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Russian Stealth Fighter Makes Its First Flight
An anonymous reader writes "The long-awaited Russian stealth fighter, codenamed PAK FA or T-50, has had its first test flight today. This Google translation of a Russian article has a photo of the jet. Production is supposed to begin in 2015; the AP reports that India is helping with development. It's reportedly designed to compete with America's F-22 (first flight: 1997). Relatedly, according to Wikipedia, Japan is planning to fly its own stealth fighter, the ATD-X, which we have previously discussed, in 2011."
That changes the whole argument on the F-22 being killed now, doesn't it? We'll see calls coming out to restart F-22 production, but probably an F-22 B where some of the stealth stuff that drives up operational costs gets dropped in the interest of being just a good first line fighter.
This is my sig.
do you have to think in Russian to fly it?
Do they all just collide in midair?
to keep Russia bankrupt trying to catch up to it.
1. Come up with super tech military program
2. Fund it until it becomes too costly
3. Wait for the other guy to spin up to compete against it
4. Move the bar further out
considering the US Defense departments budget its an easy game to win. What they spend on one program is more than most can spend on many.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
(to get started:)
Man, I hope their firefox works better than mine.
They'd have finished it years ago if it wasn't for Gecko and XUL.
has a photo of the jet.
So not *that* stealthy then ? Of course, I guess if it was that good, the pilot would never be able to find where he parked the thing.
Operating a military force like Pen and Teller just sounds like shear idiocy.
Why? I think we can count on Teller to keep his mouth shut.
My country has also developed a stealth airplane. It's so stealthy nobody has seen it yet.
Or the tax money used to develop it....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
...or did someone fabricate this part of the Wikipedia article?
The Sukhoi PAK FA... NATO reporting name: Firefox
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed Martin/Boeing secretly funded Russia's stealth fighter project to justify restarting production on the F-22. That would be business as usual - gotta keep the wheels of the industrial military complex spinning.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
To paraphrase Dr. Strangelove: Yes, but the... whole point of the new technology... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
What good would it be to try to sell an airplane that no one knows about?
I live by the F-22 production plant and I want the project to start up because:
I like your enthusiasm for the F-22 restart - just a little correction. India's participation in developing this aircraft will imply a limitation on licensing, especially to perceived threats such as China. So it'll be interesting - here we have Russia returning to its Soviet - style grande aviation engineering but also India, the world's largest democracy and one of America's most important strategic ally in the region. Id think itd be naive for the US to think of it as a strategic threat. /\ \/
The global arms industry exists just as much because it is profitable, as it is being really necessary. It falls into the ludicrous unreal geez-loweez that's a lot of loot profits range. There's huge bucks/roubles/yen/renminbi/euros whatever in prepping for wars and fighting wars, any size.
It is not just any one nation's fault, in other words.
You would be naive to think a few of these fighters won't find their way into China and become reverse engineered.
The point of a doomsday device is to make people fear you. For that to happen, they need to know about it.
The point of a spy plane is to spy on people without them knowing you are, or even that you can. They don’t need to know about it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
THIS is how we make stealth car in India
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7eOVpBCtPo
For the sake of economizing, maybe the US will outsource and have the F-22 built in China.
The chronic problem of the West is using the logic they learned in their own countries when analyzing Russia. Russia was never good to its citizens, and it was hardly ever not on the brink of national bankruptcy. But that rarely stopped it from making new weapons... that were largely more robust, if less sophisticated, than their western counterparts.
Getting into another arms race with Russia is a recipe for the US bankruptcy as much as it is for Russian... and while overspending on defense in the US would causes political instability, Russia is quite happy to make new weapons while its population starves.
Disclosure: I was an avionics tech on the original Stealth Fighter, the F-117A, back in the late 80's-early '90s. (37th TFW, Tonopah Test Range).
