Saab Gripen news

[aaam]

They were short-sighted to aim for anything less than an F-16 userbase to pickup customers unable to afford long term F-35 costs. You were unlikely to go head to head with F-35 for sales, but you have more dry thrust in the engine and most potential customers already have the supply line established for its use. Maybe you even go for an internal bay.

They actually have gone head to head with F-35 in the past, but they are learning that if a country wants the F-35, they're going to buy the F-35 regardless. As they pointed out in one of the Nordic competitions, when the results of the competition were published the announced cost of the F-35 was so low that Sweden could literally give them the Gripen E for free and the F-35 would still come out cheaper. in the reported analysis That's one of the other reasons they're not bidding in some contests where they realize that no matter what they have no chance of winning.

Boeing has started to realize the same thing. They have also withdrawn from the Belgian fighter competition. "We regret that after reviewing the request we do not see an opportunity to compete on a truly level playing field..."

I believe they are targeting the F-16/18 user base. Going for an internal bay on the Gripen E would have drastically increased costs and would have made the aircraft a larger one, which wold pushed up design, procurement and operating costs.

[h-bomb]

Gripen E/F seems screwed by the available engine choices. SAAB doesn't have the clout to make the F414 EPE, EJ200x or M88-3 materialize, so their bird is badly short on thrust.

They will need to go with the M88-4, that variant finally got to 4000 cycles before overhaul. Not sure if the EJ200 has reached that yet. Also the M88 and EJ200 are an F404 thrust class power plants, not F414. I know you can find fanboys claiming 30K thrust EF200's are in development, but I could not find anything remotely reliable.

https://www.safran-aircraft-engines.com ... rcraft/m88

[aaam]

They will need to go with the M88-4, that variant finally got to 4000 cycles before overhaul. Not sure if the EJ200 has reached that yet. Also the M88 and EJ200 are an F404 thrust class power plants, not F414. I know you can find fanboys claiming 30K thrust EF200's are in development, but I could not find anything remotely reliable.

https://www.safran-aircraft-engines.com ... rcraft/m88

I'm sure they wold have liked some M88 derivative, as the French seem to have few restrictions on to whom you can sell aircraft containing their engines. Problem is, the M88 only puts about the same thrust as the F404 derivative they already were using in Gripen A-D, so there would be no point. They needed more thrust for the E/F and the F414 is 30% more powerful than the M88-4. Even the proposals for growth versions of the M** only go to 20K, and France itself is not looking at that thrust level for future versions of Rafale.

Regarding the EJ200, it puts out 13,500 lbs (dry) and 20,250 (max a/b), still not enough for Gripen E/F. Two growth versions have been proposed: EJ2X0 with 20% growth, which would put it 5% above the F414, certainly not worth the cost and trouble to Sweden. The second is a proposed unnamed variant with a 30% growth to 26-27,000 lbs. I also have seen no signs of a 30,000 lb. variant, and it's hard to see any near term requirement for such an engine that isn't already covered by GE/Pratt.

[XanderCrews]

Welcome to the Gripen E/F paradox. It needs a bigger engine. It weighs as much as an F-16, but it doesn't have F-16 Thrust. It needs an F-16 engine. But making it that F-16 like means one is better off just buying an F-16. Gripen E is overweight. Pure and simple. Fanboys try to say the canard makes that irrelevant but that's a joke. Gripen E T/W is worse than the original and the original didn't exactly have a lot of excess power to play with

The 2nd paradox is the cost, but one thing at a time

[wewuzkangz]

Welcome to the Gripen E/F paradox. It needs a bigger engine. It weighs as much as an F-16, but it doesn't have F-16 Thrust. It needs an F-16 engine. But making it that F-16 like means one is better off just buying an F-16. Gripen E is overweight. Pure and simple. Fanboys try to say the canard makes that irrelevant but that's a joke. Gripen E T/W is worse than the original and the original didn't exactly have a lot of excess power to play with

The 2nd paradox is the cost, but one thing at a time

What do you mean that the Gripen is overweight? It is slightly smaller than the F-16 and its empty weight is about 6,800kg the F-16 is at 8,500kg empty weight by no means is the JAS-39 overweight......The bigger engine problem is being addressed as we speak https://www.nyteknik.se/fordon/volvo-vi ... or-6423996 There was a F-18 engine F414G replacement that would give 20% more thrust but they said they will improve the RM-12 the matter is when?

http://nation.time.com/2011/09/28/stick ... lion-each/ The Gripen E versions are at 113 million dollars each. I am as curious to see how much F-16Vs cost. There are alot of interests of countries wanting JAS-39 but failed bids as well because of political reasons.

