Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Furball on March 09, 2006, 04:47:23 PM
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4550670.stm
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Nice.
Hope we order them too.
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F-22 will eat it for a Trail Mix substitute.
Karaya
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Originally posted by Masherbrum
F-22 will eat it for a Trail Mix substitute.
Karaya
Ewww wtf? Soylent green? Not an American fighter. The F22 will simply piss on the Eurofighter and watch it crumble;)
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3 comments.
1. The Eurofighter is nice but the F-22 is waaay better.
2. A properly flown F-15 is a tactical match for a Eurofighter, for a number of reasons.
3. The Saudis can't "properly fly" anything so it doesn't matter what they buy, it's all for purposes of showing their neighbors who has the biggest schwinging d***.
An F-15E guy who just finished a year flying with and training Saudis in their F-15Es told me that his professional opinion as an F-15E instructor is that they can't tactically fly worth crap. In fact, every flight they return from is technically a miracle since at the first sign of real danger, they turn the conduct of the flight over to allah.
Seriously, he told me some stories that are simply horrible examples. Like an Atlantic crossing where one plane had an engine problem and shut down one engine, and the crew was so freaked out by the perfectly normal cautions/warnings that automatically come up after an inflight shutdown, they almost bailed out 200 miles S of greenland. Turns out they had never read about, practiced, or even thought about what happens when you shut down an engine in flight because if things get THAT BAD, it's all up to Allah anyhow. No kidding, true story, and that's no kidding how they explain their casual attitude towards emergency procedures.
The only thing the saudi purchase will really do is help fund the eurofighter program towards an actual semblance of multi-role combat capability. As it stands now, the eurofighter isn't much different from an original F-16A in terms of weapons capability and it's taking years for the partner nations to agree on the development roadmap. The eurofighter would have been a true world-beater if it had been funded and developed in a reasonable amount of time, but right now it's pretty much a consolation prize for countries that will never get offered the F-22 and may get shut out from the JSF initial production as well.
IMHO :)
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The question with F-22: who is willing to buy such an expensive fighter?
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Originally posted by Fishu
The question with F-22: who is willing to buy such an expensive fighter?
Thats not a question, that is the answer. Everyone ele gets to settle on a (distant) second best.
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I sure hope the US can buy enough F-22s... Without it's capabilities, the first couple of weeks of any real shooting war would probably result in us losing half our aircraft to the air defenses. US warfighting power is based almost entirely on finding and exploiting assymetric advantages, and our current (pre F-22 and B-2) technology no longer gives us any assymetric advantage. Everything we have short of the B-2 is directly countered by in-use adversary weapons and tactics, meaning that any future war is going to turn in to a bloodbath. I'm part of the crowd that says that answer is unacceptable, and although it's expensive, the F-22 is potentially the biggest cost save we have if you consider how damned expensive it would be to restart and ramp up F-15/F-16 production after suffering the inevitable losses we'd have if we had to go into any modern IADS or even into Korea.
And restarting bomber production to replace combat losses... Don't even think about it. 100 mil each is a bargain compared to replacing even a single B-2, and the triple digit Russian SAMs have been specifically designed to go against our CURRENT capabilities, not just our aging fighter fleet.
But of course those with no military aviation experience, and those of the previous generation who still think the F-4 is "good enough", will continue to trash the F-22, because they're not the ones who would have to fly into combat. If we ever need the F-22, we'll probably need it quite badly. If we ever use it, we'll wish we had more. If we don't have it when we need it, we'll suffer the consequences and they will be expensive in both lost aircraft and crews.
As for the JSF... It's a stealthy F-16 with every one of the inherent weaknesses that the F-16 has. We still have ZERO deep strike stealthy aircraft capable of self-defense even on the planning board, and the UAV program that was supposed to address that mission was recently fragmented because the Navy and USAF have completely different capability requirements. The only thing that would make me say "this is better and should be made instead of an F-22" would be the stretch version of the F-22 or F-23, basically a stealthy fighter-bomber.
