GST From United Kingdom, joined Jun 2008, 182 posts, RR: 0 Reply 2, posted (2 months 1 week 8 hours ago) and read 2344 times:
That is indeed superb news. I'm looking foreward to seeing these beauties strut their stuff at RAF Waddington this weekend. Its nice to know they will also be able to precision drop a bomb right into my flask of coffee
Gliding is to power flying as seduction is to rape.
GDB From United Kingdom, joined May 2001, 9952 posts, RR: 69 Reply 8, posted (2 months 1 week ago) and read 2236 times:
Oh right, so just passing on some videos brings out the 'usual suspects'
'Yawn'.
Another way to look at it is that the RAF has another asset to support operations, which will include supporting US ground forces.
But no, the partial facts brigade are out.
The ones who trawl around lifting a bit here and there, correct or not, to support their odd view of the world, just like conspiracy theorists.
Flipdewaf From United Kingdom, joined Jul 2006, 536 posts, RR: 0 Reply 9, posted (2 months 6 days 20 hours ago) and read 2150 times:
Quoting Alien (Reply 3): You could buy two F-35s or two Super Hornets for that price.
hey you have a point there, you could also buy 6bllion penny chews, I wonder why they didn't?
Maybe they wanted better capability than the Super hornet and F-35 for the air to air role and wanted it before 2020 or whenever the F-35 will enter service. Plus I dont think the F-35 will be any cheaper than the tiffie when it finally does enter service.
Its the same reasons that the USAF went for the stupidly expensive F-22 instead of a whole fleet of F-35s. Tis better and worth the money!
Alien From Afghanistan, joined Mar 2008, 315 posts, RR: 0 Reply 10, posted (2 months 6 days 18 hours ago) and read 2108 times:
Quoting GDB (Reply 8): Another way to look at it is that the RAF has another asset to support operations, which will include supporting US ground forces.
Always love the support but the argument does not work. The UK, like any other nation determines what is in their own best interests. Don't paint it like they are doing the US any favors.
Quoting GDB (Reply 8): But no, the partial facts brigade are out.
What partial facts. The BBC said it was over 60 million. Bloomberg has said it was over 60 million, the Saudi MOD said it was over 60 million. What partial facts?
Quoting Flipdewaf (Reply 9): Maybe they wanted better capability than the Super hornet
The Super coming off the line today is a more capable and flexible system than the tiffie. Better avionics, better radar, better ground attack, and better A2A weapons load out this fall when AIM-120-C8 becomes available.
F-35 will be in UK hands long before 2020, and with 20 percent work share of all F-35s, a far better economic deal to boot.
AutoThrust From Switzerland, joined Jun 2006, 957 posts, RR: 4 Reply 11, posted (2 months 6 days 17 hours ago) and read 2075 times:
Quoting N328KF (Reply 4): Is it safe to say that, of the Eurocanards, the Typhoon has seen the most operational service?
Yes other planes have a longer operational time canards.
But the EF canards even they look similar are pretty diffrent then the Gripen/Rafale canards. Same as the wing which is almost a perfect delta has been designed for much higher supersonic agility and are much more aerodynamic instable.
TGIF From Sweden, joined Apr 2008, 61 posts, RR: 0 Reply 12, posted (2 months 6 days 16 hours ago) and read 2034 times:
I read about the Green flag exercises in Flight and it seems they finally got a true swing role configuration.
Quote: Typically, Typhoons would leave Nellis in dry power carrying four Enhanced Paveway IIs, a Litening III pod and two external fuel tanks, plus two Raytheon AMRAAM and two MBDA ASRAAM air-to-air missiles. The fighters would then transit to the exercise area at 40,000-50,000ft, delivering an unrefuelled mission endurance of between 1h 50min and 2h.
This sums up to 11 out of 13 hard points occupied. This picture of an EF shows a similar A2A/A2G configuration with two additional AAM. It looks kinda crowded... Perhaps a stupid question but can the missiles/bombs be fired in an arbitrary sequence or do you have to, for example, drop one inner GBU to be able to fire the AAM next to/behind it?
Quoting N328KF (Reply 6): I guess this isn't what I mean. I mean, which one has really seen more action/deployment, in the "peaceful" non-hot-war manner of speaking?
Although being in the SwAF since -96 I can't recall any reports that the Gripens have seen any action other than patrolling the boarders. Don't know, but I think, this also applies for Czech and Hungary. If NBG would have gone to Darfur/Chad I guess the Gripens would have been deployed.
Flipdewaf From United Kingdom, joined Jul 2006, 536 posts, RR: 0 Reply 13, posted (2 months 6 days 15 hours ago) and read 2022 times:
Quoting Alien (Reply 10): The Super coming off the line today is a more capable and flexible system than the tiffie. Better avionics, better radar, better ground attack, and better A2A weapons load out this fall when AIM-120-C8 becomes available.
