well, first, the F-5 is a twin engine aircraft,

second: the replacement in less than a decade they’ll need to buy replacements for their hornets, which means they’ll probably want to use the same type to simplify and optimize maintainance and overall costs

result, buying the gripen may sound logical with inly the F-5 replacement in mind, but in longer term it means going a step down in capabilities as in their own evgaluation the gripen was behind the hornet and managed the minimum passable overall grade only thanks to its price

considering the support of gripen: I said that just about everybody was against it. some because they don’t want money spent on any fighter, others that don’t want to buy a fighter that came out dead last in evaluations

Stupid move. Dassault should know, that a reduced price offer from them would mean that the Siss government must allow the other bidders to re-bid as well. Which means starting the whole process all over again.

why “stupid move”? right now, their pffer was refused in favor of the gripen, so, the best they can expect is to get the process cancelled and restarted, which is exactly what such offer can do (not sure, but there aren’t that many other options left to them)

LCA mark 1 is not really worth thinking about, lets see what happens with mark 2.

What i dont understand is if the IAF know they will need to beef up sqaudron numbers why did they not consider cost when down selecting from different aircraft?

They have internet in the IAF it would have not been too difficult to rank the aircraft by cost and include that attribute in what ever decision matrix they had.

Well lets see what happens, for me they missed a chance working with SAAB to guide them to build a Gripen NG suitable for the IAF needs.

a couple of things:

– why IAF doesn’t consider cost? because their job was to asses what platforms are suitable for their need from the capabilities PoV, nothing else

– you can be certain they have sources of information that surpass googling by orders of magnitude in every aspect

– gripen is suitable for their needs in saabs view (obviously) and some fans as well. IAF who reviewed saabs offer says otherwise

at the pace of the F-35 development and all the “new finds” we hear aabout here and there,, maybe 10-15 years is what you’d need for the Block1/Tranche1 to arrive… you never know these days.

Would be funny though, if USN started looking the Rafale way for SH replacement, even if just to make some noise, nothing more… guys over at LM would love it :diablo:

well, it’s easy to say: these two are out because of cost… as he others weren’t good enough (they tested them) they are out as well.

If tejas was anywhere near in the capabilities, they wouldn’t have been spending so much time for MMRCA.

sensor suite is irrelevant, as you can always put most if not all of global hawks stuff into the U2 airframe

as for losses to defences, well, no aircraft is invulnerable, and it all comes to how you operate them. try to overfly russia (or any other country having access to the most modern SAM types) with a global hawk (or any other type doing the same job, and you’ll see it go over it, but won’t see it come back (unless you have something going @ Mach5-6 and at altitudes that no aircraft today officially uses… ahem… :rolleyes: )

er, I wouldn’t bet on that, if an aircraft has been declared unsuitable (unlike the IL-76 tankers which were suitable, but just “lesser performers”), the CaG can hardly overturn military trials results to buy what they said didn’t fit their needs

thing is, they do need to have total mobility of their head to be able to look around at will, as said before.

what’s more, the lateral accelereation isn’t that strong anyway… in any case, way less than for a formula 1 racer for instance which has to turn “flat”.

You have aerobatics pilots whose aircraft have even higher roll rates and none I know (and I know a couple) has particular neck problems because of that.