India's First Stealth Fighter To Fly In 4 Months

xmpcray writes "Less than four months from now, India's first stealth fighter will fly for the first time. It is called the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft, or FGFA, and is being developed in Russia by Sukhoi. Several of the technologies being developed for the stealth fighter have evolved from those used in the Sukhoi 30 MKI. Considered the most maneuverable fighter in the world, the Sukhoi 30 MKI uses thrust vectored engines, which deflect the exhaust from its engines to extreme angles, enabling the jet to pull off violent maneuvers like a flat spin — where the jet literally spins around on its axis."

Comments

Interesting stuff

[stoolpigeon]

The end of last year, a couple videos came out with an American F-15 pilot talking about what it was like going up against the Indian Air Force Su-30MKI. It was quite interesting, as the vectored thrust did offer additional maneuverability but it came at a cost. That isn't to say that this new jet and training wont overcome that advantage, but it was a glimpse into the world of air to air combat I don't think makes it out into the civilian world all that often. The clips were put up on youtube - I'll link to both.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKEa-R37PeU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ibgAQ7lv0w
Basically if I understand it correctly the vectored thrust allowed them to turn, but they would lose airspeed and altitude in the process. As the fighter types say - speed is life - and once it happened they were apparently easy pickings. This FlightGlobal writeup about it may do a better job of explaining.

But I wonder is how much longer this will matter. The Lockheed video on their DAS for the F-35 pretty much asserts that the system makes maneuverability irrelevant. I realize that it's a vendor sales presentation, but at the same time I know off-bore-sight missiles are pretty much a done deal. Stealthiness helps some, but I doubt it would be enough as these systems keep improving. It seems soon the primary factor in air to air combat will be the quality of radar and missiles that are available.
 
When I bring this up with current military folks, they say they think rules of engagement will keep it from going that far. I can see that in situations where one side has complete air superiority - but if it comes to evenly matched sides, I think ROE will be out the window when sticking to it means losing. The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.

Re:Interesting stuff

[smash]

I remember a quote from somewhere (think it may have been one of the falcon manuals) that went something along the lines of "after 2 days, all your smart weapons are expended, and you'll have to fall back to basics" (paraphrased).

Put it this way, despite the might of the US military, they still haven't found/dealt with some arab dude by the name of Obama living in a cave. Advanced weaponry is not the be all and end all of combat. Another example is Vietnam - the ROE simply did not permit the more advanced hardware to be fully utilized due to BS political reasons (i.e. air-air required visual ID, thus totally negating the USAF's BVR missiles and forcing pilots into close range dogfights to which the MiGs were generally better suited)

Re:Interesting stuff

[hairyfeet]

Actually while both the F-35 and the Su-30 are impressive, i think the next big air battle will be fought with one or maybe even both sides using UAVs. Pilots are hard to train, and they are expensive too. Much better to lose an unmanned than to risk the millions of dollars we have invested in the pilot. Plus you have to figure in the psychological of the UAV, which really shouldn't be underestimated. After all, you can shoot them down all damned day long, and like the terminator we can just keep them rolling off the assembly line and straight into your airspace. Eventually they WILL get you.

Finally we seem to be getting to the point of diminishing returns with manned aircraft. There are only so many G-forces a human can withstand, whereas the UAV can survive maneuvers that would kill any human being. And of course there is no risk of having a UAV pilot getting put on a propaganda video with a gun to his head if the UAV gets shot down. So when you figure together the lower price, removing the risk of pilot injury and death, and the ability of the UAV to withstand stresses the human piloted vehicles can't it just makes sense to go with the UAV. Sure there will always be a place for human piloted vehicles, but it just makes more sense to leave the really nasty, super high risk jobs to the robot. As the solider explaining the Fire Scout UAV on an episode of Lock And Load described it the three D's-dull, dirty, and dangerous, are what the UAVs like the scout and Predator excel at.

Re:Interesting stuff

[Runaway1956]

I suspect that you might draw to many conclusions from your game playing - but you certainly make one very good point. Television and movies are total bullshit. There have been precious few movies that portrayed the use of cover and concealment in a combat situation. The heroes always strut around the battlefield like a bunch of banty roosters, the enemy can't hit the heroes with anything, and the heroes can't miss the most difficult shot. Oh yeah, no one ever runs out of ammo either - each soldier must have a pickup truck keeping up with him to shoot up as much ammo as our heroes do.

