Russian VTOL fighter development

It depends on the application. VTOL jets are literally death traps for human pilots, no need to risk human pilots life and limb for that capability...however a smaller (in the 5-10 ton range) but capable VTOL UAV/UCAV aircraft seems feasible and reasonable.

Except in that range we are talking about Yak-130 type aircraft that will be 15-20 million dollars each... they already have plenty of helicopters that can take off vertically and UAVs that have the potential for much better performance.

Making a platform vertical take off or vertical landing (without parachutes) is just making that aircraft fragile... to take off vertically it needs a high power to weight ratio... which means a big engine or engines and as light a structure as you can make it... you know... fragile.

The big engine in a light aircraft means it will have good acceleration and speed but poor range and payload because extra payload means more power from the engine and less weight in the structure... which means weak structure... not only fragile but not likely to last a very long time or serious use...

Like it or not, the most likely standard Russian VTOL fighter is the Ka-52K... and improvements in high speed helicopter technology should allow rather a useful little fighter to be developed that can be carried by most Russian ships... which is rather more than can be said for the F-35 type aircraft which will never be able to land on Russian corvettes or frigates etc.

Scramjet powered AAMs with decent solid rocket boosters should allow rather good air to air target engagement performance anyway... even from lower flight speeds and lower flight altitudes...

The core of the problem with previous VSTOL fighter attempts is the lift engine is generally dead weight in normal flight... where is spends the majority of its time operating...

Of course underneath the skin there are also small pipes for puffer jets at the wing tips, nose and tail to help manouver the aircraft while in the hover where no airflow over the control surfaces means it manouvers like a dog.

Thrust vectoring engines at the tail and wing tips could possibly work with the right wing shape, but at the end of the day for any high speed performance you are looking at engines generating a lot of heat pointed straight down, so only special surfaces can be used for takeoff and landing... most normal airstrips would be destroyed with just one takeoff or landing... and the problem of hot air ingestion into the intakes of any one of those engines means very low altitude engine stall which is a pain for a conventional aircraft but normally fatal for a VSTOL fighter.

Personally I think a 300-350 metre long carrier means you can take off with a ramp in a modern conventional fighter because of their power to weight ratios and internal weapons carriage anyway, and it also means the carrier is big enough to carry all the things you will want like lots of aviation fuel and munitions, as well as proper air defence weapons and nice large powerful sensors.

An aircraft carrier is never going to be cheap... you can make is slightly cheaper by making it smaller, but really it is self defeating, because compared with the cost of all the vessels that will be operating with it the carrier itself is not that expensive... it is like saying having an airforce is an extravagance when you are paying for an Army anyway... don't bother with those air fields and fighter planes because the Army has SAMs that can deal with enemy air threats.

Well they do, but any defence is enhanced greatly by airborne radar that can see over mountains and in gaps in the ground based radar and aircraft can go out and inspect something that should not be there... an Army or Navy based SAM is either launched or not launched... it is too slow and expensive to send a ship or an armoured vehicle to go and have a look... in peace time it offers commanders of forces peace of mind to be able to send out an aircraft to check it out so you know for sure, and even in war it can prevent a costly mistake... I mean it isn't perfect... the Americans managed to shoot down two of their own helicopters just after Desert Storm because they thought they were Hinds and the fighters sent to check were too scared to get close enough to correctly ID them, but it was the asian guy in the AWACS that got it in the neck for that incident.

The ability and performance of a surface group of ships is greatly amplified with AWACS and Fighter air cover to support their operations, and in the future as hypersonic missiles proliferate then that air cover is going to become critical to add layers to the defences to improve chances of defending yourself in hostile waters.

They hand out codes like lollies, but until the item actually enters service the codes are not official... for example the Su-25TM was called Su-39 for a bit...

The VSTOL 5th gen fighter from Yakovlev I have read about with the 25 ton thrust NK-32 engine was the Yak-43 which was a drawing of a scaled up Yak-141.

The engine of the Yak-141 was actually rather substantial at about 18-20 tons thrust in the original model and improved models with 22 tons thrust, but that created lots of problems really.

