Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

Well you're free to believe what you like if it makes you feel better when attacking the Euro products but I need not go any futher with this as Scorpion said it all.

Europe didn't want a 5th gen fighter (or perhaps more precisely the cost of one, even if the EF-2000 isn't much cheaper in the end), that's what it comes down to.

That is oversimplified nonsense and if you would be intellectually honest you would know this and deal with the true requirements knowns for these aircraft, rather than reducing everything to a single factor to draw a wrong conclusion which suits your mind.

The ATF was designed to replace a single type in a single role with a single customer, or in other words to replace the F-15A-D in the airsuperiority role with the USAF.
The ATF was required to be able to kill enemy aircraft over their own territory long before they would reach allied territory. This meant that the aircraft had to be able to operate over the densest most sophisticated IADS at that time. Stealth and supercruise were crucial to achieve that goal and the direct result of very specific requirements.

The Typhoon on the other side was designed to replace a number of types in different roles with different services. The aircraft had to fulfill a secondary AG role, it had to be cheap enough to be procured in adequate numbers and as an air defence air superiority platform the Typhoon was not required to deeply penetrate the enemy airspace. The budget was smaller as well and there was less overspending at the end with a significantly lower per unit programme cost.

So no the requirements weren't the same.

You preach to Shep about intellectual honesty aND then you got the nerve to make a statement like that about the cost of the EF? There is nothing even remotely cheap or significantly lower cost per unit about the EF. Regardless of how good or bad the EF may be, it most certainly is not cheap!

What I said is that from the requirements the aircraft had to be cheap enough to be procured in adequate numbers.

The Euros will always fall back on justifying all of their projects as jobs programs. The fact is the F-15 would have been a more cost effective solution but wouldn't have preserved their design and industrial capabilities for wars they are never going to fight anyway. The US has actually recognized the F-22 is unsuited for the 21st century wars we're likely to fight while the EF partners are obligated to buy something they don't need or in some cases even want because of the agreement they signed.

Which we all know it wasn't. You've only got to look at the gimped RAF force to see that and add to that it was four and half years late! Also we were so desperate to make some money back on the over spending that we had to sell some to Saudi Arabia because the program costs ran so high.
The costs doubled and now the MOD are so embarrassed by the financial fiasco that was Typhoon they won't even release any figures!

The officical story is slightly different from how you tell it...

According to http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100617/159462165.html Sukhoi T-50 will be superior to F-22 in maneuverability, weapons and range. Also in ... morale (people, please don't laugh).

These would appear to be the least challenging/costly capabilities to achieve. So they could just as well be describing a SU-35, albeit with internal weapons carriage. I wonder how the laatest Flanker and PAK-FA would match up with one another?

That, and it's not even a given that the Su-35 is more agile than the F-22.
I have no doubt that the T-50 will have impressive kinematic performance, but it's silly at that this point of testing to speak in such absolute terms.