Canada to buy used Australian hornets

[YukonPete 586]

25 minutes ago, Chock said:

Well that's kind of what LM were trying to achieve at Paris with the F-35 when they were talking about its flight demo at LeBourget. Just have a read of some of the nonsense in this link to an Aviation Week article about its LeBourget routine:

http://aviationweek.com/defense/f-35-demo-pilot-paris-performance-will-crush-years-misinformation

The bit about doing an afterburner take off and going into a vertical climb supposedly being a move 'unique to the F-22 and the F-35' is laughable. I've seen all kinds of jet fighters do that at airshows numerous times, I even saw a Sepecat Jaguar do it once, and that's not even a fighter lol. I'm sure pretty much everyone else who has ever been to a half decent airshow in the past thirty years has seen military jets pulling that one off, certainly it is a MiG 29 favourite which most people will have witnessed when they're not busy colliding with one another during their displays lol. Tt's a party trick, and a cool one to watch of course, but it doesn't mean diddly squat in terms of what would happen in combat

Sure the F-35 has a lot more sophisticated linked avionics from other aircraft than previous combat aircraft, which absolutely will aid in its situational awareness, and that is cool for sure, however... The notion they were first claiming for the F-35 - when it was posited by many critics that it wouldn't be as good a dogfighter as previous generation fighters - whereby it supposedly would never need to dogfight because it would take everything out at long range thanks to its super-duper missiles (yeah right, where've we heard that one before eh?), is one they are now trying to backpedal on, claiming it is awesome in a dogfight when it supposedly won't need to do that, is preposterous. The idea that the F-35 can be a substitute for everything from the A-10 Thunderbolt to the F-15 Eagle is just as laughable for the F-35 as it is for every other MRCA, they are by their very definition a compromise.

I suspect Canada will be a lot better off with some refurbished Super Hornets than they would with the F-35.

Its not super hornets Canada are going to buy from Australia. Its 30 year old Classic A&B models

[ShawnG 1,823]

I might have a weird understanding of physics, but isnt it harder to perform tight aerobatics on afterburner, rather than easier?

[Chock 17,769]

3 minutes ago, YukonPete said:

Its not super hornets Canada are going to buy from Australia. Its 30 year old Classic A&B models

I was under the impression they were getting both, some of the old ones and some of the later variants, is that not the case? If it is, then that's a bit naff, although to be fair, providing they have the airframe hours, the older model is still a pretty good combat aeroplane although less capable in what it can do of course.

[YukonPete 586]

15 minutes ago, Cactus521 said:

There was a story I once read about a Canadian ground soldier in WWII, in a 1975 January Reader's Digest.  He was called the "Pied Piper", and he was a very brave soul indeed, he could not get into the service any other way and he marched is way up to the stamina required for a soldier and his camarades.  I think you can even buy a used copy of this book online.  The Canadian Air Force is our front line defense for Nato and it's important to be kept in it's prime.  I live near Luke where the pilots are now trained on the F-35, don't know if Canadian pilots are there yet or not.

John

No I doubt Canadian pilots are at Luke in the JSF program. I do know they have Australian Pilots trained and now working as F35A Instructors at Luke AFB.  This is a 2016 Australian 60 minutes story on the Australian pilots at Luke AFB and the F35.  

 

[Chock 17,769]

At least we'll have something in common with air forces which buy the F-35. Like them, we're all beta testing an expensive product from Lockheed Martin in need of some patches too. 

[YukonPete 586]

3 minutes ago, Chock said:

I was under the impression they were getting both, some of the old ones and some of the later variants, is that not the case? If it is, then that's a bit naff, although to be fair, providing they have the airframe hours, the older model is still a pretty good combat aeroplane although less capable in what it can do of course.

No Australia has 24 Super Hornets and 12 EA-18 Growler  Super Hornets and they are not for sale. Australia purchased them as a stop gap when they retired the F111 but have since decided to keep them all, They have only been in service a few years and the 12 EA-18 Growlers Super Hornets was only just delivered. 