The twin tail booms mounting control surfaces further back so the engine could be closer to the centre of gravity was one effect of the very powerful main engine...

The NK-32 is designed for bombers and not fighters so I would suspect its response to throttle changes would probably be a bit slow and it is a very large engine even if it is very powerful.... the power means more fuel burn as power is calculated based on delivered thrust... more thrust = more fuel.

Might have looked something like this:



(not my information or image, I just found it searching for Yak-43 on google).


BTW have to agree with Broski... VSTOL designs have promised much and have never delivered what they promised... there is no jet aircraft that can land of take off from anywhere without any preparation... promises they could land all over Europe in supermarket carparks are BS and the newer supersonic models make that even worse because weight and engine power destroys surfaces that are not specially designed for it. The high thrust to weight ratio is nice but using lift jets means they often don't even have good thrust to weight ratios... the two lift engines in the Yak-141 were the equivalent of having the two engines from an Su-25 in its nose pointing downwards... used for landing and taking off and hovering but dead weight useless during normal flight.

When landing vertically this can happen:



All that happened here was a normal low forward speed landing where the hot exhaust air from the lift turbojets got sucked into the main intakes for the main engine leading to a loss of thrust because hot air going in the intake that already has carbon monoxide in it and most of the oxygen burned already is no good for going through the engine again and burning more fuel... sudden loss of thrust at that altitude and boom... made to look much worse when the main undercarriage strut ruptured a belly fuel tank which ignites immediatedly because the two lift jets are operating in full AB for landing.

Very simply with the super engines you need for a VSTOL fighter you can put normal engine in and use any strip of motorway and you will be fine.

The idea of having 100 corvettes with VSTOL fighters operating from their helicopter pads is insane too... the Soviets and the British spent lots of money trying to find a cheap carrier plane and both failed. With the new F-35 with VSTOL it is Americas turn to fail. Accept it and move on and just focus on making good planes without VSTOL capacity.

so dry weight 290kg so NO this is NOT the same. 2 tons of difference.

I was referring to thrust, not engine weight.

MiG-29k si a bad jet fighter right?

The Yak-141 crashed attempting a conventional landing on the ship it was designed to operate from in good weather and flat seas... this was not the fault of a cable or other external thing like a bird being ingested or something on the runway... this was the plane trying to land the way it is supposed to land and getting an engine stall in normal conditions and crashing.

Which stopped it from getting into serial production or service.

MiG-29Ks do crash... all planes crash, but the Yak-141 was not a fully developed ready for service product, it had serious design flaws including avionics that were not ready and working yet.

BTW UK, Spain. Italy, Japan, Korea build VSTOL fighters capable carriers. I would assume their admirals know something about their trade,

Yeah, bean counting accountants have more say in those militaries than the military people have... of those countries which has used their carriers in a real conflict in the last 40 years where the enemy actually was a threat? I would say the Falklands and the UK and they lost 6 ships because of their mediocre fighters and weak tiny carriers.

To be fair the Argentine carrier was rendered useless by British SSNs too, but that would not be a serious issue for Russia as they would have the ASW capacity to deal with that.

If the Argentines had decent SSKs the British would have been in serious trouble, or if they had MiG-23s with BVR missiles for instance...

Most of VSTOL will likely to use STOL, they need like 70meters and ski jump not 300m and catapult thus making carrier cheaper, much cheaper. What for most of counties does count.

The V in VSTOL stands for vertical and requires an enormously compromised design... vertical landings are probably more dangerous than vertical takeoffs, but it is like choosing between dog shit and cat shit really....

EMALS cats offer the best solution for takeoffs at sea allowing maximum weights and maximum safety.

A VSTOL fighter is most probable solution to me. Manned or unmanned that's yet another question.

Vertical landings are normal for VSTOL fighters, but vertical takeoffs are rare and very uncommon as shown by the ramp takeoff structures on carriers... taking off vertically is more dangerous and seriously limits payload and fuel weights which reduces performance dramatically.... rendering them next to useless.
STOL which is what they already have works fine.... they have already talked about assisted take off equipment being added to the Kuznetsov for the upgrade so it will be interesting to see what that is.

