most of all, waverider is a cruise missile, and the meteor is a A2A missile… not much relation between them…

considering these “performance claims”, I guess we’ll still be here arguing for years.. until some F-35’s finally come to their units and (some time later again) they start facing other aircraft.. then we’ll have a clearer picture of what they can or can’t do.

thing is, even LM’s aim was, they admitted, to match F-16’s performance, not get better.. and for a strike aircraft (which it is, even if some politicians/airforces believe they buy an “all rounder” ) it’s not bad.

Now, believing it will outperform fighters built with agility in mind, well, sorry, I don’t buy it… it has a powerful engine, but it’s also very heavy… put that engine in an f-16 and you’ll get fabulous performance. put it in a 30000lbs aircraft and you get a good flying brick, not unlike the f-105 or the F-4 at its time. Good striker but not a dogfighter

That is called a “soft-kill” by the smart use of air-power by the NATO. By cold logic the Serbian forces gave the wrong impression to the own people and leadership they had a military option at all. Wrong bravery and stupid behavior the sad results from that in mind.

actually, many people I know had the mindset “let them come on the ground” about NATO… and when milosevic lost elections a little later, it’s is not impossible that his decision to stop was related (at least partly) to his loss.

what’s more, I doubt he didn’t know how his forces were doing… he most certainly had a pretty good idea of their status.
anyway, it’s past, and the discussion here is about their future equipment, no? 😉

trade sanctions against US goods? that’s the key… put 10000% tax on the gripen’s engine (US product) and it’s suddenly the costliest proposal for the FAB 😀

it’s another story… and it’s obviously peanuts compared to what the US taxpayer would have spared/gained through a real competition… in such a big deal as the KC-X market

anyway, each year, airbus takes a little more market shares from boeing… the USA could have had a bigger part of that through A330 assembly line on US soil, instead of what, they’ll just keep a line that was supposed to close for lack of orders with lesser production of an older airframe

it’s great news for boeing, that’s certain…

er, not to be picky but the definition of “supersonic” is “faster than sound”, which means >Mach 1. Since 1.2>1, anything going at mach 1.2 is, by definition, supesonic

Serbia will not be able to develop anything more advanced than the Lasta within the next 20 years or so. What they can dream of, at the most is a squadron or two of decent second hand jets. Such as Mig 29s, Gripens or F-16s. That they would start developing their own fighters are pure fantasies.

it’s not about “starting to develop”.. they started before, it would be “taking over” the studies that were done previously and they wouldn’t be alone in that area since the french were involved already at the time.

If you simply look at that airframe you can see the commonality with the rafale… there were yugoslav engineers and french ones working together on it… if there was the will, they’d be able to produce that thing, and it wouldn’t cost as much as a complete development of a new aircraft, and could probably be done in a matter of 4-5 years, since it would use “off the shelf” equipments already developed for the rafale as well as initial studies from before wars in the balkans