[Chock 17,769]

9 minutes ago, YukonPete said:

No Australia has 24 Super Hornets and 12 EA-18 Growler  Super Hornets and they are not for sale. Australia purchased them as a stop gap when they retired the F111 but have since decided to keep them all, They have only been in service a few years and the 12 EA-18 Growlers Super Hornets was only just delivered. 

Right. Well, in that case, maybe Canada should have got some MiGs or Sukhois, it'd have been far more bang for their bucks and they could probably have had new airframes too. I'm pretty sure they can be wired up for western avionics and weaponry and at least a MiG-29 can out-turn an F-15, then again it needs to since it has an exhaust plume you can see from ten miles away lol.

[YukonPete 586]

8 minutes ago, Chock said:

Right. Well, in that case, maybe Canada should have got some MiGs or Sukhois, it'd have been far more bang for their bucks and they could probably have had new airframes too. I'm pretty sure they can be wired up for western avionics and weaponry and at least a MiG-29 can out-turn an F-15, then again it needs to since it has an exhaust plume you can see from ten miles away lol.

I think Canada should just buy Typhoons or something. Its funny here as some people in Canada say we should just design and build our own fighter. But that's unrealistic and per unit cost would be crazy! Would make the F35 look cheap. 

[Chock 17,769]

Pretty much any combat aeroplane is going be cheaper than the F-35 to procure, that much is clear. Perhaps Canada might be better off going with those old Hornets for a few years and then maybe doing a deal to license-build the Sukhoi Su-57? Such a move would provide jobs and doubtless be cheaper than either the F-35 or the F-22, or pretty much any other contender for that matter.

The Su-57 will almost certainly be a far better aeroplane than either the F-22 or the F-35. If the UK has any sense, they'll look at doing the same thing as a replacement for the Typhoon instead of staying with the F-35B, which is clearly always going to be a bit limited in capability courtesy of its STOVL functionality; there is little doubt that with some electromagnetic launchers and arrestor wires fitted, the Su-57 would easily be able to operate off the UK's two new carriers as well as from its land bases and be a far more capable warplane than the F-35B is ever going to be, in addition to providing a shot in the arm for its aviation industry.

There is no reason that either Canada or any other country has to stay with only procuring US-built warplanes, they should look at what suits them best in terms of industry as well as military capability. And it's not as if western countries such as the UK haven't considered this before; back when the Eurofighter project was looking shaky for a while, the RAF did apparently give serious consideration to getting the MiG-29, albeit with different engines.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Pretty much any combat aeroplane is going be cheaper than the F-35 to procure, that much is clear. Perhaps Canada might be better off going with those old Hornets for a few years and then maybe doing a deal to license-build the Sukhoi Su-57? Such a move would provide jobs and doubtless be cheaper than either the F-35 or the F-22, or pretty much any other contender for that matter.

I actually agree with you, I think a license to build Sukhoi's in Canada would be awesome using Canadian designed avionics...HOWEVER, it would put Canada's membership in NATO and NORAD at risk. Canada needs to remain a solid partner in NORAD to be able to defend that continent and using Sukhoi's to do that wouldn't work for the other NORAD partner.

Also Russia sends Sukhoi's over the arctic to test Canada's NORAD response so responding to Sukhoi's with Sukhoi's is a bad idea, and if it was an actuall attack then the American's wouldn't be able to tell which nation's Sukoi's is which, and just shoot them all down.

[pete_auau 1,154]

11 hours ago, HighBypass said:

That version of the F-35 doesn't hover so it will hoon around better due to less weight. HOWEVER, I'm sorry but that display was.... lacklustre... mediocre. I saw nothing in that display which an F-4 Phantom couldn't manage - maybe the slow flybys might have been a little slower than an F-4, but nope, nothing to see there.  Heck I was more impressed by this Starfighter video!

Now, if we're talking Sukhois....  the F-35 had better be able to destroy any adversary at BVR, because if it gets up close, then this beast can point it's nose wherever it needs to... and you may be able to buy his mate too for the cost of one F-35..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfYElZi9QTk

 

maybe  but  first  you have  to  get  radar  lock  on the f35   and  see  where   he  is  first  not  that easy  to  do

[Murmur 3,941]

8 hours ago, ShawnG said:

I might have a weird understanding of physics, but isnt it harder to perform tight aerobatics on afterburner, rather than easier?

