Posted on 04/19/2014 9:32:47 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Her her her.
The Russian high/low concept seems valid, and like something the US was trying to do with the F-16 as the "low" in quantity. Dunno what happened to the "high".
Not enough F-22s around to matter that much on that end, and the F-15s are falling apart from what I hear.
The Navy used to have the F-18 and F-14, but no longer.
A lemon is a POS that is constant trouble. The MT does not sound remotely like that. And the Russians already know how to maintain the 29. Sounds like they got a bunch of perfectly fine new airplanes.
With used frames.
“...16 MiG-29SMT fighters. Under the deal, said to be worth $473 million...”
$30 a plane. Is that reasonable?
Yes. It's hard to find anything under 50 bucks these days.
Thanks for the threads you post. I really enjoy reading them.
From what I understand their tanks were 160 degrees inside. No AC. The theory? In an all out war all factories would be destroyed so they settled for stick shifts rather than wait for parts that wouldn’t arrive.
Read it again. Unissued airframes from earlier builds, never completed. Does that mean used to you?
The US does not currently have a twin engine fighter comparable to the Mig-29 for cost comparison. Two engines do cost more.
Much of the low cost of the early F-16 vanished with all the radar and other bits that got added onto it. Sounds like the Mig-29MT comes fully equipped.
It does not have stealth technology. If you can see it, you can kill it.
Were I a buyer, the older airframe would concern me. From what I’ve read, the early Fulcrum’s airframe was designed with the Soviet philosophy of “disposable” hardware. As such, the airframe life on those early birds were pretty low - less than 3,000 flight hours, IIRC.
That’s just my amateur opinion, of course.
To claim stealth capability as so much a force multiplier is about as credible as to say a digital camo coat makes one invisible and invulnerable to enemy fire. There are newer more sensitive radar technology these days making stealth capabilities less appealing, not to mentions improved ir and optical sensors which makes no difference between F-16 and F-35.
Mig company is a Soviet leftover. Their lust undistutably successful design was Mig-21 and they got stuck in a 1960s mentality.
Aircraft were rather inexpensive at the time and durability of aircframes weren’t of big concern as well, because technology advanced rapidly. They build thousands of fighters in no time and in a few years they were scraped as absolete, about time or earlier than they started to fall apart.
Needless to say that it has changed in 1970s as aircraft became more complex and expensive and their approach hasn’t worked ever since.
Mig-23 was an attempt to build a rather sophisticated airplane under that same mass production concept and it wasn’t that much successful and it only went worse with 4th generation Mig-29, designed and marketed as a cheaper and smaller alternative to Su-27 by Sukhoi.
used frames will have a higher failure rate from all the stresses they’ve already been through. metal fatigue.
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