Spot on. Although the rafale are good I still feel it was a very expensive purchase and not inline with the rest of the IAF. India would be much better doing a joint project with Russia.
I agree.
With the Su-30MKI they added a lot of non Russian bits and at the time those choices were made it was a good choice because at that time the Russians still had fairly basic fighters in service and they would not have been able to make the Su-35 we see now as good as it is.
But time has moved on and Russian Avionics have moved forward in leaps and bounds and as shown in Syria and Ukraine that Russian EW and technology is much better than it was even 13 years ago during the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia.
These days the foreign and domestic components of the Su30MKI as well as the local production/assembly just contribute to making it much more expensive and really don't add any new capabilities or improve performance.
An Su-35 that Russia would sell to India (and probably no other country) is better than any Su-30MKI upgrade, and if India want a two seat model they are upgrading their own Su-30s to Su-35 standard anyway... they could have a mix of single and two seat planes if they want them.
What I am saying is that at the time the foreign bits were likely much better than the Russian alternatives if there were Russian alternatives to the bits they bought, but the price was that integration and especially price suffered... perhaps 20% of parts were foreign but 80% of the price was those 20% of parts.
Having a demanding customer forced them to be better... it was a good thing for Sukhoi too.
Maybe they join the new checkmate fighter program and India can easily put their own twist on their versions.
Well that could be a problem. This programme is being paid for by a country... speculated to be the UAE but might be another country... hell it might be Saudi Arabia and that is why it is being kept secret. The point is that a joint venture between Russia and India then India gets a say in the design but they have to pay for it. With a UAE programme India is not going to contribute more than the UAE so they might have to settle for paying for their own modification variant where the get the basic plane that UAE wants and they pay for changes... a bit like the Su-30 programme where they took an Su-30MK and India could choose what to change and the final product was an Indian aircraft and they could decide who could buy it if it was exported to a third country.
It all depends on how the Su-75 programme is structured... the whole programme might already be suitably funded and they just want final product customers to boost production numbers to keep the costs low because the UAE is not going to buy thousands of these aircraft, but if there is as much interest as there is from this forum they might get a dozen countries to buy this plane... for 20-30 million dollars an airframe you would probably be paying about the same money as you would buying a British Hawk lead in fighter trainer... and this is a 5th gen light fighter... countries that don't have a lot of money would be very interested... Argentina, Thailand, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, etc etc etc even North Korea and Cuba and Venezuela.... who would not want an F-35 that does what it is supposed to do for that price... even for double that price at 40-60 million dollars per aircraft... especially if it is MiG-21 level costs to operate.
That is what kept the MiG-21 in service... it was cheap and easy to keep in the air... and while it lacked range and payload very few things could run away from it...
The checkmate would be ideal replacement for mig-27, mig-21, jaguar. And I am sure HAL are now shitting it with Tejas program. Tejas 2 may never see the light of day now, checkmate is far better than Tejas 1&2 and cheaper than the latter, and we all know how long it takes India to produce aircraft.
To be fair 5th gen light fighters are not operational everywhere made by everyone... compared with the F-35 the Tejas is actually pretty good... I honestly like the idea of it and how they have designed it, but they are clearly not happy with a few things...
I also don't think they can really wait another 5 years for a replacement plane... I think a MiG-29M2 can be made now in Russia and in India... they are not stealth fighters but do they need to be as light strike aircraft... just have stealthy stand off weapons so the aircraft remain cheap to operate and affordable to buy in numbers. I would go with a stealth plane for the fighter interceptor role the MiG-21 performed but even then the MiGs could support such operations and carry extra missiles to boost their performance.
And a joint project with checkmate being built in India still ticks the box for made in India or at least the government will make it so.
It would be best for India I agree, but will the country that owns the design agree too. Is this programme opened up and made public because they want help in developing the plane or have the opened it up to make it public to get countries considering new planes to realise that this is on the way and so don't make any rash expensive purchases because if you can wait this is going to be worth a serious look.
There will be a few pilots and ex pilots in the administration thinking their country would be better off getting involved in this programme rather than waiting to see if they get old worn out F-16s or if they get F-35s rammed down their throats and how on earth they are going to shift around the military budget to pay the 120 million plus to buy them let alone the 80K euros per hour needed to operate them...
They say the new plane will be 6-7 times cheaper to operate per hour than the F-35, and a conservative estimate of operational costs for the F-35 would be about 68 thousand Euros.... and I am being generous. 7 time cheaper makes it just under 10 thousand Euros per flight hour which is reasonable, but the question is are Sukhoi using official costs for F-35 or actual costs, because if using official costs then it would be even cheaper...