For a given speed, the tighter the turn, the more lift is required. But more lift means more (induced) drag, so you need all the thrust you can have to overcome the increased drag in a tight turn.

For example, in an F16C with a typical air-to-air load and full afterburner, at the tighest sustained turn radius, all the engine thrust is used to overcome the additional induced drag.

Also, a heavier aircraft requires of course more lift for the same g-load, and again that requires more thrust, and that is the reason why a fighter max sustained turn radius is tighter the lighter the fighter is.

 

[ubersu 78]

23 hours ago, paddler said:

You are so out of the true fact zone here that you owe it to yourself to re-educate yourself. Start by a google search of "JTF 2 Presidential Unit Citation". That is just a sample of Canadian participation in joint and combined operations since Korea.

The JTF2 deployment that got a citation was a relief operation in Haiti - which is precisely what I wrote with regard to non-combat operations. Most Canadian operations have been supporting operations for domestic political reasons.How does that affect Canada's need for advanced fighter aircraft?

DJ

[Chock 17,769]

13 hours ago, ShawnG said:

I might have a weird understanding of physics, but isnt it harder to perform tight aerobatics on afterburner, rather than easier?

What you are probably thinking is, in exactly the same way as with a car, it is harder to turn tighter at higher speeds since you have to alter the trajectory and overcome inertia. But also as with a car, speed will bleed off in a turn unless you keep the throttle open; it is the same with a fighter plane.

As you probably know, close in 'dogfighting' fighter combat is all about energy, either energy right at that moment in the form of speed, or potential energy in the form of height which you can turn into speed by diving, or the ability of an engine to accelerate the thing to speed quickly in order to change your position vertically (i.e. using more fuel as energy), or the ability of the aircraft to bleed off energy quickly if necessary to make it more 'pointable' (i.e. allowing your controls to produce more effective energy). This has been true since the days of Sopwith Camels versus Fokker Triplanes and is just as true today.

Altitude will bleed off in a turn too since you trade the lift vector into a turning force when you bank an aeroplane. So unless you compensate for those losses of energy (speed and height) whilst whizzing around in your jet fighter, you will end up in trouble. How you compensate for that loss of energy, is by providing energy to sustain things with your fuel, i.e. you give it some throttle. More modern combat jets can employ thrust vectoring to help with that too.

Let's take for example a very well known combat jet aeroplane, the F-16 Fighting Falcon (or Viper as its pilots call it). This is still perhaps the best turning fighter there is; it can out-turn pretty much any other jet fighter in the world when lightly loaded, but it is not quite a simple as that in combat, the F-16's super turn rate comes at some cost (fuel), so we have to consider a few things even when we disregard any weapons slung under the thing.

Fighters have an instantaneous turn rate, i.e. how quickly they can snap into a turn, which is a function of how fast their roll and pitch rate is and how high an angle of attack they can hold before the wing stalls. Fighters have a sustained turn rate too, i.e. how tight they can turn and maintain that turn. An F-16 will sustain a turn tightest (i.e. the smallest radius) at between about 330 and 380 knots, when it will be pulling about 5.5G, but to sustain that, it might have to kick in some afterburner because otherwise it will bleed off speed. This means in a turning fight, if its adversary can keep it stuck in that turn and not need to use its own afterburner, then eventually the F-16 will have to break out of that turn and run away, or it will not have enough fuel to return to base, and if it does that, it will present its hot tailpipe to the other aeroplane and be going in a straight line and that'd be asking for a heat seeking missile up your rear end.

To give you an idea of how much fuel a jet fighter uses on full afterburner, imagine this: take twenty coke bottles and fill them all with water, then tip them all upside down at the same time. All that water starts pouring out; that's the rate at which most fighter plane jet engines are using up fuel when on full afterburner. As you can imagine, at that rate it is no surprise most jet fighters will be out of gas in less than ten minutes if they keep that up, which is why most modern jets are now incorporating 'supercruise', i.e. they can go past Mach 1 without employing afterburner.