Back then, stealth was achieved by a combination of architecture (the angles), materials, and flying the thing under certain profiles (that is, you avoid flying too close to enemy radar installations, fly at night, etc). The whole idea was to be a literal hole in the sky, or at least make enemy radars less effective - enough to get in, do your job, and get out. The results have been somewhat mixed - during our whole Desert Storm tour, not a single F-117 got so much as a paint chip, let alone a bullet hole - sand and heat was a bigger danger to the things than lead. OTOH, one was shot down over Bosnia during the late 1990's.
When it comes to stealth? You either fly quietly, or you get noticed by enemy A/A and fighters. Modern stealth tech has taken a step back from the looks of it, and appears to have cast aside the whole idea of sneaking around, which IMHO was the whole point to stealth in the first place. Also, the F-117A was, in essence, a small tactical bomber - it has no dogfighting ability to speak of (no guns, and A/A missiles would be damned clumsy to use from one - doing that would make you even less aerodynamic than you already are, and carrying even one air-to-air missile would eat half of your bomb load). Old-school, we snuck around, making sure that the only time you noticed one of our jets was from the explosion its bombs made on your property. The Russian jet and the F-22 take a different tack - they only want to make it a little bit harder for an already-flying missile to find them, without sacrificing speed and maneuverability too much. But - if you load either one with a full bomb load, those round bombs will happily give your position away to the first radar dish that you come even partially close to.
So use them only for air superiority, you say... cool - but the whole point of air superiority is to own the sky, and noticeably so. ;) Any other role besides those two (e.g. ground support), and you face the same big risk as any other aircraft - that of being taken down by the first piece of dumb lead to fly in your direction.
Long story short, stealth is useful in limited circumstances at best, and even at this time doesn't really justify its expense and R&D outside of those circumstances.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You must be kidding.
Education - teachers and college professors get paid barely enough to literally survive, when they get paid at all. After the exodus of the Jewish scholarly elite, and the subsequent evacuation of any non-Jews that had academic credentials, Russian education is barely starting to recover...
Healthcare - hospitals are in shambles. If I remember correctly, you would have to bribe every nurse and orderly in turn to get clean(er) sheets and non-expired medication. Better to bring your own, bought on the black market.
Housing - it is not lacking in strength, but it's barely above the level of trailer parks in amenities
Moscow and St. Petersburg city centers are not a good indicator of the conditions in Russia. They are about as sophisticated as the West, at Western (or higher) prices. Given that a chief physician of a large hospital makes about $1000-1500/month while paying New York prices for groceries and only about 1/2 as much for housing, it should give you a lot of pause before making these ridiculous comparisons.
In Soviet Russia... memes overuse YOU!
Old people do need money to eat and get health care
You assume that because they need it, they should get it. At the other end of the scale is a child that needs an education. If there's only one dollar out there, and the old guy wants it, versus the child, I'd say, give it to the child, and let the old guy die.
This is my sig.
Chinese Engineer 1: What's that part made of?
Chinese Engineer 2: Titanium.
CE1: Isn't that expensive?
CE2: We'll just use lead. Or melamine.
CE1: Will it have the same mechanical properties?
CE2: No, but by the time the Americans notice, it'll be too late.
CE1: Heh heh. Er, hang on a minute...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's not a case of them 'reverse engineering' the fighter, the primary obstacles to creating aircraft like this isn't an aircraft design issue, it's an engineering issue. The materials, production lines, resources, manufacturing expertise, et al., necessary to successfully implement the F-22 or PAK-50 is incredibly prohibitive. Ever wondered why China is only now just starting to produce fighter aircraft of the 3rd/4th (more like 3.5) generation on its own? They've had high quality imported aircraft for almost two decades now and they can't make anything themselves that compares to a 4.5 generation fighter. This is what one would term a 'non trivial' tast ;).
