People say the the saudias baught the eurofighters for the same reason brits are buying them. To replace the torandos

Well, even though the need for the Raptor is questionable,

Sigh, politics politics, newspaper, politics = guardian.

The Guardian is an anti-labour paper... they say anything and everything to discredit the government. And are famous for discrediting anything they do or are involved in.

A newspaper is never to be believed... alot of what they print is crap.

The British media has ALWAYS been against Typhoon even from its original inception... whatever you read about the program 99% of it is negative from the media. British media hardly ever says anything positive about anything... it doesn't sell. Negativity does.

And what would happen if the media got their way and we ordered F-16s instead as they have been pushing since 1994? They would again attack the government saying they were destroying British industry and purchasing obsolete fighters from their american bumchums!

Infact the BBC are the only media I have ever seen say something positive about it. And that was only once.

Oh and btw, its British... not Brittish.

And most of the papers are owned by non-british nationals. Mainly Australian and Americans.

No-one with any intelligence in Britain believes a word the papers say outside of the financial pages.

Andy

The F-35 is a highly compromised aircraft, yes it can carry 18.500lbs of gas internal including 2 JDAMs and a pair of AIM-120s. But this is all packed in a chubby airframe; only 0.7ft / 21 cm longer than the F-16 and the fuselage is wider than that of the F-4, approx 11.5 ft / 3,5m. How much drag will give this?

The aspect ratio of the Typhoon = 2,398 (10,95 x 10,95 span / 50 sqm wingsurface), for the F-35 = 2,6688 (11% higher), the aspect ratio is a powerful indicator of the general performance of a wing.

The Typhoon also has a better T/W ratio, better SEP and lower wingloading.

The F-35 has better/ more sensors and better avionics and a very low workload for the pilot, but those 6.000.000 lines of code gonna be a big challenge. The Phantom had more and better sensors + avionics than the MiG-19, but what happened?

ESM systems like ALR-94, SPECTRA, DAS etc. maybe force future fighterpilots to turn off their radar to prevent (accurate) locating and identification and maybe / probably Stealth is countered by distributed passive sensors linked with each other in a network.

Tiffy.... older, yes, but still able to counter that Triple Ugly successfully.

So highly compromised that everyone and their grandmother wants to buy it and not the "Tiffy". I don't think you can judge a 21st century fighter with 1950s aerodynamic theory.



A generalized judgement based on aspect ratio is not a good indicator of anything. Plenty of aircraft out there on paper would seem to be more maneuverable than a Viper and yet the Viper outflies all of them in the real world.



Based on this theory, an early-model F-15A could outfly a late-model F-16C. It can't.




Again, you are using 1950s standards to judge 21st century realities. Is your name Pierre Sprey?



Yes, and maybe pigs, if given wings, can fly.



Let's see if once the F-35 is available on the market the Tiffy wins a single sales order when competing against it. Let's keep in touch and if the Tiffy ever defeats the F-35 in a foreign sales order competition when going head-to-head against it, I'll mail you one year's salary.