Anyway - addressing the more important part of your post: I think there will always be manned fighter and attack craft, for the same reasons that there will always be grunts on the ground. The machines and the technology are cool, but they can't occupy a territory, they can't impose their will on the occupants of a territory, and in fact, they lack any will to be imposed.

No matter how advanced warfare gets, the grunts, the sailors, and the pilots will still be out there.

Re:Interesting stuff

[Mashiki]

I remember my old history teacher saying "Old technology becomes obsolete, until someone figures out a better way to kill with it."

Yeah he was right, sure the battleship is obsolete now because of what it was designed for at the time. Surface, and fleet engagement. You can knock a billion dollar ship out of the water with a $400k missile. That doesn't make surface fleets obsolete either. I figure oh 10 years, and you'll see the reintroduction of battleships in long-range bombardment and support. As the use of missiles will become obsolete from surface ships. Easier to shoot down a missile with a laser, than it is to shoot down a metal slug traveling 50x the speed of sound hurtled by a battleship's railgun.

Re:Saw it Coming

[phayes]

Every time stealth comes up noobs who imperfectly understand the technology & its implications cry out: Multi-path radar renders stealth useless. No, it does not. The only multi-path radars out there like the Australian Over The Horizon radar all use wavelengths too long to be usable as a SAM target radar. While you may be able to detect a stealth airplane using multi-path, you can't use it to shoot at it & a F22/25 will be able to shoot down all non-stealth aircraft sent up against it.

Stealthy?

[1zenerdiode]

Am I the only one that looked at the thing and thought "it doesn't look very stealthy." No, I'm not talking about the paint. Just the fact that the intakes and some other features look like they are going to be big scatterers and contribute significantly to RCS. My understanding is that vectored thrust also has a significant thermal and radar signature... This sort of seems like Russia trying maintain prestige and credibility against F-22 with someone else conveniently picking up a big chunk of the tab. Then again, India is probably buying them to neutralize Pakastani F-16's, so it may be worth the investment in their minds. I'd have a hard time believing that these would give even F-15E's or Super Hornets a tough time.

Long term

[ShooterNeo]

Long term, are manned aircraft going to be still used for air superiority?

Cost effectiveness might be a key factor. Drone aircraft don't need to be manufactured to fly for years and thousands of missions. They could be made just good enough to survive 10 to 100 or so sorties, with a 10% failure rate considered acceptable for the first mission. Drone operators could train using simulators and a small number of better quality drone aircraft. For the missions needing drones to loiter over an area for a prolonged period, a different model of drone would be used - you don't need high speed jet interceptors if the enemy has no aircraft left. Also, drones wouldn't need to have the dogfighting performance of an F-35. They could be slower and less maneueverable - but packed with missiles and with a radar system capable of defeating stealth aircraft.

Drone aircraft wouldn't need to be "recalled" or inspected. If a fault is found that might cause a crash, no point in fixing it unless the problem is severe. You could manufacture thousands of them and leave them stored in special packing canisters. Unpack a few every few years and use them testing them to get empirical measurements of average 'shelf life'.

I think that with these and other cost saving measures, you could probably manufacture 3 to 5 drone aircraft for the cost of one manned aircraft with similar capabilities. The MQ-9 Reaper is about 1/3 the cost of the Apache helicopter it supplants. As long as you could guarantee that the drones would always work despite enemy jamming (possible with mesh networking, phase array communication antenna and one time pad encryption, I think) then they would be the only game in town.

Re:Saw it Coming

[definate]

I'm not so sure about the Australian Over THe Horizon radar being unable to be used by SAM's for targeting.

My uncle used to be SAM commander (or whatever it's called) and he said there were plenty of times when they would lock on and fire at aircraft way over the horizon, when engaging in war games with the US. This was despite AWACS and similar.

Though he did say that most of these were with active radar, however when they (the US) started running stealth fighters in the games, they weren't able to track them. However, almost straight away all of the SAM sites were quickly sent down to the DSTO for upgrades, and each one came back with a special little switch which they would flick when ever certain conditions were met. He surmised that this allowed them to track and lock on aircraft using stealth technology using the OTH system.