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The viability of manned aircraft is a question of technology. By the end of WWII, proximity-fused shells on US Navy ships made convention air attack against them a suicide mission. If the US Navy was forced to fight an identical opponent in '46, air attack would likely have been abandoned. The Japanese resorted to suicide attacks in part because conventional attacks were already suicide, at least a crash dive might let you get a hit. The cruise missile a refinement of the suicide plane concept. The idea of dive-bombing or torpedoing a warship from the air quickly fell out of favor. But that was ok for airplanes since they could carry missiles and engage from beyond the range of return fire. While aircraft did indeed use gravity bombs and later guided bombs against naval targets in the following decades, that was usually in third-world wars or against small patrol ships. Nobody would think of risking that against a proper warship.
The rise of the SAM's made things trickier for land-attack craft. A multi-million dollar jet is risked attacking tanks that are worth maybe $200k. The attrition rate under the 6 Day War was so high it was thought the end of manned combat aircraft had been reached. But subsequent development of Wild Weasel tactics and improved ECM put the SAM's on the defensive. But technology continues to improve. The early missiles were laughable. The F-4 went to Vietnam armed only with missiles and did not achieve an air-to-air kill until the gatling-equipped version arrived. But missile tech is very, very good now. The last gun kill achieved by the Air Force was an A-10 versus a Hind in Gulf War 1.
The question now is one of development cycles. The F-22 program started in '81 and didn't go operational until 2005. Ridiculous! How many SAM generations came during that time? And how much cheaper will those weapons be? The damn B-2's cost a billion bucks a pop and are irreplaceable. We're not cranking up the production lines for any more. And what are they good for, truly? To carry cruise missiles? Why do we need a fancy bomber for that? Why not just load cruise missiles on C-17's and kick them out the back a thousand miles from target? There, now you have cargo-bombers and can buy more aiframes for the same money.
The Poles kept cavalry units up until WWII. They finally were disabused of the idea by Germans with panzers. I think it's going to take a similar catastrophe to move us past the idea of manned combat aircraft.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Stealth fighters can be detected by the characteristic pattern of reduced precipitation below the body of the aircraft:
http://www.roe.ac.uk/~jkd/stealth.jpg
Saddam took that one step further. Do you really need WMD, or just for people to think you have them? We certainly feared him. He certainly had chemical weapons at one time, and tinkered with other WMD's at other times. But in retrospect, that was all gone by 2003. So why did people think he still fear he had them? There is some anecdotal evidence his scientists mislead him to keep from being "replaced", but only for a few of the suspected programs. For Saddam, ambiguity was useful up until Iraq got invaded. Playing games with weapons inspectors kept everyone nervous and a little wary of what he might be capable of.
Then came the big prank. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda came up with a great idea: if you get caught, mention that there is a plot with Saddam to use WMD. Remember, Al Qaeda didn't like Saddam, so this was meant to get two enemies focused on each other. Combine this with Saddam's games, poor/biased intelligence, and an administration set on wiping out any potential threat, and you get a nice little clusterfuck.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Why worry?
That's THREE WHOLE YEARS after the end of the world!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
You would be naive to think that an aircraft of this complexity can be "reverse engineered". I do not think, in fact, that history bears a single example since WWII at least of any foreign military aircraft being reverse engineered into a successful combat aircraft.
With any advanced aircraft the "secret" of success is not the plane itself so much than the whole vast production system that builds it. The tooling plans are actually some of the most valuable secrets.
Perhaps the closest example of a successful combat plane clone was Israel's Kfir, derived from the Dassault Mirage. But this success required Israel to steal the complete Mirage plans, including the all-important tooling plans, to be able to buy actual production equipment from France, and to buy the engines from the U.S.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
J-10 is definitely at least 4th generation, and the upgraded (J10-B) variety is almost certainly 4.5-gen - and that should be finalized really soon.
The J-10 is considered to be a 4th generation fighter, but the Chinese did not engineer the plane themselves - it is based heavily on the IAI Lavi, Russian engines, and Israeli flight controls (not the same as the Lavi.) The J-10 is the second attempt at the J-9 which was cancelled long long ago and even as such took nearly 20 years of development to get to where it is, even though it is basically a foreign born aircraft. Needless to say, the Chinese will be buying their PAK-FAs, just likey they do their other Sukhois (and engines, and electronics, and flight control systems...)
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