But much of this stuff is more for cool movies than for real life combat anyway, since any modern combat operation will try to knock out fighters on the ground, or jam them so that they never have to be engaged at all; then you can get on with bombing the hell out of your enemy and have ground troops move in to mop things up. As they say: 'fighter pilots make movies, bomber pilots make history'.

This is why when you see a jet fighter wowing crowds at airshows with its afterburners lit up like a Christmas tree as it turns on a sixpence, it is very misleading as to how good or bad it'd be in real combat if it needed to fight for more than ten minutes and actually still have enough fuel on board to not make its mission a one way trip. And this is a problem not just against fighters; for most modern combat aeroplanes, surface to air missiles and flak are a far greater threat, which is why all modern combat aeroplanes are concentrating on stealth capabilities in the hope that they'll never actually get shot at, which of course would be the ideal situation.

But that will only get you so far, after all, you can't jam an anti-aircraft shell, the best you can do is to try to jam its targeting radar, but that won't stop a gun crew from having a good guess and firing at you anyway, and if your 40 million Dollar jet fighter got shot down by a lucky shot from a soldier with a 40 Dollar AK-47 and a 40 cent bullet, then it wouldn't be the first time that kind of thing has happened. Nevertheless, jamming and stealth will do a lot to stop missiles from being lobbed at you, which is really where something like the F-35 has an advantage, however, it would still need the ability to dodge missiles, since many of these can be optically guided, and you can't jam that sort of guidance with your fancy stealth-shaped aeroplane.

Sustained turn rate is what makes fighters able to out-turn missiles, for example, an S-75 V-750 Dvina missile (aka the SA-2 Guideline in NATO parlance) is perhaps the most well-known surface to air missile of all time; it was used extensively in the Vietnam War and it has been responsible for downing loads of aircraft over the years, including most famously, Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk in 1960 (what most people don't mention about that incident is the Soviets had to launch 14 SA-2 missiles at him to gain a hit and even then one of those missiles hit one of their own MiG-19s which was attempting to intercept him, but it was nevertheless a shock to the Americans that a missile was able to get up high enough to hit Powers).

The S-75 missile has two rocket motors, one which burns for about four seconds to launch it, the other burns for about 22 seconds and boosts it up to a speed of about Mach 3, which will take it up to around 65,000 feet. At Mach 3, if that missile tries to turn to intercept something, it can end up easily pulling forces of 25G since there is no pilot on board who'd black out under such massive force. This sounds impressive and might lead you to think that a fighter which can only pull about 9G would be screwed. However, even though an F-16 can pull 9G instantaneously, yet can't sustain it, it actually turns best at 5.5G, which might lead one to believe it'd be really screwed against such a missile, but that isn't so, because if you time a turn correctly, a 5.5G turn at 350 knots is vastly tighter than a 25G turn at Mach 3.

This is true for air to air combat too; modern fighters such as the MiG-29, the Eurofighter and the F-35 have helmet-mounted targeting systems, where you can gain a lock on an aircraft which is off-boresight from your fighter jet simply by turning your head and pressing the lock button when you have a lock tone, but just because your tracking radar can lock it up simply by having you looking at that enemy with your funky new helmet sight, that only means your radar dish is turned toward the enemy and is tracking it, it doesn't mean you can launch your Sidewinder or whatever and expect it to make a turn at Mach 2 which will hit that fighter turning at much tighter than the missile could ever turn when it comes off the rail, when that fighter you locked up is turning much tighter at a mere 350 knots. Thus being able to turn your aeroplane tighter is still what matters in air to air combat if you want to guarantee a missile hit, regardless of how fancy your targeting system is.

Thus the ability to pull massive G is not the important factor, it's the ability to sustain high enough G to give you the best turn rate which matters, and for that, you do need to use more thrust in any aeroplane, just as you have to push the throttle up a bit in your Cessna 152 when you put that into a turn.

[HighBypass 2,339]

18 hours ago, Chock said:

The bit about doing an afterburner take off and going into a vertical climb supposedly being a move 'unique to the F-22 and the F-35' is laughable....

cough... English Electric Lightning...  cough.. in service 1960. ....   just saying...