bob sterman wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 7:59 am
EACLucifer wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 5:28 pm
From what I can gather, the Typhoon isn't actually mechanically much - if at all - worse than the Gripen at short field operations, it's that Sweden heavily emphasise short-field operation compared to most nations using Typhoon. Remember that Typhoon was considered for the QE class carriers for a format where the aircraft would have taken off without catapult assistance (STOBAR), which gives you a clue as to their short-field capabilities. Most canard configuration aircraft with decent thrust to weight are very good at quick takeoffs, and for the landings Typhoons do have a brake chute.
Some discussion among pilots of the Bronk article on PPRuNe...
https://www.pprune.org/military-aviatio ... n-out.html
Some debate there about whether the Typhoon with underslung air intakes is more vulnerable to sucking in debris from short rough poorly maintained runways.
I'm not going to go over that discussion too much, as it's covered there and in other places, but there are a couple of things I'd add, which are applicable to military aid in general.
The first is exaggerating the differences between systems. Gripen has very good short field performance, but it ends up becoming "the one with good short field performance", which can lead people to assuming that everything else falls well short. Similar can be found in tank discussions - Challenger is "the one with the very thick armour", ignoring that very similar armour is found on the Abrams and others worldwide. No platforms is perfect or good at everything, and platforms should be viewed as tools to be used by the ZSU to achieve their goals. More capable tools give more options as to how to use them, but very seldom will one platform radically change things on its own.
The second is that delivering military aid is a process, it isn't just find half a dozen Typhoons, or a dozen tanks or whatever and hand them over. One criticism of the idea of sending tanks is that Ukrainian armoured recovery vehicles would struggle with the weight - but those paying attention will have noted that pledges aren't just MBTs, support vehicles, including ARVs, are promised too. Providing jets is a medium term goal, which means we aren't talking about jets as they exist now flown by pilots as they exist now from runways as they exist now. When discussion turned to jets, Ukrainian officials started talking about building/improving runways for them. Likewise with armaments, there's time to work on that. Famously the GBU-28 guided bunker-buster was designed, manufactured and deployed in three weeks during Desert Storm. There's time to say what weapons are needed, and how can they be fitted? The obvious ones to consider are long range standoff munitions (JASSM, Storm Shadow/Scalp EG, KEPD 350 etc) and fire and forget ground attack weapons, with Brimstone the obvious candidate as it can be used without exposing the jet to the risk of MANPADS. There's time to work out an optimum package of jets, pilot training, ground crew training, armaments, basing and so on.
And just to repeat a couple of things from the thread linked, Typhoons do operate off fairly rough surfaces in some countries, and MiG-29s and Su-27s already in use have low-mounted intakes.