Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Entitlements don't bankrupt us at all. Old people do need money to eat and get health care. If if not for social security, medicare, etc, people would just have to redirect what they now pay in taxes towards savings for retirement, or spend more on supporting their elderly parents, etc. It's not like all that money people are now using to put food on the table, keep their homes warm, and get medical treatment would magically be available to build super-weapons instead.
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
The story of the F-15, as related to me by an Air Force guy. The Russians come out with a new interceptor, the MiG-25. In reality it's a lead sled, can go really freakin' fast in one direction and fire off some missiles but it has very little flexibility and is not that good of an aircraft. But since we don't have good intel on it, we start guessing as to what it's capabilities would be, making up all sorts of shit. The Air Force freaks out and demands we build a counter and that eventually became the F-15, fully capable of doing everything the Foxbat was supposed to do. Total overkill.
Doublechecked wiki, this story is confirmed there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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