talkitron wrote:ricnunes wrote:LoL! By 2060 (not a typo, two thousand and sixty) France/Germany should have their future fighter aircraft which will have similar capabilities as the F-35 but it a timeframe where the F-35 will probably starting to get replaced by something else.

Yeah, the Eurofighter Typhoon is just now getting ground attack capabilities like the F-15E had in 1989 and the air-to-air performance is competitive to the F-15E with equal munitions. So the Eurofighter took 30 years to equal the F-15E. The US should screw Israeli objections and aggressively export the F-35 to the Persian Gulf states to cut down on the financial viability of the Turkish, South Korean/Indonesian, Japanese, and now French/German fighter projects. Just like the Rafale and Typhoon added little to the F-15E in terms of military capability, these other projects will add little military capability to the F-35.
Why even compare the Typhoon to the F-15E? One was conceived as a pure interceptor with A2G capabilities added later as an afterthought while the other is a mud-mover. Apples and oranges really.
bigjku wrote:Tiger05 wrote:bigjku wrote:http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-germany-defence-idUSKBN19Y1FJ?il=0
No they aren't buying F-35. They will likely do Eurofighter 2.0 and get the same results they got not buying F-15's. Europe will build an F-35/22 hybrid about 3 years before the US is onto the next thing.
They were looking at the F-35 to replace the Tornado in the 2020s. This new program is to replace Eurofighters/Rafales in the longer term (2030s-2040s). I dont exclude the possibility that they will still procure the F-35 and at the same time pursue that new fighter development but we will see.
Btw why should Germany have bought F-15s??
To replace their F-4's frankly.
The main concept is that the Eurofighter has no real reason to exist. We are getting some percentage improvement over the F-15 for a huge investment. The program as someone else stated is basically at its core a jobs program. It is what it is. Nothing against it but as an aircraft it really doesn't bring a lot new to the table that couldn't have been bought off the shelf. Any improvements on the F-15 are in the margins.
Thats a very US-centric point of view there... Europeans have their own aerospace industry. Its understable that they tend to favor a "home-made" solution as much as possible. Nothing wrong with that. Buying F-15s off-the shelf from the US would have provided next to no benefits for European aerospace companies, not to mention no R&D work as well thus making them lag behind, etc.
And i think you guys are being too harsh on the Typhoon. Yes, the program was a mess (largely due to the end of the Cold War which caused a lot of delays) but the aircraft itself turned out to be a fine jet. Pilots love it. I disagree that it is barely an improvement over the F-15. It has phenomenal pure 'raw' performances and climb rate, is more technology advanced, has more advanced sensors (IRST, sensor fusion...) and weapons (Meteor), has more growth potential, etc. FWIW the jet performed very well against F-15C/E during joint exercices.
OTOH i admit that the latest Eagle versions (F-15SG/SA, etc) are very impressive but keep in mind that they werent an option when the Typhoon was designed in the late 1980s/early 90s. F-15C was already out of production at that time and the F-15E was just coming online. Hindsight is 20/20.