I wonder how much attention Sukhoi will pay to appearances. Do they realise the potential for causing what will be, in essence, a national disgrace if they roll out an obviously hastily put together, hand built prototype a la Su-37/MiG 1.44?

I understand exactly what you’re saying and it makes perfect sense but unfortunatly after seeing how *people* raved about and continue to rave about the Su-47 and Mig-144 as the ultimate fighter I fell it’s to optimistic to hope the same won’t happen again.
Blind nationalism and fanboy’s wishfull thinking more than often trump common sense and rational thinking. Don’t expect this to be any different if the PAK-FA is a bodge job. I don’t realisticly expect it will be a failure though there is always a slim chance.

* (not on this site – or at least I don’t think so, mainly youtube)

I’d have to disagree with most of what you’ve written.

I’d have said it was a good use of resources to repair the damaged aircraft with the bits they had available, the only other options was to either lose the asset and be one down or to buy a new one at a far greater cost.
You use of the word ‘crashed’is also in the wrong context. Nothing had ‘crashed’ in regard to the chinook, it had a landing accident, and the part that was used wasn’t damaged or subject to undue stresses.
Saying you wouldn’t fly on an airliner made of from old bits of 2 aircraft just shows your lack of knowledge of aircraft engineering and the standards worked to. I’d also say you probably have already flown on an airliner made up from bits of another, one of which may have crashed!

Indeed you are spot on here, the article was utter nonsense and an unwarrented non-factual attack on our armed services. A pathetic farce of a news article (just like the “bike locks secure nukes” BS the BBC was hyping up a while back http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=75988&highlight=lock+nuclear

But the BBC did not write those lines??? They are quotes. Would you rather they applied censorship and did not report what was being said?

The point misses you totally. This was a non-story and the BBC chose to publish it, the angle of the story is that the MOD and RAF are letting our troops be killed which is false and a lie.
The story served one purpose and one purpose only; not to impartially inform the reader about helicopter shortages or percieved shortages but to attack our services and claim they are negligent.
This comes from the supposed ‘news’ organisation that willingly helped organise anti war rallies which themselves are far outside of its duties and a clear sign of the left leaning policies toward war so it is of no suprise to myself.
I guess people will claim the BBC are perfect and fair ,but you might be suprised to find they are nothing of the sort
http://www.ejpress.org/article/7205
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554833/BBC-report-finds-bias-within-corporation.html

Well I won’t harp on about this subject after this post but you BBC lovers need to read the article again and notice
Sentances such as

“If you gave them flip flops and catapults they’d still go out there and do the job for us, but we don’t support our men.”

But Mr Sadler said it was a “real scandal” and showed a lack of support for the troops fighting in Afghanistan.

“Mr Sadler’s son, a trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company, was killed when his non-armoured Land Rover hit a mine.”

“An admission that a “cut and shut” helicopter was used in Afghanistan has angered the father of a dead soldier.”

All of these sentances were left in the article for a reason and if you cannot figure that out I feel bad for you.
But the bigger question is why do the article at all? The BBC know very what they are printing and here they are guilty of printing antiwar propaganda with no factual basis, unless of course you believe the Guy they quoted to be a rellibale and informed source. I imagine you guys are going to try and claim this is fair coverage of the Afghan conflict when the reality is they have printed a pack of sensationalist lies.

What the BBC do need to do is start presenting the counter argument more fairly and stop sensationalising/making one side more prominent.

You’ll be lucky, the BBC is about as anti war as an organisation gets, they will use dead soldiers families as pawns in their game and do as little as possible to report good news from warzones that have UK troops deployed whilst overplaying all bad news.

I would like to share some stuff on the Su-25SM used in the Georgian Conflict August 2008.

The first batch of six Su-25SMs where delivered to the RuAF on December
28, 2006.

By the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia on Abkhazian territory in August 2008, the whole Su-25 Regiment had as many as six Su-25SMs
All these where used in the conflict.

Combat losses amounted to one comfirmed Su-25SM and three Su-25, at least two more Su-25SM suffered heavy damage, but made it back to their base.

So, the Su-25SMs force suffered a 20% loss rate and an overall 50% mission killed rate/out of the war tally.

I don’t think I need add futher comment.

Having air support is not all that much use unless you have situation awareness and know where your targets are and where your own troops are. unless you give the Airforce a free run to attack anything that moves or beeps and are willing to accept friendly fire incidents there is not much you can use it for.

A blue force tracker equivelent would have gotten around alot of that hassale. It is another case of Russia being slow of the mark and not having a system in place, most of the worlds armies would love a blue force tracker type system, few can afford it but Russia could with ease. I would imagine they have it as a top priority because without it you’re greatly limited.