Q
The point that gambit is making: and a very valid one at that is that experience or not, if your fighter and its avionics impose laborious tasks on you as against a fighter where most tasks are conducted by computer, you would lose to the less labour intensive fighter. However, we have seen hybrids of this plane where they have retained the frame with its advantages, yet changed that avionics suite with western ones, which might make the task easier for the fighter.I would like Gambit to comment on this aspect . In Short how would the US fighters fare against a Ruski/wesern hybrid ala MKI?
Araz
In short, it would be a tough fight.
For the long answer...The more equal the hardware, the greater the burden upon the human to achieve victory. The only way to gauge the human is to remove as much non-human factors as possible. That mean it should be F-15 against F-15, for example. But since we know this can only happen in a tightly controlled environment, hardware parity usually implies that for matching features, such as thrust vs weight ratio or roll rate, there should not be a difference outside of an agreed upon percentage cut-off. But then again, it begs the question of who is going to determine that agreed upon cut-off? On the other hand, the F-15 pretty much set the standard when it established itself as the premier hardware that has a greater than 1:1 thrust vs weight ratio. No one told the manufacturer to make such an aircraft else there would be no contract. No one agreed to it but it happened anyway. Same for off boresight queuing system. No one agreed to it but the feature became a necessity if one is gain 'world class' stature. So if we have a fighter that has exceptional reserve engine power going up against a fighter whose targeting mechanism is limited by the pilot's neck muscles, there is no way to determine which hardware carries the greatest burden to achieve victory. It will come down to the humans themselves to pit their wits against each other in trying to force their opponents to fight under disadvantageous rules.
The greatest asset for Western avionics, from my experience at seeing US and Soviet/Russian avionics outside of the 'bench' environment, is that Western avionics are more dependent upon and more demanding of sensor inputs than Soviet/Russian avionics. For example, all aircrafts require three axis sensors: pitch, roll and yaw -- gyros. But US avionics would demand greater sensitivity from the gyros and accelerometers than what we have seen from examining Soviet/Russian avionics under the 'bench' testing environment. The field result is that even though the Soviet/Russian aircraft may have a higher roll rate, the American aircraft will have a
QUICKER response to a pilot's roll command that increase his odds of forcing the Soviet/Russian aircraft into a disadvantageous position
SOONER into a fight. And when we have missiles that can reach double digit Mach in less than two seconds, the sooner your opponent is in a disadvantaged position, the sooner you win.
There is a limit on how far we can adapt Western avionics into Soviet/Russian airframes and have no doubt we have tried when we bought and examine Soviet era fighters after the USSR collapsed. Airframe characteristics and flight behaviors are not consistent, else all aircrafts would look exactly alike. That higher roll rate could be the result of airframe characteristics rather than from flight control computer programming, therefore there would be negligible or even no advantage at all in the adaptation. If airframe characteristics and flight behavior do not matter, we would have seen the resurrection of the MIG-21, a formidable turning fighter, but with fly-by-wire FLCS and this would make the new MIG-21 practically unbeatable.
On the other hand, because we are more dependent upon sensor inputs, electrical and air data, our avionics are easier to modify and integrate into more diverse hardwares. That is why the F-117's avionics are from the F-16, whose avionics set the standards for fly-by-wire FLCS worldwide. To this day, people still underestimate that significance to aviation. Fly-by-wire FLCS are extremely sensor dependent and the greater the precision, .001 versus .0001, the
QUICKER the response in any axis. The F-117's airframe characteristics and flight behaviors are more amenable than the MIG-21 to the built-in flexibility of the F-16's avionics. The F-16 and the F-117 airframes are inherently unstable. The MIG-21 is not. That mean its maneuverability is airframe limited, so installing an avionics system that can adapt extremely quickly to an inherently unstable airframe would not yield any performance gain and of course not cost effective at all.
The MKI is an excellent aircraft in terms of airframe and avionics. But it does have limitations and environments like Red Flag or the Cope exercises are supposed to reveals how those limitations can expand beyond the paper specs into the combat situations. The wise thing to do is to continuously expose as many MKI pilots as possible of those limitations. Of course the price is that others would know of them as well. Why do you think the US is always eager to play the 'bad guys' to the host countries anywhere in the world besides Red Flag?