“No bucks, no Buck Rogers…”

It is quite possible, I never said the report was true, only that such a development is plausible.

Saying “it won’t be possible because they never did it before” is quite a strange statement, as in aeronautics, nobody, from the Wright brothers on would do anything as there always had to be a first time… And they even do’nt have to reinvent everything, as most necessary knowledge to develop such an aircraft is pretty much publicly available to anybody…

The most advanced and complex stuff today is about electronics, engine technologies, stealth shaping… stuff that a trainer either doesn’t need, or can use off the shelf available parts if the needed expertise isn’t there and costs too much to be developed

ex-yugoslavia was a maintenance center for Migs of all sorts. besides, they were developing a fighter at the end of the ’80s (in collaboration with dassault). besides, they already build trainers (prop)

So, if one puts it together, why not considering developing something more advanced? Everybody has to learn at one given time, and a trainer is still easier to develop than a fully capable fighter.

As for the question about “why UAE would develop with serbia”, why not? rather than just buying an aircraft, by participating in building one, they make a business, possibly getting some money back by selling it to other countries…

not necessarily, if the money is there (and with UAE there should be no problem on that side), things could move forward pretty fine