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New Russian Fighter Not Up To Western Standards
schwit1 writes "Despite initial high expectations, the Indian Air Force appears to be souring on a joint development deal with Russia for a new fifth-generation fighter jet, according to the Business Standard, a major Indian business publication. The Russian prototype is 'unreliable, its radar inadequate, its stealth features badly engineered,' said Indian Air Force Deputy Air Marshall S Sukumar at a Jan. 15 meeting, according to minutes obtained by the Business Standard. 'They're very good at building airplanes,' Cordesman said. 'The problem that Russia, since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, has been putting out the military equivalent of show cars. They look good, but it isn't always clear how practical they are and how many of the specifications they can actually meet.'"
From model villages to model aircraft eh?
They haven't had quite as much opportunities to field-test their designs as the Americans.
Essentially it seems to be a problem with the entire concept of "fifth generation" fighters. The idea that you can have useful all-aspect stealth without sacrificing performance in other areas is ridiculous with current technology. The PAK FA (Russian version) sacrifices stealth for performance, the HAL/PMF (Indian version) changes the avionics and tries to add more stealth features. No 5th gen fighter has lived up to its manufacturer's promises of "invisible, supermanuverable ultra plane!!! At a reasonable price!!!" They're all over budget with worse performance than promised. The F-35 is an un-stealthy brick, in the variants that actually work. It also costs as much as an F-22, if not more. The F-22 was cancelled because it cost too much. The PAK FA is a 4th gen fighter with some front-aspect stealth tacked on, and better avionics, including anti-stealth radar. It's probably also going to be the cheapest of the lot.
Not a sentence!
That the AK47 and 74 rifles that the Russians would sell to others would have a chamber that was slightly too small so that if they picked up rounds from dead Russian soldiers they would not work in the foreign soldiers rifles.
I dont know if that was true, but it could easily be the same story here. India is potentially a rising power and with their experience with China, the Russians may be uneasy about providing the Indians with a powerful weapon. In this case the Indians are smart enough to realise it and powerful enough to confront the Russians.
Of course there's still the old adage, never blame malice for what can easily be explained by stupidity. The stealth fighter had very difficult requirements and rather than admit they couldn't produce the goods, it was easier to present the Indians with a fighter that clearly didn't meet the specifications.
In either case, I dont blame the Indians for being upset.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So long as your Air Force is made up of nothing but experienced pilots, you'll do fine then.
One (of many) reasons that the US military sucks up so much money is that our pilots train continuously. In the C17, pilots do not reach the Aircraft Commander level until 4 or 5 *years* after putting on wings. Obviously, fighters have a different training program, but clearly huge amounts of continuous training are involved. So, yes, in practical terms, the operational Air Force is made up of almost nothing but experienced pilots.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you read the history books, you'll also see how the F-4 was going to destroy all opposing aircraft with missiles, so it would never need a gun because they'd never get close enough.
Once it actually got into actual combat in the actual real world, there were sudden orders for a gun pod for close-in dogfights.
The F-22 may be able to hit less stealthy aircraft with missiles from well beyond visual range, but that doesn't help if the rules of engagement won't let them fire missiles at random dots on a radar screen. Also, I was reading recently about new IR trackers which can detect F-22s from well beyond radar range, making radar stealth far less useful.
And its all because of that damned stealth which cripples the HELL out of the aircraft! The ONLY advantage it gives you is on sneaking up, that's it, and in return for the sneaking up? 1.- no external hardpoints means you can't carry shit for stores, 2.- this cuts down loiter times to joke levels, 3.- it limits your new toy to a couple of missiles at best, 4.- it drives the costs to insane levels thanks to the exotic materials and perfectly flush seams required.
Frankly we are making the same mistake that Germany made in WWII, as we are making planes that are extremely complex, have very low flight to maintenance ratios, spend more time on the ground being worked on than anything else,can't afford to have more than a handful built making spare parts costs soar, and are ignoring the fact that any potential enemies are gonna be able to pick up the MiG 29s and SU35s for a song thus enabling them to "plane spam" us with planes that can carry a hell of a lot more stores than our techno turkies ever can.
If we HAVE to buy stealth toys? The stealth eagle can be had for a song, eagles are reliable, when you don't need the stealth it can carry a ton of stores and most importantly we get the line cranked we could easily have 2 or even 3 of those for every F35 which they STILL haven't been able to show will actually work with any reliability. Its the F22 all over again and all TFA does is show me that stealth is just a bad idea with current tech. the Chinese are likewise finding this out, with their F22 copy ending up on the "for sale cheap" pile because after trying it the Chinese air force don't want it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And if you can afford it, it really pays off. Take a good look at what the highly trained, badly outnumbered Israeli air force did to to the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi air force during the Six Day War. The Soviet trainers of those national air forces there were explicitly prevented from providing extensive training and from keeping the aircraft fully fueled and armed. The constant concern was that educated, trained local pilots would steal the planes and fly to NATO airbases, for both economic and political reasons. The list of successful pilot defections during the time is quite long:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's an amazing list, and purchasers of Soviet aircraft of the era were constantly handicapped by the risk of the best trained and educated pilots defecting.
That one is actually feasible. The most distinguishing feature of Rafale is that they have a fully integrated (advertised as) revolutionary electronic warfare suite called SPECTRA. This proved itself well in Libya, where there were two kinds of NATO attack sorties. Those where aircraft were escorted by dedicated electronic warfare aircraft like Prowlers and Growlers, and those where Rafales went in without. The task of electronic warfare aircraft is to jam enemy radar guided missiles. They are the main force responsible for high survivability of NATO aircraft in recent conflicts.
F-22 is highly reliant on its radar guided missiles to do the job. It's a pretty bad dogfighter as dogfighting would put emphasis on maneuvreability and F-22 is designed for stealth first and foremost. Rafale is designed for speed and superagility, so it's meant for dogfights. If Rafale's integrated electronic warfare suite is indeed powerful enough to disrupt F-22's radar guided missiles as it's rumoured to be, F-22 is going to be boned very hard in a duel against it. If both sides are able to render radar guided missile attacks useless, guns and IR seekers come into play and that puts F-22 at a massive disadvantage.
The historic analogy here is ninja vs samurai. If a ninja could get a sneak kill, he would win. But a frontal fight against a heavily armoured and armed samurai is a suicide for a ninja.
Yet another reason to move to pilotless planes. Drones don't need training, they just need to be programmed.
*Some* drones are pilot-less, mostly high altitude reconesonce drones. *Most* US drones in fact have qualified pilots at the controls, sitting in control rooms at places like Creech Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. Creech is both a training / testing base for drones, as well as a Command and Control location where actual pilots sit in rooms controlling drones in "real-time".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
model villages to model aircraft - an (obvious, I think) reference to Potemkin Villages. And a damned good comparison, at that.
Hey, I'm just working off of the USAF pro-formas. : )
Fuel (and other direct/indirect expenses) are booked to "Air Operations", then a portion of those costs are allocated to training for reporting purposes. So yes, the $792M figure for training doesn't represent all the costs associated with training. And you're right, $792M isn't even close to the "real" number once all the expenses are allocated.
I would however point out that even if one adds the entire 2014 USAF Air Operations budget to the $792M Flight Training budget, it still only amounts to a little over 5% of the total USAF budget for FY2014. So I think my original (clumsily made) point still stands.
But I'm becoming argumentative. I certainly defer to your experience in any case.
Cheers!