[botsing]

What do you mean that the Gripen is overweight? It is slightly smaller than the F-16 and its empty weight is about 6,800kg

From SAAB's own fact sheet the Gripen E "basic mass empty" is 8000 kg:

http://saab.com/globalassets/commercial ... et--en.pdf

[wewuzkangz]

What do you mean that the Gripen is overweight? It is slightly smaller than the F-16 and its empty weight is about 6,800kg

From SAAB's own fact sheet the Gripen E "basic mass empty" is 8000 kg:

http://saab.com/globalassets/commercial ... et--en.pdf

I referred to the c/d Version instead of the E version.....E version in which they referred to themselves are currently looking to upgrade engines because for them they say it is cheaper

[wewuzkangz]

file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/Raven_ES05_LQ_mm07819_.pdf Another thing i found interesting is its radars have a 200 degree view. I wish for information of what the an/apg-83 view is at. And i also highly doubt i will receive radar performance from either that give RCS detection range estimates.

[botsing]

What do you mean that the Gripen is overweight? It is slightly smaller than the F-16 and its empty weight is about 6,800kg

From SAAB's own fact sheet the Gripen E "basic mass empty" is 8000 kg:

http://saab.com/globalassets/commercial ... et--en.pdf

I referred to the c/d Version instead of the E version.....E version in which they referred to themselves are currently looking
to upgrade engines because for them they say it is cheaper

If you referred to the C/D version then you should have mentioned the Volvo RM12, which gives about the same T/W class as the Gripen E with the F414-GE-39E.

Also, XanderCrews clearly mentioned the Gripen E about the overweight:

Gripen E is overweight.

What do you mean that the Gripen is overweight? It is slightly smaller than the F-16 and its empty weight is about 6,800kg

file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/Raven_ES05_LQ_mm07819_.pdf Another thing i found interesting is its radars have a 200 degree view. I wish for information of what the an/apg-83 view is at. And i also highly doubt i will receive radar performance from either that give RCS detection range estimates.

Nice to know you are user "owner".

Let me upload the PDF for you:

Raven_ES05_LQ_mm07819_.pdf

(167.22 KiB) Downloaded 1726 times

[swiss]

The E/F is bad value.

Switzerland (and Brazil) seems to disagree...

Switzerland didn't buy the Grippen. Thank god we have a Direct democracy.

And in the Evaluation by the Swiss Airforce, the Gripen was far behind the Rafale and Eurofighter.

[ikea99]

"Switzerland didn't buy the Grippen. Thank god we have a Direct democracy.

And in the Evaluation by the Swiss Airforce, the Gripen was far behind the Rafale and Eurofighter."

To be fair, an evaluation is not a competition. In a evaluation you look for what is possible to do with a "thing" and in a competition one wins. That said, Gripen E leaked eval in 2008 where only the first evaluation done and the last eval was done many years later when Saab even knew what would be inside gripen for real. To point out once more, the test evaluation was to see what the aircraft could be used for, and if it could manage to do the tasks given to them by the Swiss air force, it wasn't a competition. Absolutely not in 2008 anyway.

The final results where following Rafale(6,98), EF(6,48), Gripen MS21 (5,33). The difference between the best Rafale and the worst Gripen where 23,6%. Not really strange if you ask me. Gripen is a single engine aircraft.

If you look at the tests done with electronic warfare, gripen c/d (the one tested) had just about the same performance as the most expensive Rafale (the new one in Gripen E will be better with attack ability s etc). And i didn't even see any RCS tests in there of the aircrafts, here Gripen E will be a clear winner since its new built and Swaf had demanded "significantly" lowered RCS ( of a already low RCS).

