“with 125000 hours clocked” it still hasn’t even ended its initial development, had one aircraft lost due to engine fire (Rafale lost 4 aircraft due to human error, not one for a technical problem), was grounded and then flight envelope reduced for months because of engine overheating (from memory, engine used to bend too much for the tolerances applied). Is it the worse aircraft in history? no, far from that, is it the marvel some want us to believe it is? I have my doubts… in any case, what I (or you for that matter) think about it won’t change a single thing anyway 😉

I don’t put the blame on the F404, I already said it was a proven design at the time. Anyway, we’re turning around the point: if the official data say they had to shut down one engine in midflight over 200 times in a 24 year period that shows one thing that pretty much anybody at least a little honest would have admitted by now: engines are not perfect. they do have issues, sometimes minor, other times more serious.. pretending that having more than one is useless (pretty much the argument of those claiming that “Canada doesn’t need a twin” just because their pet plane has only one) is denying reality.

How many pilots and planes they’ll loose if the opt for a single engine? only time will tell… but for those who will get killed and their families because of troubles that a multi engine aircraft could spare them, it will not be much of a consolation to hear “yeah, but it was a reliable engine…”

30 years old, but the engines use the same basic technology.. more refined, but also more complex and with more strain on the elements… the F-135 is a brand new one, and it still has to prove its reliability (and until now, there were several moments where that reliability was somewhat questioned.. only time will tell how well they worked on it to correct what was not working as expected) while the F404s of these Hornets were already a proven and quite reliable design overall between 1990 and 2010 .

As for the reason, the precise one isn’t listed for every occurrence, but all are regrouped in “for safety reasons”.. they, obviously, did not shut them down for fun.. it can mean a birdstrike, starting fire, oil leak (oil pressure down), and so on.. it can be anything.. the only thing that is certain is that it was considered sufficiently serious (dangerous) to consider it to be safer to shut the engine down. In a single engine fighter, such occurrence leaves no choice, either you shut it down, and eject, or you don’t shut it down… and you face the consequences you considered more dangerous than shutting it down when you were in a twin

er, from the examples you give, Sweden and Norway are a lot smaller (long but narrow), meaning they are always in relative vicinity to an airbase, they are literally dwarfed by the size of canadian territory up north. Japan is much smaller as well (same thing) and also much further from the arctic circle definitely not having the same conditions and, what’s more, they do operate twin engine fighters as well (F-15), which allows them to modulate depending on their priorities… and, what’s more, their next gen fighter they want to develop is also a twin engine one, if I’m not mistaken. For the USA, a comparable territory would be Alaska where operational missions are performed by F-15s and F-22s… twins. Other countries close to the arctic circle are Finland (operates F-18s – twin engines) and Russia (all fighters developed for long range over Siberia for a number of decades by now are twin engine fighters with no exception).

US Navy will opperate the F-35C.. yes, but if you look at it, it was shoved down their throat without asking them about it and they do whatever they can to reduce its introduction, retaining the F/A-18E/F as much as possible and looking for their next platform which, incidentally, will be a twin engine one (again)

Australia… Hum, yes, however, there has been a lot of criticism about the acquisition process by the politicians and, from what I remember, it wasn’t good for your career to disagree with it

About the statistics.. yes, engines became much more reliable than they used to be 50 years ago (as one would expect them to be), but again, unless you can guarantee a perfectly reliable engine (meaning one that will absolutely never fail), whic nobody can, two are safer than one… the only question is, how much do you value the life of the guy (or girl) inside and what odds you are willing to accept to risk wasting it.

Now, about the start of this (once more repeated discussion): the question was “how would Canada fight the commercial war”, and some have suggested that they should ask for some details that they believe the USA would refuse.. I merely suggested a more “reliable” solution to exclude the F-35 which is to ask for a twin engine fighter.. by design, it would exclude the F-35 without the risk of the vendor eventually saying “ok, we accept these conditions”..

exchanging ideas, yes, but on this very subject, I’m not speaking about “my” ideas… I simply state what one’s being taught whenever he learns to fly, and why there is redundancy in everything critical in an aircraft.

For some parts, you can make them failsafe, meaning, you build them in a way that they can’t and won’t brake unless you destroy the aircraft… possible for parts like wing spars and other structural components.. an example of that principle pushed to the extreme is the DC-3 that had lots of parts made with that principle, and that’s why you can still see a number of them flying today, many in countries and conditions where you’d expect them to just rot on the ground… but the problem is that you can’t do it for everything as the aircraft would be too heavy.. and then, there is complexity of some parts that brings the increased possibility to malfunction, even without breaking. Computers can crash, engines can malfunction, and so on… for that, you use redundancy, so that in case of a malfunction of a given part of the aircraft, your spare takes over and allow you to get back on the ground in one piece

At first, when regulations have been standardized, for flights over oceans, the liners used 4 engines, three eventually, but never 2, as the flight on one engine was considered insufficiently safe to allow flights far from alternate airports. Then, as engines reliability and power increased, new regulations have been made, the ETOPS was born:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS

from there on, twin engined aircraft could fly over oceans and hostile areas for as long as they remained inside reach of an alternate airport in a given lapse of time (first 90 minutes, then 120,, then it was extended to 180.. the 3 or 4 engined aircraft never had that limitation and could (and can today) cross the oceans in all directions regardless of the distance to the closest alternate airport.. they are considered sufficiently safe for long flights with one engine dead

Don’t worry, I understand perfectly what the loss of one engine means.. and that’s exactly why redundancy is there.. to have more than one to rely upon. Why do you think, there are no single engine airliners? Because they can fail.. and if they do, having more than one is your best chance to survive. The A380 engine broke… and it is one of the latest and most modern engines around (made by GE/P&W alliance) … showing, if need be, that there’s no such thing as “a failsafe engine”. The aircraft and the people onboard are still in one piece only because there were other engines that kept running to have it fly to the diversion airport (for them, it was about 700nm flight from Groenland to Goose Bay)

no need to ask for complicated stuff like source code, just ask for a twin engine aircraft for safety reasons (which, btw would be pure logic, considering you operate over hostile territory up north a lot) and the F-35 is out of the game

others don’t seem to bother a lot about it being too obvious that they decided before even making the competition.. Belgium, for example, seems to have copy-pasted parts of F-35 brochure for its RFP, so much that Boeing, Saab and Dassault didn’t even bother to reply to that masquerade