denel
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Correct. There is no shortage of parts; think of it like out of support/out of product lifecycle product; you keep, you maintain/evolve as you wish. That is the beauty of this scenario. As I said there are tonnes of part jigs lying at Atlas still which can be leveraged; if needed just connect with the folks there as there are still a lot of people around who part took in the Cheetah program; will be happy to build up the orders for parts; better to get complete new parts supply that salvaging off older planes.If France cannot supply parts then there is no problem. But if we are getting parts via a valid contract then it depends upon what is in the contract.
Correction, I did not work on Pak Mirages; my work was multi-prong specialising in secure link communications - including pioneering work on how to make links ECM proof; this work landed up as comms units on your Mirages and part of it is embedded in H2/H4s which makes one of the guidance modes completely ECM proof as you found out in Feb missions over india deploying these beauties. Additionally on architecting protocols for Threat Awareness and Weapons Assignment decision support to automate choice of weapon selection on Rooikat/rooivalk.You do understand that Denel has been a professional in this industry and worked on Pak Mirages? Should we take his word for it, or yours?
Arrogance is something that breaks down everything. It breaks down communication and it stops innovation and problem solving.
Many other pioneering works which i cannot say much about in vhf/hf manpacks, artillery, AAMs using TEWAs.
Because of my work, i was closely working with people at Atlas during a lot of prototyping and testing which required getting into the Cheetahs or M3s or F1s; i did not mention integration challenges in Cheetah for multi-facets of embedded systems. during this time i had seen how cheetah evolved out from m3 at atlas.
I did not do anything on the Impalas which were my softspot - similar in nature to K8s.
I digressed - now my passion is around deep learning for retinal problems - you will be unaware retinopathy is a major affliction during high Gs. So this has become my latest thesis area - working with several retina surgeons across 3 countries on this.
Alas that was my lifetime of work; i still smile when I get news of H2/H4 successes.
Unfortunately what i observed of PAF with their Mirages is complete lack of foresight going back 30 years back; it is this tunnel mindedness that has prevented innovation by non PAF engineers from taking the M3/5s to next level. Dont ask the French was our motto! They are the worst pimps you can get in this trade; instead we were all charged young men with engineering degrees who said we can do better as the outside world was against us, we will do better than them and without them - A middle finger to the europeans was our mantra and frankly we could not care; we had the soviets pivoting Mig23s against which our M3s were poor only F1s were up to the mark. Necessity was the mother of inventions. Our orders were make it better and clean slate given; no requirement but what was feasible which meant anything was doable.. No one from the airforce was part of the group; they were our customers. We presented our progress - options and solutions; that was it. They were there just to test and fly and report back every parameters. There were multiple entities part taking in the project each providing seperate frameworks. None but none answered or had air force personnel - we did not want pencil pushers or blockheads who stood between us and progress. This is what is lacking again and again in my humble opinion.
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