Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Grid 88"
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@MDP1702 The US and NATO countries have all kinds of exchanges going on. That includes engineers, test pilots, operational pilots, special forces, joint exercises, etc.
You won’t find anything online about most of what went on during those times, and a lot of the current exchange programs will never have openly-published articles because they are more boring nuts and bolts things.
My family worked on the post-stall maneuvering flight regime algorithms for what became the EFA/Eurofighter. The MiG-29 had everybody scared about post-stall performance, so it became a critical design feature for the next iteration of fighters.
In hindsight, we should have been far more focused on low observability and putting an AESA in the EFA, like France did with Rafale.
25 Billion euros for Rafale development is more than one of the JSF variants, which would probably correlate well for JSF-A and JSF-C programs, much like Rafale C and Rafale M for the Air Force and Navy Rafales. F-22 was $32.4 Billion for RDT&E.
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@missouriresole4726 They are completely different aircframes that share the same radars, basic engine configurations, sensors, CNI/CIP computer bank, and common inspection subsystems where possible. The airframes, wings, vertical tails, canopies, weapons bays, bulkheads, spanners, spars, landing gear, arresting gear (A has USAF arresting gear, B has none, C has carrier arresting gear), and other structural components are quite different.
The Integrated Power Pack is mostly common, and revolutionary. Cockpits are the same.
The best comparison for the Typhoon in terms of budget is the F-35A model. Development costs for the A model are less than the Typhoon, and unit costs are $62 million less per aircraft. F-35A survivability and lethality is superior to the Typhoon across the board, so with Typhoon, you pay way more for less capability up-front and during its service life.
Typhoon development costs were exacerbated by the multinational nature of the program, which we were directly involved in back in 1980-1982. It’s the whole reason we PCS’d to Munich in 1980, to go work with the Germans, Brits, Italians, French, and Spaniards on the new European Combat Aircraft.
Typhoon development and operational costs have gone way over budget, which always happens with these kinds of programs.
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@relativx9257 The Indian price matches the price advertised in a French documentary on Rafale before the Indian deal, as well as the Typhoon price.
Drivers of the cost for Rafale are:
1. Made in France with high labor and materials costs
2. Low production numbers
3. Twin engine
4. AESA radar
5. Advanced avionics
6. High quality construction using lots of carbon fiber and composites
Operational F-35A and B availability rates have been 70-95% and several NATO nations have already fulfilled alert fighter readiness missions in Iceland, deployed from Cyprus, and UAE for real-world operations with very high readiness rates.
Cost Per Flight Hour is the same for operational F-35A and Rafale, with different accounting methods being used for both.
Dassault said they will work hard to meet a $25,000 CPFH and 75% availability rate for India, without stating what the numbers are now.
In the press, F-35 CPFH numbers have been doubled. I looked up the very detailed DoD Comptroller aircraft hourly cost per flight hours, and F-35A was $17,333 including personnel salary.
What they're doing so they can get more money from Congress is inflating the worst-case numbers for what it would take to upgrade the existing Block 2 F-35s up to a future Block 4 or 5 standard, which is never going to happen since Block 2 are used for training and will never go to operational squadrons.
They're taking those estimations, and feeding them back into CPFH with an amortized number that isn't real.
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@eSpace-fr So EU is a unified block, right? Who provides the defense security for the EU States?
Who bails out the EU when the ECB allows loans to Greece, Portugal, and Ireland with the same lending standards given to France, while not even maintaining more than 4.5% minimum reserve requirements before 2008?
In case you haven't noticed, nations are drifting away from EU membership due to massive incompetence in banking, finance, defense, immigration, and EU laws imposed on domestic policies of the member states.
It's more accurate to see the EU as a propped-up continent by the US, across the financial, industrial, and military spheres that is taken for granted by the EU citizenry, who have their media filled with anti-US rhetoric by the Russians...thirsting after European sea ports and trade routes.
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@carthag1574 I’ve been studying acquisition and CPFH/O&M costs since the mid 1980s as reference. First of all, the CPFH figure you’re listing at 44,000 euros is simply so far off from being correct, I wonder where you saw that. If you were to convert that, it would be $52,360/hr. That’s $5,000 more than the F-22A CPFH!
Actual CPFH not including upgrades down the road is $17,963 per the 2021 DoD Comptroller’s extremely detailed reports. So now you would have to find an additional $24,000 to make that number work.
Especially in foreign nations who haven’t bought any of the Block II and early LRIP birds that have high projected (not purchased) upgrade costs to be brought up to Block 4 standards (which there is no reason to do since they are training conversion aircraft), the CPFH is much lower than the average fleet cost for all of US Dod with all its early F-35As, F-35Bs, and F-35Cs. If you try to correlate any of these costs from the whole US fleet, you will get totally false numbers.
Additionally, partner nations have been training in the US at Luke and other bases before even taking delivery of their fighters while waiting in the acquisition schedule.
Your figures for the Rafale are also way off by under $10,000. Dassault promised India that they will work hard with Indian Air Force to get Rafale’s CPFH down to $25,000 over the long-term. That doesn’t include ancillary systems like FLIR or Recce pods.