Yes thats right, today it does but in a few years when more of these milestones are reached then the super bug will be totally insignificant, future planning its called. Lets face it, if one were up there in the sky against the enemy I'd rather be up against the enemy in an aircraft which has a better range, better T/W and Lower wing loading. The tiffie has proper supercruise and most importantly the workload with the immense amount of data fusion in the tiffie cockpit means that the pilot can concentrate on flying the jet.
GDB From United Kingdom, joined May 2001, 9952 posts, RR: 69 Reply 15, posted (2 months 6 days 13 hours ago) and read 1952 times:
Alien, are you really trying to assert that two F-35's will cost the same as one Typhoon?
How can you possibly know this?
Because the current price of the Typhoon is for these full production models.
F-35 on the other hand, is years away from service, costs are (inevitably) rising, it is in the early stages of flight test.
If it maintains the planned price, whatever it is right now, it will be unprecedented.
Anyway, which F-35? F-35B, will will operate alongside Typhoon replacing Harriers, is thought to be the most expensive of the three variants.
I wonder what the Typhoon detractors make of the pilot in one of the videos refuting one of their totems.
The capability on dry power, (of course it's known it can supercruise-expect for the knee jerk detractors of course).
But then this is where the similarity to the conspiracy types comes in, I suspect the first few prototypes, fitted with RB.199 engines from Tornado, with the much less performance compared to the engine designed for Typhoon.
The ill informed detractors claiming this was still the case with the definitive engines, deliberately?
(The '9/11 Truth' idiots claimed that debris from UA93 was found 6 miles from the point of impact, 'proving' the official story was not true. Problem is, they used something like Google Earth to research this, but this measured distance from impact to farthest debris found from the nearby roads, which snaked around the area and were far from the proper direct 'as the crow flies' distance. Likewise, an unsurprising slip up in the chaos for the mass landing order, mistook for a very short time, later corrected, a Delta flight for UA93. This of course to the conspiracy types 'proved' foul play, a cover-up).
What do we mean when we say 'operational'?
Since in a limited sense Typhoon was before the RAF officially declared it so.
In Italian service, providing QRA over some international summit, (a reality since Sept 11th).
Gripen, a slightly older type was first, then the only aircraft you can fairly compare with Typhoon, the Rafale.
Back to F-35, we perhaps should not be that surprised about the cost rises, even though affordability was one of the main reasons for the programme in the first place.
If you think of it as a 21st Century F-16/F-18, like these legacy aircraft, needed since as with F-14/F-15 in the 70's, how they could never be procured in anything like the numbers to replace the legacy fleet without a drastic cut in numbers.
Same now, with the F-22, as well as the need to replace both legacy Hornets and the Harrier fleet, building separate types here was never going to happen post Cold War.
Jackonicko From United Kingdom, joined Feb 2008, 242 posts, RR: 4 Reply 16, posted (2 months 6 days 12 hours ago) and read 1917 times:
Here we go again.
In defiance of all the evidence, Alien trots out the same old lie – that Typhoon costs “twice as much as an F-35”.
What a load of nonsense….
The USAF’s own estimates for F-35 pricing contradict Lockheed’s claims of a $50-60 m price tag. The USAF figures give a programme flyaway average of $83.131 m, with a price of $199 million in 2009, $158 million in 2010, $124 million in 2011, $101.726 m in FY2012 and $91.223 m in FY2013, and $79.973 m thereafter. But that’s founded on the assumption that inflation will run at only 2% per year, which is unlikely in the defence and aerospace sectors.
Lockheed have claimed an export price of “$58.7 million for each of the first 368 foreign-bound fighters.”
But let's look a little more closely at $58.7 m.
That’s in 2002 dollars, so the real price is likely to be $80-90M in real world dollars with even modest inflation.
And that’s just a predicted price, not an actual or guaranteed price. It’s a deliberately attractive figure intended to ensnare the Aussies and is deliberately ‘optimistic’. Indeed it was specifically stated that this fixed price would “only be able to be offered if consortium numbers and schedules are maintained, and that it would likely add additional costs should partner nations start deferring or reducing their buys."
So with Denmark and Norway looking hard at Gripen, Super Hornet and Typhoon, and with the Netherlands equally shaky, and with the UK more likely to take about 82 aircraft, and not the planned 150, you’d have to be a hopeless optimist to imagine that numbers and schedules would be maintained, so this price is MOST unlikely to be met.
That’s the F-35 price taken care of.
How about Typhoon?
Firstly, you have to compare like with like – so you have to compare F-35 unit flyaway cost with Typhoon unit FLYAWAY cost not with Typhoon unit SYSTEM cost.
