teh only thing that the navy said in that article is that they would take only one engine for their fighter, to ease logistics..

they never said which one (at least not visible on this page)

er, just like that… if the US want an aircraft that can do a good job and share common airframe for naval and air versions, there’s country just on the other side of the ocean making one… 😀

ond one can only dream of what developments would be doable if rafale devs had even just a fraction of the budgets spent on the JSF 😉

P.S. not to say, if you order a couple of thousands of these, you’d certainly have it for a really very low price 😀

they’ll rethink it for about july, or august… or 2012…

The T-50 is a competitor to the F-22 -an air superiority aircraft, while the F-35 is an attack aircraft. It has a slightly larger RCS from the direct front but, from the sides it has a lower RCS than the F-22. A typical apples versus oranges debate.
The F-35 borrowed heavily upon the technology from the F-22 program. While it doesn’t have stealth through materials, it does use techniques the F-22 does not use to reduce the RCS. Things such as protecting the gap between the fuselage and access panels has wire embedded in the edge of the two sections to prevent the foreign radar signal from entering the gap and being reflected back to the point of signal origin. Other places where stealth can not be used like the F-22, the F-35 has wire grids, layers electrically charged (at different voltages) to prevent from penetrating the aircraft’s skin, reflecting off the insides of the aircraft, back out to the point of signal origin. The F-35 is tremendously different from the F-22 in philosophy of reduction of RF energy. Some parts of the F-35 are similar to parts of the B-2 in RF reduction techniques. The cost of maintenance of the F-35 is far less than that of the F-22. The cost of maintenance of the F-22 is less than the F-15! One reason so many countries are putting up with the crap associated with the F-35’s development is because its operational cost is so much less than other aircraft for the life of the program.

Janes Book of Aircraft (the big annual book) has some great articles on the F-35 aircraft and the program.

little correction, you should say:

“the operational costs is expected to be less”.. for now, the only thing certain is that the aircraft is late and costlier than expected… how much it will cost and how it will perform is just speculations for now, as it’s still in development stages

wasn’t there an interview posted a week or two ago where an enginner who was part of teh designers team explained thatthey tested all sorts of configurations for the future gripen and the actual canard layout came out as the best performing way to do it?

what’s more, you should come down to earth, kiwinopal. Any aircraft is a design that takes years of studies, coparative tests etc.. by people that are certainly more competent than any participant on this forum, and they choose their configuration in order to fulfill their objective, depending on the available knowhow.

Your posts since you arrived in this thread are simply said: “tail planes = better, period”… so one really has to wonder what were all auropean engineers thinking when they designed, all of them, canard equipped aircraft.

What’s even more funny, you state one way, and a little later exactly the opposite, like when you said that a delta (and a canard delta of course) are limited in STR because you need more power to maintain speed, and a couple of pages later you state that europeans wanted canard-deltas because they needed small airframes and had weak engines. So according to you, europeans must really be completely dumb, as they made exactly the type of aircraft that needed more powerful engines while they did not have them.

The easiest way to build an aircraft is to keep doing what you were doing before, and all european manufacturers were building conventional (tail planes) aircraft in the past… and little by little all switched to deltas.

SAAB and Dassault did so with the Draken (and Viggen, and now Gripen) and Mirage series (III, IV, 2000 and now Rafale), even Boeing started to make the X-32 as a delta aircraft, and only after they had trouble reaching weight target and sufficient levels in control and agility that, in the end, they decided to make it more “conventional”… a configuration they knew better (easier FCS programming etc…).

You mean those who pay and see what they get in return ignore what they have been paying & what they have been getting in return…

er, just to make sure I understand you correctly:

those who pay the bills don’t know how much they pay? is that what you’re saying?

I call it wishful thinking…

Test flights are done in a programmed fashion and each flight is required to fill certain blanks. they don’t just go up and do whatever they feel interesting.

as a test flight needs to be done with and data analyzed before the data that was wanted is considered valid, you can’t just jump to next batch of tests before you analyzed the previous one, so, cutting numbers to 1/3rd and believing that the same level of testing will be done is rather naive.

What’s more, that is valid when everything goes exactly as planned. if something doesn’t, you need to study why it didn’t work as expected and design a new way to reach your target, and then, go back to test it, which stretches a bit more your testing (and development budget, etc…)

Same for LM’s claim the numbers are too high. strangely, those who pay and see what they get in return have no clue how much they pay? It’s like guys overhere selling cars. they tell you you’ll spare 5000€ buying their new model (talking about various bonuses for retaking your old but perfectly functional car)… they somewhat forget to tell you you’ll actuallyl have to pay some 20000€ to have it… LM sells (or better, tries to sell) the F-35. The way things go (buyers starting to understand that it will cost them truckload of cash beyond what they expected) the last thing they need is to aknowledge they’ll charge 2 or 3 times the initially claimed price

If in Europe they have taken the Canard is mostly as a result of size constraign and the lack of real powerful engines.

strange, I was under the impression that you stated that a delta (no aft plane, basically) needed more powerful engines to be able to turn correctly.

and now you say that europeans went for canard/delta designs for the lack of powerful engines?

do you mean the europeans wanted to make aircraft that go well straight ahead only? 😀

besides, just out of curiosity, if the Typhoon is such a piece of crap (from aerodynamical PoV) can you explain to all of us why the engineers who built it made it that way? Did they build a POS on purpose? in over 20 years of development? while it was so simple to copy a design from the 60’s to make a better canard aircraft? no seriously… how about thinking for a second (not more should be necessary) before posting such nonsense?