Comments by "VisibilityFoggy" (@VisibilityFoggy) on "PilotPhotog" channel.

  1.  @hansstopfer878  - Serial production? There are 12 of them built, India left the project, and Russia has only committed to buying 6 per year, which will inevitably be reduced. The Su-57's legacy will be that of a testbed platform. A very slick looking testbed, but a testbed nonetheless.
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  2. I know a lot of people are arguing that the YF-23 should have been put into production over the Raptor, but you're forgetting the acquisition mentality at the time. The ATF program also included the Navy through their NATF program, which was looking for a replacement for the F-14. The F-22 would have been able to be navalized for carrier usage while (I forget all the technical reasoning) the YF-23 either couldn't or shouldn't have been navalized. This was a major point in the decision-making process. We all know, of course, what happened – politicians wanted to fight wars in the middle east instead of preparing for America's next Cold War against an empowered China. So here we are, still producing F-15 airframes in 2020. The USAF got a much smaller piece of the Raptor pie than they wanted, and the Navy didn't get a slice at all.
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  3. The problem with the Tigershark was that it was based on a platform that was already getting long in the tooth. Northrop was trying to squeeze every last drop out of the F-5. The USAF needed a light fighter purpose-built for the mission with a long upgrade path ahead. Had the F-20 been built instead of the F-16, you can bet it would not still be being built in 2020. Its upgrade path was a brick wall compared to the F-16.
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  4. You mean the Lavi? Suggest you research the J-10. ;)
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  5.  @米空軍パイロット  - Canards are not good for RCS concerns. Adding them to the Su-30MKI and forward variants instead of straight thrust vectoring always struck me as a mistake.
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  6. It won't have the cool paint schemes. Stealth coating is pretty bland. ;)
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  7. The PLAAF has left the chat...
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  8.  Grug Crusader  - Actually, the J-20 is generally considered to be more of a copy of the defunct MiG-1.44 program than the F-22. The airframes have very little in common, beginning with the fact that the J-20 has canards, which are definitively horrible for stealth purposes.
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  9. Ha. And who knew in 2020 they'd both still be open.
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  10. Israel operated the delta wing Mirage III and Mariage V, and built a tech demonstrator of the IAI Lavi, which resembled a "regular size" F-16 but with a delta wing configuration. It was an indigenous project that, under the hood, did not resemble the F-16 all that much, though aesthetically looked very similar from the exterior. There are some who believe the IAI Lavi plans were leaked to the Chinese who used them to build the J-10.
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