What is you opinion about AESA for JFT, th Chinese one shown or any other western AESA like Vixon or Reaven from Selex?
There are two types of radar users for whom no system is ever adequate: air traffic controllers and fighter pilots.
It does not matter if you are at a regional municipal airport, you want the type and size of the radar the guys at large international airports uses. It does not matter if you fly the latest or a 20-yr old fighter design. You want to know who is coming from which direction, how fast, how high, and from as far away as possible. From this perspective, regardless of vendor, if the system is an AESA, you must investigate.
Most air forces today are defensive in posture, meaning they have limited reach beyond domestic airspace. This is all the more reason a force at a defensive posture should have the best eyes available. No ground force ignores attacks from the third dimension, therefore, control of the sky is paramount, even when one's forces are defensive in posture. If an adversary is uncertain on the safety of his ground forces due to intelligence that his air force may not be able to hold the necessary air corridors and/or airspace territory, he may not attack or alter his ground plans enough that may sway the war in your favor.
Which one you think will be better in terms of capabilities Chinese or Selex?
This is problematic. Published specs are always optimistic, and when the technical details are secret, you have no way of telling if the sales brochure is telling the whole truth until you are able to secure a private demonstration assessed by your own experts, from pilots to engineers to scientists.
I cannot give you any opinion in any direction. But just as I posted earlier, the potentials of the AESA platform is so great that if a vendor advertises an AESA, you are compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is telling the truth, or at least mostly the truth, until you are able to secure that private demonstration.
Absent that private demonstration, the next best hint is experience. So here you have to look at who is the newcomer to the AESA field. I understand that as a patriot, you want the best for your country. But intellectual honesty do not allow me to make that comparison in the absence of third party testing, which we know will not happen. You have no choice but to trust that your government will audition the candidates objectively.
However, in the interests of layman discussion, some high level clues can be useful.
Range. An AESA platform does not automatically have superior range over the classical mechanical dish/planar designs. But the real desirable advantage when range matters is how much less power an AESA system need to produce target resolutions at the same range as the classical mechanical dish/planar designs. In other words, less power for the same results means better response time --
FOR YOU.
Situational awareness. If a four-ship attacker can gang up on one victim -- they will do it. One to kill, the other three to deter the victim's mates. Four against one make for a quicker kill, which mean the same four attackers can more quickly reorient themselves against the next singular victim. We do this at Red Flag regularly. What this mean is that the
MINIMUM tracking any combat radar system must be able to do is four. No less. An AESA system should have no problem doing six.
The four-ship patrol is standard.
https://theaviationist.com/2014/01/29/f15-vs-mig-23/
BARCAP (BARrier Combat Air Patrol) whose aim was to protect the zone between the Iraq and Iran borders, 24 hours in each day of the week.
On Jan. 28, 1991 one of this BARCAP was flown by four F-15s belonging to the “Wolfhounds” of the 32nd TFS (Tactical Fighter Squadron) from Soesterberg,...
If some mechanical system can track six, so should the AESA candidate.
Multi functionality. In auditioning an AESA candidate, said AESA system should have no problem performing true airborne targets multi-tasking. Track-While-Scan (TWS) is fake in the classical mechanical systems and any experienced pilot can tell. That same pilot would be able to know when the AESA system is performing two or more air tasks at the same time. Ground mapping is time intensive and usually requires stable flight. An AESA system must be able to perform ground mapping while monitoring the sky for potential threats that would interrupt that ground mapping process. Multi functionality is the most critical and time consuming assessment, which inevitably requires the most experienced pilots to test.
Maintenance. The higher the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), the better. But you are going to pay for that. Part of maintenance is modularity of components, which results in how quickly can the aircraft return to flight status after a maintenance action. Part of maintenance is service contract since you are buying from a foreign source.
Again...You have no choice but to trust that your government will exercise due diligence. The audition will not be in one day or even one yr. Every vendor know you are reviewing multiple candidates that may come from countries that are hostile to each other, which inevitably brings in politics.
How big boost it will be for PAF for facing IAF?
If the Indians do not have the same capability, then Pakistan will have a noticeable edge. But if the Indians have AESA, then Pakistan would be foolish for going PESA. You either be superior or match.