Some day some general is going to wake up and wonder why the only aircraft he has that is capable of making it to the opposing general's HQ is a fighter that carries only 500lb bombs and doesn't have the range to make it back home... We're already near that point but congress and civilian pentagon leadership has the military chasing it's tail so bad that we can't even properly express how bad a hole we're digging ourselves.
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What about the "talk" of F/B-22?
(http://www.checkpoint-online.ch/CheckPoint/Images/N-FB-22.jpg)
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Originally posted by eagl
snip
If we ever use it, we'll wish we had more. If we don't have it when we need it, we'll suffer the consequences and they will be expensive in both lost aircraft and crews.
I don't think truer words have ver been spoken about the raptor.
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As Eagl said, the tranche 1 Eurofighter is the basic fighter model, it is the tranche 2 that should be a lot better and multirole, and as of yet uncontracted tranche 3 will be even better. The RAF have sold the Saudi's some of their order, probably to take the money and put it into buying higher spec Typhoons. They have developed a new missile for it which is still in development (MBDA Meteor).
From those i have spoken to that operate and fly the Eurofighter Typhoon they absolutely love it. I believe nexx works for Eurofighter GmbH, i'm sure he will have more info :)
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Originally posted by eagl
Some day some general is going to wake up and wonder why the only aircraft he has that is capable of making it to the opposing general's HQ is a fighter that carries only 500lb bombs and doesn't have the range to make it back home... We're already near that point but congress and civilian pentagon leadership has the military chasing it's tail so bad that we can't even properly express how bad a hole we're digging ourselves.
Eagl, whats your opinion of unmanned drones and how they fit into the equation?
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Originally posted by Krusher
Eagl, whats your opinion of unmanned drones and how they fit into the equation?
Oh man, this is gonna be GOOD!
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Originally posted by eagl
An F-15E guy who just finished a year flying with and training Saudis in their F-15Es told me that his professional opinion as an F-15E instructor is that they can't tactically fly worth crap. In fact, every flight they return from is technically a miracle since at the first sign of real danger, they turn the conduct of the flight over to allah.
If the old TOWD were here, we'd all be treated to a lovely diatribe on your "racism".
:rofl
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Originally posted by Furball
Saudi Arabia to get Eurofighters
good choice! :aok
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Why does the kingdom of saud even have a military?
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Originally posted by Debonair
Why does the kingdom of saud even have a military?
To protect royal regime
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Toad,
Truth hurts sometimes... *shrug*
UAVs... The problem with UAVs is that time and again, pilots have either saved an "impossible" mission or brought a damaged aircraft back to base by doing that "pilot shxt", and UAVs can't do that. So when the crap hits the fan, the UAV will in my considered opinion be either unable to complete the mission or will be shot down. So all those cost savings that UAVs are supposed to give us will evaporate, one lost UAV at a time.
We've already lost one global hawk due to running into a hill (bad terrain database) and they cost just as much as a U2. Granted, we also just lost a U2 due to flying into the ground, but my point is that in combat, it's the human input that makes the difference when the enemy tries to stop you from doing your business. A UAV can't look left-right-left in 1.5 seconds, analyze a visual picture, and determine a course of action, and I am convinced that in a real shooting war, the UAV attrition rate will be very high.
Try looking up how many predators we've lost... It's a lot, and the losses in many cases could have been prevented by a pilot in the plane. The cost adds up fast.
UAVs will be an important addition to our bag of tricks and properly used they can be a force multiplier (think stealthy cruise missiles that can also do battle damage assessment and electronic combat) but they'll never actually be able to replace manned aircraft except in the minds of non-pilot bean counters and overly optimistic engineers that have never been in combat.
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Grun,
The FB-22 is a nice idea but I don't think it'll ever get funded.
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How many Gs can a global Hawk sustain while still maneuvering. How about the F22?
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In the long run, unmanned A-A platforms will dominate.
Think of a missile capable of high-G maneuvers and armed with counter-measures and missiles of its own.
Putting a man inside limits the capability of the platform.
http://www.alexisparkinn.com/photogallery/Videos/F-22%20Crash.mpg
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pfft. good going for the euros they will sell lots of them to the arabs. it seems that the moslem technique for night landings is usually ejection. that is also the technique for "ACM".