And to be honest I feel it's the best option for India, a better, cheaper, more capable aircraft and production rate will be better. Strike version could be made also
A strike version would be unnecessary I think... for the strike role it would initially take internal weapons only on a SEAD or DEAD mission and then once air defence is seriously degraded then it will take internal and external weapons and start cleaning up...
If am honest India should have been looking at using the Tejas 1 as an advanced trainer. Continue to operate the Su-30, upgraded mig-29, joint production of checkmate, and purchases of su-34 and mig-35 as required. And 4-6 squadrons of su-57 ( India should have stuck it out with the joint venture), top it off with a mixture of mi-28, ka-52, mi-35, and their two homegrown attack helicopters and India would have a happy mixture of foreign purchases, joint production/built in India, and homegrown products.
I totally agree, but I also think we are far too biased to be fair judges. What we can say is that these systems were developed to work together and integrating them into an air force should not be that difficult. It is also very clear that Russia is happy to enter into joint ventures with India for things they want that Russia does not already make.
I understand India wanting to transition from buyer to developer and maker but I think they are going about it the wrong way... trying to make their own light and medium and heavy stealth aircraft is like trying to make their own main battle tank... there are not many countries on the planet that can do that sort of thing to end up with something that is world class that is not made up from bits from all over the place and is not eye wateringly expensive.
India is trying to make a heavy super tank when they should have been making their own T-72 or T-90 upgrade mass produced numbers tank and buy the best upgraded model from Russia as their more powerful but more expensive tank.
Same with the planes, they should have been building lead in fighter trainer aircraft and drones as their focus.
The fundamental problem is that even if they got the Arjun perfect and the Tejas perfect how many are they going to be buying... how many export customers are they going to have... and remember that would mean they would need a global support network that they would need to create to support their products in service...
The point is that what ever they make is going to have to be both capable and super cheap and produced in enormous numbers... so a lighter numbers tank, or drones... not super expensive tanks or fighter planes that have so many different foreign components that you need approval from 4 different countries to export it... and you know if those 4 countries include the US and France that many customers that might be interested wont get the choice because of sanctions which might stuff up the whole programme for domestic production too.
Seriously, I've been hearing about the MiG-29UPG plans since I joined you guys MP.net. India just strings Russia along for years and years.
It sounds ambiguous, but about 40-50 of their planes were already upgraded to the MiG-29UPG level, but that might have included parts and components from other countries/vendors. They also recently bought more MiGs in an emergency purchase of stuff from Russia after tension with China... it is a good way to bypass red tape like tenders and competitions that drag on for years.
What it is saying is that by 2022 all their MiGs in their Air Force will be to the same standard with the same avionics and systems, which is a good thing of course.
Every year there are grand announcements, memorandums of "intent" signed, playing games with Russia while rushing through deals with the Americans via fast tracking arrangements. India dangles money before the Russians and spends it by the yanks, yet it's always Russia who extends itself without conditionalities to help India. Time to get real.
Could turn taht around and ask how many American fighters do they operate? They have American transport and attack helicopters and transport planes, but no fighters or bombers, and in terms of fighters and strike aircraft, they have the Jaguar and Mirage 2000 and are getting 36 Rafales and pretty much all the rest are Russian except for Tejas.
It is all a bit chaotic, but the majority of their stuff is Russian or Soviet...
I think the point here is upgrading with russian equipment and armament, not Israeli, French, UK, ..., as usual. Most probably they decided for russian components basing on results of Russian MiG-29SMTR in Syria. Mix of foreign components didn't work well against Pakistan.
Yes, I think there was a bit of foreign stuff in the UTG upgrade and with the addition of new aircraft recently because of border disputes with China, they did get about 10-20 more MiGs so upgrading those too... having it completed by 2022 is next year....
Regarding the Rafale deals the last word I heard the French were talking about domestic production in India which I thought was out of character... perhaps they realised they over did the cost of 36 aircraft and want to ensure they have not priced themselves out of the market...
To justify local production they would need to want hundreds of planes.... otherwise it would be much cheaper to just buy the number you want made in France and then work out the difference in price they would have charged for local production and then just used that money to fund local production of something like a drone that might operate with the plane or operate independently.
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are and who the good guys are. Russians are selling a product so if the customer wants extra cream or cheese or whatever then they will put that on... sometimes the customer makes their own cream or cheese or they get their cheese and cream from somewhere else so the Russians are nice guys and let them put their own extra fillings on.