The Tumanski R-195 does not have an After burner when used in Su-25s and generates 44KN of thrust each.... close enough to be considered the same as the 41KN thrust RD-41s mounted in the Yak-141 as lift jet engines.

My point was that as lift only jet engines you need two engines powerful enough to fly around in an Su-25 just to take off or land... and despite their excellent weight, they generate heat and burn fuel on takeoffs and landings and their position near the main aircraft air intakes makes the risk of hot air ingestion a serious and ongoing problem.

At least with the Pegasus engine on the harrier the front engine nozzles to air from bypass air so it wasn't particularly hot... unlike the air from the rear nozzles that went right through the engine and had had fuel burned in it.

Not necessarily design flaws but likely not ready to production yet.

Design flaws... engines at teh front of the aircraft burning fuel and creating oxygen depleted very hot air that can be ingested into the main air intakes for the main engine is a design flaw because it will generate a stall when it happens and it can only happen when approaching the ground or leaving the ground... two very critical periods you don't want an engine surge or engine stall.

Yes but was iteratively improved and now flies very good. So would Yak do. Is there money and will they would finance Yak VSTOL fighters. But in the beginning of 90s Russian MoD stopped even MiG-1.44/1.42 programmes. MiG ccorp was doing really poor.

Fundamental flaws require a complete redesign... in this case their idea was a lift fan connected to the main engine, which the Americans used for their F-35 design.

The fan blows cold air that has not had fuel burned in it already so it contains oxygen so if it goes into the main air intakes it is not a problem.

It also means you don't have a huge amount of super hot air being reflected off the ground into the fuselage of the aircraft so belly mounted stores either weapon bays or belly mounted Pylons become an option... not an option for the Yak-141 because the airflow is critical and very very hot so wing mounted weapons only... which is very limiting.

If you believe so many fleet admirals are wrong but you are not then ok but I respectfully disagree.

Admirals don't design planes and will believe what they are told... some Admirals probably don't like aircraft and prefer ships instead of planes just like for a long time naval admirals around the world didn't like submarines either... they thought they were dirty and underhanded... sneaky.

Russia should not rely on air power the same way the west does with its ground forces, but at sea a long way from home some aircraft are certainly a force multiplier and improve peformance all round... the core problem is technology... you could spend billions making VSTOL fighters but you are never going to get a VSTOL plane that is superior to a conventional plane, therefore the only advantage VSTOL fighters have is being able to operate from tiny ships conventional aircraft can't operate from.

The British and the Soviets went down that rabbit hole and the core lesson they learned was that tiny 20K ton aircraft carriers simply don't make sense and will cost you ships rather than protect your fleet.

The UK had tiny carriers and what do they have now? A carrier about the size of the Kuznetsov...

France wanted to save money too but did not go down the VSTOL rabbit hole.... Mirages with lift jets was about as far as they went and they knew cats made more sense with conventional fighters... the CdG is a 40K ton carrier and for their next carrier they are talking about nuclear powered about 75K ton and EM cats... the Soviets had the Kiev class carriers with VSTOL fighters and they planned and laid down the Kuznetsov class carriers ( a couple) and then the bigger Ulyanovsk carrier that was to have catapults.

Every once in a while someone pops up and says why not put the Yak-141 back into development and production... the cost of developing viable VSTOL fighters would be multiple billions of dollars... British experience of having VSTOL fighters in service with their cheaper mini carriers was that they lost 6 ships anyway... lack of speed and range made their mini carriers less useful than the fixed wing carriers they had just retired to save money.

To save money they lost 6 ships... when you add up the cost of developing the Harrier and the price of those 6 ships lost... one of which carried their helicopters for the mission... and you realise keeping the older carriers in service for a bit longer and upgrading them would actually have been cheaper.

Can't be too hard on them... promises were made and not delivered and we only know what we know because of what happened... when making their decisions they didn't have that information.

They do now and their two new carriers are not like the new carriers they had in the 1980s.

No follow on VSTOL project for the British either.

BTW in what conflicts Russia took part for the last 40 years where long range supersonic interdiction fighters were required ? None? only Syria where nothing was required and delivered that Yak 141 or better 201 could not do . Same with any of wars like Libya or Afghanistan.