(We’ll ignore the fact, for now, that European unit flyaway costs are always higher, because they include more initial spares provisioning and GFE). They’re close enough to be interesting.
Now you could believe ‘experts’ like Lewis Page (notoriously unreliable, partial and inaccurate), Bloomberg and the BBC (who like all the mainstream non specialist media take the latest figure and accept it uncritically), or you could look at what industry, the partner nations air forces and governments, and real expert defence journos say…..
The source of most of the inaccuracy and mis-reporting is the NAO figure of £64 m quoted in the Major Projects Report 2005 (MPR05). This IS NOT A UPC, and was based on the production costs only for 144 Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 aircraft that are currently on contract - but included R&D and other costs that should properly be divided across all three production tranches, making it meaningless as a proper unit flyaway cost. (Some costs for 232 aircraft, some for 144 aircraft, divided by 144 does not give a real unit cost, obviously).
That figure is £20m out of kilter with ALL previous AND subsequent UK, German, Italian and Spanish figures - ALL OF WHICH HOVER AROUND £45 M. That figure is higher than the price paid by Austria (the contract was leaked so we KNOW what that price was) which would be illegal under the heads of agreement, which provide that the partner air forces will always pay less.
£64 m ($122 m) is NOT an accurate unit flyaway cost for Typhoon. So what does it cost?
The real costs of Typhoon are:
1) £42-45 m Unit production cost (validated by the NAO, confirmed by the Typhoon IPT, and backed up by the equivalent official figures from all four partner nations and Austria)
Tranche 1 cost £45.45 m (NAO MPR: "The contract for the first Tranche of 148 aircraft, of which 55 valued at some £2.5bn are for the UK, was signed in September 1998.")
NB That the R1 and R2 upgrades (NAO: "retrofit of Tranche 1 aircraft to Tranche 2 standard (+£117m))" add £2.12 m per aircraft.
In the NAO major projects report 2004, the unit production cost (excluding R&D) was quoted as £49.1 m (assuming a full 232 aircraft buy) across all three Tranches. (£11.39 Bn + R&D)
It was later said (by the NAO and the Government) that our 55 Tranche 1 aircraft were costing £2.5 Bn, representing a unit production cost of £45.45 m.
Figures released in Germany, Italy and Spain would all suggest that the Typhoon's UPC is in the region of £40-45 m ($73-83 m).
So if 55 Tranche 1 aircraft cost £45-49m each, how could the average Tranche 1 and 2 UPC have got to £64.8 m? Is there any way that a £64 m UPC could be real?
No, there isn't.
The 144 RAF aircraft in the first two Tranches would have to cost £9.333 Bn (excluding R&D), and since Tranche 1 costs £2.5 Bn, the Tranche 2 aircraft would have to cost £6.833 Bn, or £76 m each - £30 m more, per jet, than Tranche 1.
Whereas NAO and UK Government figures show that they actually cost £42 m each, fractionally less than Tranche 1, as planned.
Or you could arrive at a Tranche 2 unit cost by dividing the production contract total (€13 Bn or $16 Bn US) by the 236 aircraft in the tranche. That's €55 m/$67.8 m - £42 m at that time.
Or you could look at the Austrian price of €61 m - guess what - fractionally more than £42 m......
2) £82-84 m total programme unit cost. (UK total cost (£19 Bn - £19.6 Bn) divided by UK production total of 232). That's cheaper than Rafale - which works out at £88 m.
So Typhoon has a unit programme cost of £82 m, and a unit system price of about £60 m - which includes the unit flyaway cost of about £42 m.
That’s rather cheaper than F-35, and (as you’d expect) rather more expensive than the less capable F/A-18E/F.
Jackonicko From United Kingdom, joined Feb 2008, 242 posts, RR: 4 Reply 18, posted (2 months 6 days 10 hours ago) and read 1869 times:
I should have added that the basic "What you pay for one aircraft" cost - what the US refer to as UFCs (Unit Flyaway Cost) - we generally refer to as a UPC (Unit Production Cost).
Neither UFC nor UPC includes R&D, of course, but a UPC will tend to include some batch-specific tooling costs that are excluded from a US style flyaway cost.
Typhoon is very competitive price-wise with other aircraft in its class (F-22, F-35, Rafale, F-15SG) but is naturally more expensive than less capable types like the F-16, Gripen, and Super Hornet.
Though Alien will doubtless hate any inference that his beloved Super Hornet is inferior to Typhoon, it is fact. During a recent visit to Boeing, very senior programme people admitted as much - though they did naturally claim that the Super Hornet enjoyed some specific superiorities and claimed better cost-effectiveness for their aircraft.
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? As always you show your lack of understanding about the EF and its systems. Keep on dreaming. 