Arms companies fight over fighter moniker

Reuters ^ | Sep 9, 2011 | Jim Wolf

[sukhoi-30mki]

Arms companies fight over fighter moniker

7:03pm EDT

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A squabble among arms companies over what to call the world's most advanced warplanes could roil the competition for multibillion-dollar fighter contracts worldwide.

At issue is an esoteric term, "5th generation," to describe aircraft designed to dodge detection by enemy radar even when loaded with their weapons.

The term is applied first and foremost by aerospace experts to Lockheed Martin Corp's (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) F-22 and F-35 fighters, which are built to appear as small as a swallow on radar screens.

Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), whose F/A-18 Super Hornet is set to compete against Lockheed's F-35 worldwide, has been keen to suggest that the "5th generation" tag overstates any real-world advantages of the F-35, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter.

"I think it's fair to say that the '5th-generation' terminology is a marketing terminology," Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's chief executive for its defense business, told the Reuters Aerospace and Defense summit in Washington this week.

"We don't operate in a world today where it's an individual airplane against an individual threat," he said. "It's the combined forces and bringing all of those forces and their capabilities together."

Boeing, the Pentagon's No. 2 supplier by sales, is competing against Lockheed, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier, and the Eurofighter GmbH consortium for a potential $6 billion contract for about 40 fighters in Japan.

Boeing's offering is the Super Hornet, which it calls a combat-proven strike fighter with "built-in versatility."

Eurofighter is offering its multirole "Typhoon." It was selected as a finalist along with France's Dassault Rafale in a potential $11 billion

[sten]

in the 0bama years, the most expensive, least capable, will win the award

of course there is a bonus if it’s foreign made

[spetznaz]

Ironically, based on the original description of a ‘5th generation fighter’ described during the ATF program that gave rise to the YF-22 and YF-23, as well as the follow on material on the production F-22; based on that description the F-35 is not a 5th generation fighter. The F-35 only meets two criteria- sensor fusion (of which the F-35 has done a good job) and stealth (and even then not at the level the Raptor has since the JSF program that gave the X-32 and X-35, and the follow on F-35, was supposed to spawn a ‘cheap-er’ aircraft to come and mop up once the deep IADS penetrators - namely the F-22 and B-2 - sanitised he crazier defences ....basically it was a stealth-y bomb truck under the original ATF + JSF paradigm, with the ATF being the hunter killer and the JSF the janitor). Anyways, strictly speaking the only 5th generation fighter operational so far is the F-22.

[Yo-Yo]

OK, let's see:

1^st Generation: Externally braced biplane.
2^nd Generation: Internally braced metal monoplane
3^rd Generation: Jet propulsion
4^th Generation: HUD and other electronics
5^th Generation: The airplane I'm trying to sell today.

Read the tagline...

[spetznaz]

Hahahaha