FLIR and recce are integral to the F-35, so you can’t separate them from operations and maintenance costs like you can with 4th gen fighters to "cook the numbers”.
Right now, operational F-35A squadrons have been seeing $21,000 CPFH, which is about $3,000 over the raw CPFH of $17,963. You can calculate those numbers by the expected service lives of each airframe and draw the long-term conclusions.
You mentioned availability next. Operational, later-production Block 3 F-35As have enjoyed availability rates from 70-95%.
Dassault promised India they will work hard with them to reach a 75% availability rate for the fighter itself, no mention of the ancillary FLIR or Recce pod systems.
Rafale also uses an advanced simulator with 180˚ immersive screen, not as immersive as the F-35 simulator, but still very modern. It is an integral part of the Rafale training process.
Rafale is more useful for a matching enemy? Rafale is not survivable against the F-35 in Air-to-Air, nor can it penetrate saturated IADS nets like the F-35 can. There are 3 times as many F-35s with 3 assembly lines and huge supply chains, as opposed to the Rafale, so the parts availability and long-term supply side is again in the F-35’s favor. This is just reality.
So in conclusion:
F-35 has less O&M costs with full-up systems integral to the air vehicle machine, while Rafale without pods is more expensive.
F-35 has about half the unit cost ($77.9 million vs $144 million).
F-35 has the same or better availability rates (70-95% proven vs 75% promised).
F-35 is more lethal and survivable.
F-35 has more supply-side support and will into the future by a large factor.
But you think Rafale would be a better choice?
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@fred9267 The US built a huge portion of the Russian military equipment. Talk about how Russia won WWII in the Pacific or North Africa or the Middle East.
For those of us who actually have been studying WWII for many decades, we understand that it was a global war with multiple theaters, and while the Germans were slaughtering Russians by the millions, the US was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific for years, AND supplying Russia with our industrial base.
We built 20% of their bombers, hundreds of thousands of trucks, thousands of fighters, tanks, medical supplies, rifles, radios, Avgas, uniforms, and food. If the US had not supported Russia with all those war materials via Lend Lease, one wonders what the duration of the Eastern Front would have been.
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@alexdarcydestsimon3767 F135 is the most reliable fighter engine ever built, not to mention the most powerful. There is cold hard math that supports that if you look at engine failure/flight hours. No other motor comes close. The next closest engine for reliability is the F119 in the F-22A, followed by F100-PW-229. These are indisputable numbers.
Electronics/avionics are the standard to beat for reliability, only a portion of which contribute to the "800 deficiencies" across 3 aircraft types (F-35A/B/C). F-16 has over 1000 deficiencies, not including pods and its ancillary combat systems. F-16 had the highest reliability rate of any fighters in USAF service until F-35A came along. Even the F-35B in USMC, RAF/RN, Italian, and Japanese service has much lower MMHPFH than the F-16. Again, the math in favor of all variants of the F-35 series out-performs the best legacy birds in service.
The cockpit has less failure nodes than any other fighter cockpit in the world, with more redundancy for critical navigation/instrumentation for bring-back, all on separate circuits for power and signals. Voice controls aren’t used much, if at all. Most of the important buttons are on the throttle and stick, while other interfaces are touch screen. In a high-g scenario doing BFM training, you don’t remove your hands from HOTAS anyway.
F-35A airframe structures are much stronger than legacy airframes and rated to 8000 hours service life, but stress-testing has exceeded 27,400 hours years ago without structural failure, so it exceeds the rated service life by greater than a factor of 3. That is not normal. Since it uses CF in many areas instead of Aluminum, it explains the increased durability and resilience to stresses.
You can see each one of these claims is not supported by reality.
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@user-jo7dd2jn5s Every historical source in the US begins with the US staying out of the Great War, other than sending shiploads of supplies.
Woodrow Wilson got reelected on the promise that he would keep America out of the war.
Then we discuss the U-Boats and sinking of ships, including the Lousitania with the passengers.
I've never even heard or seen the low-rate, minimalist info sources remotely claim the US fought throughout the Great War, since that would contradict the prominent political and international events related to the US.
England and France were begging us to do more, but Americans didn't want to get in foreign entanglements, so they set up the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to cause public anger. That still didn't do the trick. It wasn't until April, 1917 that the US Congress finally declared war on Germany.
Same with WWII. US was attacked in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, followed by declarations of war against us by Germany and Italy.
The Japanese had victory after victory in the Pacific, and the US still had not activated its industrial power or generated a sufficient military strength for multi-theater operations.
Since I was a kid, it was always about dealing with the Pacific first, then sending forces to North Africa after the British defeat by Rommel in North Africa in 1942, to stop Rommel from reaching the Suez Canal.
It's simple-mindedness on the part of Europeans thinking that the US even had the combat power it did in 1944, superimposed on 1939.
We didn't. The largest awakening of industrial capacity in human history happened after 1941, where the Nation rallied to build factories, tooling, and workforces to manufacture all the war material that would feed the Allied War machine in the coming years.
These are fundamental basics of WWII.
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