SBD-3
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2008
- Messages
- 15,120
- Reaction score
- -9
- Country
- Location
I was not aware of the YFC-1e being a confirmed project, let alone cancelled. Maybe I missed something.
However, I beg to differ about the stealthy and stealth aircrafts not making it big in most airforces.
For example, the F-35 is being sold to Australia, Denmark, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Israel. And these are just the initial customers. Singapore and Saudi Arabia might also get a few of them eventually. Next comes Russia, India and China. That makes up a bulk of the airforces of the world. So, as you can see, the air forces are switching to stealth and stealthy aircrafts. As time goes by, more and more air forces will be incorporating stealth technologies.
yet these airfrafts will incorporate stealth only to the extent of US exports limit. (I remeber a statement by Boeign's CEO that they would have to water down the SE to make it allowable stealth export limits imposed by US DoD. You would have also remembered the dispute between UK and US on not handing over the source codes to UK. So we wont see true F-35 flying in world airforces, instead something like F-35Ex . The F-35s acquired by USAF and USN will be more potent than the export variants. There are also certain risks of technology leakages when an aircraft is mass exported (like F-35). US have other safe avenues (B-2 and F-22) but Russia only has PAK-FA at the moment. Even Chinese will be very interesting in getting hands and look on it and tweak their weapons accordingly and mass export will serve this purpose just fine. But Russians aint that stupid, look even with India, they have restricted their partnership to orignal stake (25% i guess) and did not expanded this. Its just too risky to export your lone critical advantage