What a load of garbage.

The RAF wants those aircraft, but isn’t being allowed to have the money to pay for keeping them. They’re not obsolete: they’d be perfectly good for many roles as they are, for quite a long time, & could save flight hours on the newer airframes. They’re not impossible to upgrade seriously – again, it’s money. Politicians refuse to pay for upgrading them to the same standard as later batches, or to fund the logistics chain to keep them operational without upgrades.

isn’t that the definition of obsolete (note i didn’t say inefficient)

How do you manufacture 2.4 planes per month? Sounds like you’d have four fifths of an aircraft left over at year end. You may want to check your own math.

Subcontractors for any aircraft program have their production processes geared for a certain rate of production. You can’t just blow a whistle one day and expect all 500 of them to immediately double or triple their output. Because that’s what it will take for the result to be seen in just two years. Then add in another year to actually assemble the aircraft. If all goes per plan, by 2018 the delivery rate will rise to between 15 and 20 units annually, and the IAF will receive its first units.

The F-35 program is building up to a production rate of nearly 250 aircraft per year in 2019 (20 per month). Matching Dassault is hardly a big challenge.

ATM it is no big challenge as Dassault build operational aircrafts…

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No comment

Reading Ajai Shukla about MMRCA is a nonsense. Je dot crazy about Dassault after he was denied a flight in a Rafale B

jaguar in cad and CAR in 1993. But not only jaguar, some nice surprises…

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10205222181252276

Try actually reading and understanding a post before commenting.

There was nothing nationalistic in what I said. All I said was that the F-15C/D can stay in service because the F-15C/D will not have to be the top fighter for the US throughout it’s whole lifetime.

Neither the Eurofighter nor Rafale have a replacement on the drawing boards at this time. No, UCAVs are not it either. They are barely in their infancy in an A2G role and even assuming they can compete in an A2A role in the next 10-15 years is wishful thinking.

Could you develop please? It would be quite interesting…

External support is very common even for a program that is much smaller in size and scope. I spent nearly a decade of my early career doing just that for defense and other government projects. Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have extensively used external contractors for many tasks on both the ATF and the JSF programs. I have a buddy who is working on the E-2D program at the moment and has been pretty much working with just one client over the last 3-4 years. His small outfit has about 12 employees.

Furthermore on the cost portion the program boss points to the SAR and a flatline in the RDT&E funding. You can see the report for this year in about 10-11 months and see if there is any significant change. If you need external help you have provisions for it as part of your budget. If the program needs half a dozen consultants or technical expertise, that does not necessarily translate to an increase in the RDTE levels. There is some wiggle room built in for Contingencies.

/mode troll on Ask Thalès and Dassault? /mode troll off