I believe it’s more like a super modified MiG-21. The wing of the JF-17 is strikingly similar to that of the MiG-21. The ailerons and flaps are pretty much identical. Like the MiG-21 the JF-17 wing lacks wing twist. The inner chord has the same angle as the wingtip.

I’m not surprised to see a Typhoon getting “killed” by a Rafale. I’m sure the Rafale has been “killed” by the Typhoon as well during exercises.

I’m more interested in the French fetish of taking HUD shots and posting them all over the internet.

Well the flight scenes are mostly CGI. And the black Hornet in the movie is definitely CGI.

Not, and by a long shot.

nice bits of apparently first hands reports 🙂 Do you know where I could read more of these (in English would be great :o) ? Reading the part regarding the comparison between the 2 planes performance would be awesome 🙂

Sorry, these are words from a friend of mine who’s a Gripen technician, he goes pretty much were the Gripen goes. He praised the Rafale for it’s power and beauty. And the Gripen pilots were having a tough(but fun) time at altitude against the Rafales. They said that they couldn’t shake the Rafale at high altitude. For the Gripen to be more competitive here the F414 is needed. Fitting it into the Gripen NG Demo proved to be rather uncomplicated, so in future we’ll see.

Rafale F2 clearly dominated the gripen a few years ago when thet came to Reims. In terms of situational awarness, sensor fusion and power (in the whole flight enveloppe an especially at high altitude) it was outclassed. The report was posted several times here.
A rafale pilot who flew in the gripen back seat compared the gripen to a smaler Mirage 2000-5mk2. They appriciated the gripen ease of use and low maintenance nevertheless.

There was no domination. However the Rafale proved to perform noticably better at high altitude(where the exercise was conducted) thanks to a much healthier thrust/weight ratio. The situtaion awarness of the Rafale is good but it’s not exceeding that of the Gripen. The armament for the Rafale at this time was better. No low or medium alt engagements took place between the Rafale’s and the Gripen’s at this point, so for the Gripen being outclassed is stretching it beyond breaking point.

The Swedish ground crew found it hillarious that the software for the Rafale cockpit displays were windows based, with the classic sky and grass field background during start up! One of the Rafale pilots swore loudly that one had to go three steps back in the menu just in order to change the radio frequency, and then go the three steps forward to continue were you left off.

Surely the Rafale is an outstanding machine, but most of the time the mouth of french aviators are much more outstanding.

Gripen NG XMLU. 😀

Saabs answer to the J-10B. No, not really. It’s just for fun folks!