PARIS, April 15 (Reuters) – France has not signed a deal to sell Rafale combat jets to Saudi Arabia, a diplomatic source said on Friday, dismissing a newspaper report.

French business daily Les Echos had reported Saudi Arabia had agreed to become the Rafale’s first export customer, boosting investors’ hopes that France would break into a strategic market dominated by Britain and the United States with an order worth 6 billion euros ($7.7 billion).

The paper said France and Saudi Arabia had signed a memorandum of understanding covering 48 multi-role Rafales, with an option for 48 more, during a two-day visit to France this week by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz.

But the diplomatic source denied this.

“Questions of bilateral defence cooperation were raised (between Chirac and Crown Prince Abdullah), but there was no signature during the discussions,” the diplomatic source said, asking not to be identified.

The French government declined official comment, and planemaker Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) , which builds the Rafale, said it would neither confirm nor deny the newspaper report.

Dassault’s thinly traded shares rose as much as 4 percent on the report to 525 euros before shedding most of their gains.

“I suspect there will be some sort of deal, likely for Rafale, but the level of surprise in France over this suggests it may not be as firm as it might appear,” said Francis Tusa, the editor of industry newsletter Defence Analysis. He said a deal might pose a threat to long-running British ties to Saudi Arabia in defence, including lucrative upgrade work that BAE Systems (BA.L: Quote, Profile, Research) has hoped to win on Saudi Arabia’s Tornado fighter jets.

Saudi military forces current fly four types of fighter, including two variants of the Tornado. One question is which of these four would the Rafale replace.

France, which has been negotiating for 15 years to sell border security equipment to Saudi Arabia, has so far been cautious about prospects of a quick sale of the Rafale.

Commenting on the prospects for a deal with the Saudis, Jean-Francois Bureau, the spokesman for France’s defence ministry, told reporters at a weekly briefing on Thursday:

“It’s a discussion process that started a long time ago. I do not have the impression that we are in a final phase, and if it were the case, it would be up to the Saudi authorities to announce it.”

But the Saudi’s may buy Rafale’s, If they do, it will give much needed credability to the program.

Good luck!.

Cheers

It was certainly more involved than I’d ever imagine, try getting the list of aircraft and getting a concensus of capability on any one of them!!, near impossible!.

If you were to list all the AtoG weapons for just the Typhoon and Rafale, then look at the published data on SAR resolution, targetting IR systems, etc etc, you soon realise theres only sketchy details on both, might be an interesting exercise for this thread!!!

Typhoon ——- Rafale
Brimstone ——— ?
Storm Shadow —Scalp
Pirate ———– OSF
Paveway x——— ?

Then start to try to compare the individual systems, it get complicated real quick, I personally didn’t think they were too far apart!!.

if you find that little exercise too easy add all the other aircraft :-).

Happy April 1st to all

Cheers

Hows it scored??, thats easy just put 100% in one box and compute, and this will give you the weighting for each aircraft.

And did you know that if you add a few letters and take a few letters away from ‘Hamburger’ is a perfect anagram of ‘Greasy bun’ 🙂 .

have fun…

Cheers

PS the weighting for the rafale and typhoon aircraft in AtoG was looked at from the weapons that are to be intergrated, storm shadow/apache/ brimstone etc, and their relative capabilities, the rafale is AtoG optomised, but doesnt have a brimstone counterpart, etc etc etc, as it says…

“the method of defining each aircrafts capability for a given criteria is purely empirical, being manually estimated from available data, reports and other factors. We bear no responsbility should a national airforce use this application to select their fighter aircraft!”

“However, this requires all hardpoints to be loaded to their theoretical maximum bearing load- utterly unrealistic.”

Hmmmm. I was wondering what was up!!!, so what is the real heaviest load??.

Cheers

“Less flexable in what way?, it could be just the number of weapons due to be cleared on each airframe there refering to!!.”
Hi JW, the undercarriage folds inward and restricts the length of the stores that can be loaded onto the outboard shoulder hardpoints. Rafale can carry more than the Typhoon and has demonstrated heavy carriage- and I mean heavy carriage- in conditions that likely customers would find themselves in- to wit: without the squillions of support planes that the Americans can avail themselves of.
Without being patronising, I didn’t mean to trash the Typhoon per se, but the (mis)information put out into the public domain by Typhoon Inc. and some aviation journalist and authors (who are old enough to know better) has in the past fairly rattled my cage :dev2:

The Typhoon is going to be just fine (it’s just going to take a while), but I never cease to be amazed by the assumption, expressed by many, that somehow the Rafale is inferior to most everything else out there (probably because it’s French). Typhoon will be a little better (theoretically) than Rafale in the dogfight (this assumes that Typhoon Inc. get the FCS to work properly), but Rafale is going to be a lot better than Typhoon in air-to-mud.
Right now, only Dassault can deliver the goods.
Aahh, Dassault 🙂

I’ve wondered about the length of the Storm shadow on the Typhoons inner pylons, the front of the missile would be quite far forward, near the canards, not impossible, but awkward looking.

So I’m keen to see an actual photo of the fit rather than diagrams showing them on the inner pylons, so I’m looking forward to a Typhoon ‘heavy’ photo.

I don’t see the rafale as inferior…. just not as good!!! 😀

As for the FCS problems, what are they, AFAIK there are no real problems now!!.

There were previous problems with roll racheting but that was fixed quite a while back, there was a FCS/wing fuel distribution load problem with the first single seaters, so only dual seaters were made in the first batch, until the modified wings were produced…

As for journalists they do sometimes get muking fuddled!!!, What exactly rattled your cage?

Oh and Glitter, the costs seem to be all over the place WRT Tyhoon and Rafale, What are the figures your working from…?

Cheers

Joust emulates the fighters in software, and real pilots ‘fly’ the emissions, the data used is from real world tests and evaluations, where that is not available then best guess estimates are used, several fighters modelled in the Joust simulations were never manufactured, and some had much reduced capability when they were finally fielded.

So yes I happen to agree with you that some of the assumtions may be wrong, but I would also like to point out the assumtions/estimates they make are from a much more ‘educated’ veiwpoint, these experts are ‘in the trade’ and their estimates are often very accurate for given systems.

And yes it also the worst, but as I said until theres a better one it will have to suffice.

Cheers

Those figures were from the DERA test, If you can provide any credable sources that disagree with these figures then I’d be interested.

You can argue the merits of the DERA evaluation, but in the absence of any other BVR combat comparisons carried out by a competant agency, they should stand.

One of the ‘differences’ in the DERA evaluation was the Rafale used Mica while the Typhoon used AMRAAM.

Do you have any sources which I might find interesting?

As for radars, there is a publication called ‘fox three’ which details the Rafales new radar, see http://new.isoshop.com/dae/dae/gauche/sponsors/sponsor_rafale/img/fox3_7.pdf
and search for AMSAR too.

Cheers