And as far as AWACS stuff goes, you shouldn’t put so much faith in it… during NATO attack on Serbia, serbian Mig-21 fighters (by far outdated at the time) flew low altitude CAS missions despite 24h AWACS coverage and constant presence of NATO fighters in their airspace.

I imagine the reason for that, if true, was that NATO aircraft didn’t want to go to low altitude to deal with them because of the aforementioned dangers and radars/missiles perhaps lacked ability in the ’90s.

What’s the range of an MICA or even a Meteor at 100-150ft AGL? Keep in mind the AWACS might be passing off the tracking data to his ally sitting radar silent at 40,000 ft within missile range of your aircraft. All while your situational awareness is grossly limited as a result of the horizon blocking off the radar, OSF as well as the pilot’s vision.

To give an idea as to the range of the MICA at 100ft, the range and ceiling of a MICA VL is 20km and 30,000ft respectively, so an aircraft at 40,000ft is pretty much safe from MICA in that situation.

http://www.mbda-systems.com/mediagallery/files/vl-mica_datasheet-1424430131.pdf

another fisherman promissing? 😀

In this case the fisherman have been at work for >15 years and have a physical item in place that’s currently being integrated. The Rafale conformal radar by comparison, doesn’t physically exist and no one has any clue when it will even exist as a prototype of any description.

no date for sure… but one indication: they have started already to study it, and the support to go on if it’s interesting to go that way is already there… on the typhoon side, you have no date on which you may expect to just reach similar capability to what the Rafale does today (count somewhere in the middle of next decade) and from there on, you may eventually look at what you may do as improvements with conformal arrays (with more than 10 years delay over the french), if you’ll get some support to do so (not sure and even if you get one, it’ll take another few years just to get partners to agree upon it)… face it, with the decisional structure (4 so-called partner nations) and flawed initial goals (emphasis over interceptor role rather than real full multirole aircraft from the beginning) condemned the Typhoon to spend pretty much its lifetime just trying to equal its closest rival

And even a pro-Rafale blog says it’ll take 10 years and Euro1bn of funding.

Dates on Captor-E phased integration already given above at least twice. Now when discussing Rafale conformal radar you should bear in mind that Typhoon AESA development started >15 years before the first planned introduction phase. So right now, Rafale conformal radar is roughly where Typhoon AESA was in the year 2000.

Frankly I’m not too interested in Typhoon development post-2030 because both it and the Rafale will be technologically superceded by then but from 2017-2030 the Typhoon will be comfortably smashing the Rafale and that’s far more relevant to present day discussions.

You sound an awful like you’ll bash the Rafale regardless what’s presented to you…

in 1991 what was dangerous was manual terrain following (happend here and there that pilot flew the aircraft into the ground) and, most of all, multiple passes right over the same heavily defended target.

Rafale: automated terrain following adresses the first one, and stand off PGM’s adress the second one.

Other questions?

Not so, most of the aircraft lost to ground defences were flying at low level. At low level you get targeted by missiles with passive homing and therefore receive no warning until post launch, which is usually at very close range, giving you little time to do anything about it. At high altitude, you get a radar warning, the ground radar can be targeted and the missile and operator have to do an awful lot of work to get to you and AASMs are limited to just 15km at low level.

won’t discuss the precise abilities of this or that suite, it was a response to the SU-27 sneaking unseen and shooting down Rafales who were happy flying around without looking anywhere… soon he’ll explain to us that they’ll be bounced by a flight of Bf-109s out of the sun doing B&Z on them unseen, as they have no radar…

Worst case scenario, it could happen. I’m not saying how well the Rafale would hold its own in a fair fight against an Su-27/35 because I’ve no idea. But the ability of an Su-35 to sneak up passive using just ground radar for awareness, or getting lucky, is possible.

Even if you detected an active emission, it would no longer be an OTS shot because any pilot with a brain would turn to face the enemy, which is why this example is null and void in so many different ways. Assuming a plane got to 7.8nm (or even 10 or 20nm) without an active emission allowing it to be noticed, it could then detect and target the Rafale without an active emission. If it gave an active emission previously, then the Rafale pilot would have turned to face it anyway. It’s just such a nonsense example.

All those numbers are necessarily approximate, as they will vary depending on plenty of conditions even for the same airframe. A simple way to check it even without approaching a fighter is to go to a flying club and make a flight with any cessna or similar. one in the morning with cool air, the other in the afternoon under a good hot sunshine… you’ll notice your climb rates are nowhere near those you achieved in the morning.. and that’s just one parameter that can affect measurements

in any case, while approximate, these numbers still give a general idea, as there’s no reason for them to give particular advantage to one airframe over another

You wish.

This is painful.
1) What 2030 scenario have I presented. You are having arguments with yourself in your head if you think I’ve presented any such thing.
2) Do you know what the word conformal means?
3) Clearly you don’t, as radome size has to do nothing to do with conformal arrays!

Yes it does, because the randome would still be the centre piece of any conformal array and the physical structure of the aircraft would block FoV for radar emissions coming from the cheeks, except for near dead-ahead. Still a pie in the sky 2030, aircraft defunct anyway, kind of scenario.

Alright after deliberating with myself I have come to the conclusion that we should get rid of the lukos bickering & Rafale-envy. I have decided to use the nastiest means and I am determined to program a bug in his matrix:

So, lukos, which is better the EF or the F35?

Nic

F-35, 15 years newer, it should be better and is. The RAF would hardly be getting them if it wasn’t.