The point is ! The Swiss Gov. didn't make a mistake, they choose Gripen as their winner since it was the most sensible choice. You can run two gripens ,at least, for the price of the other ones.

[aaam]

file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/Raven_ES05_LQ_mm07819_.pdf Another thing i found interesting is its radars have a 200 degree view. I wish for information of what the an/apg-83 view is at. And i also highly doubt i will receive radar performance from either that give RCS detection range estimates.

file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/Raven_ES05_LQ_mm07819_.pdf Another thing i found interesting is its radars have a 200 degree view. I wish for information of what the an/apg-83 view is at. And i also highly doubt i will receive radar performance from either that give RCS detection range estimates.

AESAs can generally look 45-60 degrees off from boresight, depending on the system. Beyond that, the beam can't be "bent" any further without a major loss in capability and accuracy. There's a technical name for this but it escapes me at the moment A mechanically scanned radar will have a wider field because the antenna is physically pointing to the side/up/down

The reason the radar on Gripen E has such a wide field of view is that Saab cleverly mounts the antenna at an angle on a rotatable turntable. By rotating the turntable, the boresight of the antenna changes, and the look angle is now 45-60 off the new "heading" if you will. In this case, if the antenna of the Selex ES-05 Raven is rotated so that its boresight is 30 degrees off aircraft centerline, then the radar can see its normal 45-60 degrees (I don't know the field of view of the Raven) to the side plusthat additional 30 degrees. So when they say it can see a total of 200 degrees, that means that the combination of the Raven's offset capabilities and the antenna deflection through rotation totals 100 degrees to each side.

The new Captor-E for Typhoon also physically points its antenna but it does that by mounting the antenna on an arm, which may give even more offset from centerline, but comes at the price of weight, complexity and possible a smaller antenna size that would be possible with a fixed antenna or rotating mount.

The SU-57 addresses the AESA field of view issue by having two additional fixed arrays pointing to the side. The F-22 was also supposed to have that, but that was cut early in the program.

[aaam]

The E/F is bad value.

Switzerland (and Brazil) seems to disagree...

Switzerland didn't buy the Grippen. Thank god we have a Direct democracy.

And in the Evaluation by the Swiss Airforce, the Gripen was far behind the Rafale and Eurofighter.

Actually, Switzerland did select the Gripen E. What happened was that in a referendum, the populace voted not to buy anything at all, which killed the Gripen deal.

What is interesting is that in what few documents have been made public, the evaluation seems to have been done using the Gripen C/D, while the aircraft that was bid was the Gripen E. That may partly have been because at the time of the evaluation, the E was very much a paper airplane.

[aaam]

There seems to be a lot of repetition that the Gripen E is overweight and underpowered and that Sweden is desperately searching for a more powerful engine. To me at least, it appears that this is centered around the fact that its T/W ratio at gross is not as high as that of the F-16. The thing is, that is only one of many factors making up an aircraft's capabilities. Turn rate, drag, high alpha performance, ability to regain energy play in, as do sensors and weapons, availability and support, networking, etc.. What I'm saying is that just because they don't match the F-16 doesn't mean they aren't satisfied.

Two examples from the F-14 come to mind. When the F-14A came into service, it's T/W ration was inferior to that of the F-4, even when the TF30s were working. However, the Tomcat was less draggy. So, it out accelerated the Phantom consistently.

When the F-14B/F arrived, with the thrust for which the aircraft was designed, evaluations were done against the F-14A to see how the improved T/W assisted in air combat. With the F-14A starting in the defensive position, it could no disengage before the D got of its shot. This was expected. What was not expected, was that if they started with the A in offensive and B/D defensive, even though the B/D really outperformed the A, it also could not disengage before the A took its shot.

T/W is certainly a factor, but it's not the only, or even the most important factor.

[basher54321]

F-14A very likely had the higher T/D and was far better aerodynamically - however the F-14A also had about 6000 lbs more total max static thrust over the F-4S on given figures.

The lower powered F-16C Block 50/52 (~29,000 lbs) have about 7000 lbs more static max thrust over the Gripen E (~22,000 lbs) - so call me mr pessimistic but if looking at drag I wont be putting my money on Gripen E for that contest either.