They get taught about every single switch, how it works and what it does, so that they can fully understand the system, and ensure that it operates no matter what, or can recognize when somethings wrong. However, when this new switch was installed, it was kept quiet, they weren't told anything but "When this happens. Flick this.", and so they did, and from then on it was able to track and lock on any of these stealth fighters.

I could have my information wrong, but it sounds valid to me. I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows any details or has any other information on this system.

Argenties are bad pilots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which only worked because the Argentinians weren't very good. Against a proper adversary, slamming on the brakes in a fight is an extremely bad idea and will get you killed rapidly. As they say, speed is life. It doesn't really help all that much to be behind the other guy when he has a couple hundred knots on you and is zooming away.

That's an outrageous claim. The Argentineans were not bad pilots in fact considering their equipment and the ineptitude of some of their leaders they gave the Royal Navy a proper spanking. The Argentines would not have succeeded in inflicting such heavy losses on the Royal Navy if they were bad pilots. The British were plan lucky they didn't loose any carriers. These guys were flying from bases on mainland Argentina to the Falklands which was at the very limit's of their range. The Argentine strikers were laden down with bombs, they had no effective ECM assets and very few air to surface missiles which meant they had to go in with dumb bombs and that made them fairly easy meat for SAMs. Since they didn't have any escorts either they also suffered heavily at the hands of the Harriers. Any attempt by the Argentines to operate fighters over the islands failed because once they got there the supersonic Mirage couldn't use the considerable speed and power advantages it had over the subsonic Harriers (read: the Harrier had no afterburners and the Mirages couldn't use theirs) because if they had done that the MIrages would have run out of fuel before getting home. Effectively the Argentinean Mirage pilots had 10 minutes max over target area before they had to return to base. All of this gave the more maneuverable Harrier a huge advantage. If the junta had actually had the brains to land heavy construction equipment along with the initial invasion forces and extended the Port Stanley runway ASAP (which foreign observers considered to be the obvious thing to do) the boot would have been on the other foot since it would have allowed for the forward deployment a portion the sizable fleet of Argentine AF Mirage fighters to the Falklands and they would have had no performance or patrol time restrictions. It has been argued that extending the runway would have been impossible because of local conditions. However, the British extended the Port Stanley runway after the war to allow F-4 operations out of Port Stanley so that argument is BS.

Re:Dangerous Thinking

[Moofie]

Let me be a little more verbose. If by "reasonably equipped enemy" you mean "enemy that a) has nuclear weapons and b) has a delivery system that can reliably penetrate the Aegis air defenses", I think there are very few "reasonably equipped enemies" to worry about.

Let me put this another way: The people who actually think about carrier deployment for a living have probably at least a passing familiarity with the notion of weapons that might go boom near carriers, and some rudimentary notions about how to prevent such a scenario.

Re:5th Gen

[Wizard Drongo]

Actually, the EFA is probably close to the F22. We'll never know for sure because EFA was a clusterfuck of bad project management, so most of the cooler options have been nixed/mothballed.... And the USA *did* offer the F22 to the RAF, but because of EFA they had to turn it down. I happen to know this for fact, it might not have been high on the public radar, but I spent some down time listening to an RAF fighter pilot who got to fly the F22 on an exchange program setup with the possibility of the British buying some F22's. He was most displeased some dickhead suit in London caused it to fall through. Apparently the USAF were quite looking forward to getting the RAF to take up some slack in Afghanistan etc. with deployment in ~2012 of a few squadrons of F22, but thanks to said nameless suits who have too much tied up in EFA, no go. Pity really, 'cause sure the EFA is a good fighter, and may not even be too bad at Ground Attack, but to have the RAF and USAF both operating the same airframe again would be very helpful. Since the UK's military budget is pretty huge and a lot seems to go on research into shit that never happens, if they changed their priorities, they could licence some US tech, maybe even option to build it in the UK thus saving the political face & jobs, then take the research budget down a few notches and have 5 or 6 more squadrons of fighters, or a few aircraft carriers again....... Dreams are nice, but it'll never happen though...