You are kinda missing the point... you develop systems to be used, so if Russia does get involved in conflicts away from her borders right now her hand is incredibly weak... though to be fair the last 40 years they have had Su-33s which would be better than many fighters around the planet that are currently operational.

Not state of the art but not state of the ark either... the point is that what they really lack is AWACS... helicopters with radar are useful but it takes fixed wing AWACS to provide good situational awareness needed to defend the ships it operates with properly.

More importantly with new naval SAMs being ARH having radar in the air on AWACS and also on fighters means the ships become vastly more powerful.... a Corvette with Redut can engage enemy sea skimming anti ship missiles as soon as it can see them... on its own that would be as the missile comes over the horizon... so 20-30km or so.... with a MiG-29K or an Su-33 they can engage them at the maximum range of the missile... 150km.

Quite a significant distance.

The Israeli attack on a US spy ship only stopped when they intercepted reports of F-14s responding to their mayday calls...

An unknown blip on a radar screen approaching your ships in the middle of the ocean... do you fire a missile or not?

With air power you can send a group of planes to investigate... even if they are all wiped out you know you are under attack and can prepare... waiting till they sink a ship might be too late to prevent other ships from being sunk.

Aircraft carriers are not about invading countries, they provide air power and air support to friendly surface ships and submarines... in peace time they will prevent minor navies trying to block your access to open ocean or new trade partners... in war time they let you ships live longer and inflict more damage on the enemy forces.

They are not invincible and don't make you all powerful... but they mean a force that would otherwise obliterate a surface group without aircraft might struggle to defeat a group of ships with air power support.

Making your carrier aircraft the same as your land based aircraft with minor modification also saves you a lot of money too... you will notice with the F-35 nobody is buying the VSTOL model for land based use because it is the shorter ranged handicapped model that costs much more to operate and buy and will probably be the one that crashes the most.

But they didn't, do we talk about realities or rather what if scenarios?

They didn't so the British got lucky... except for the ships they lost.

Working out what potential problems you might have in the future is how you decide what to spend your money on for the future and with aircraft carriers you have to plan decades into the future because it will take 10 years to build one and even longer to get it fully operational and useful with all the necessary infrastructure and support vessels... including Cruisers and Destroyers to operate with it.

1) In general, any jet fighter is a compromise, cannot do all. Vide - F-35. Cannot be carrier fighter and VSOTL and bomber. But could be optimised to one for roles.

That is true but shaping the aircraft and balancing its design and its engine so it could be used for VSTOL use with a lift fan meant it could not have a sleak low drag shape.... so you end up with a stealthy Buccaneer instead of a stealthy Viper which is what they wanted.

Don't get me wrong the Bucc is a brilliant aircraft... carrier capable and with a bucket of instant sunshine under each wing on a low low low flight profile it is actually faster and longer ranged than the F-16 of the time, but it is not a fighter and never pretended to be so.

Sometimes i got impression that when you built IIWW tanks your tanks would be build Fledermaus or at least Tiger 2. And most of your free time you'd try to prove T-34-85 was rendered near useless. Weaker armor, not good enough main gun ... I would disagree here too. T-34 was much better tool of vctory.

You have your analogy backwards there... VSTOL fighters... especially supersonic ones is asking too much when a simple normal traditional layout aircraft that can be mass produced in enormous numbers with a good engine and a good radar and a good gun and missiles makes those wanderwaffle look silly and stupid.

2) VSTOL are supposed to use STO for sake of bigger payload. Yet the difference between 70 till 100 meters without catapult and 200-250 with catapult is pretty expensive in terms of shipbuilding. That's why Russia started to work on such plane - will it be Su-75 (as STOL) or some day we'll learn about VSTOL? Perhaps in an unmanned version pilot cockpit will be replaced by vertical start engines?

A bigger carrier carries more aircraft and more ordinance and systems and equipment and is more useful ship.

If you look a the 1.5 trillion wasted on the F-35 how many ships could they have built.... the S-70 could be modified for cat launch and serve as an excellent strike platform if strike is needed but the facts are that a naval Su-57 and a naval smaller fighter to allow good numbers to be carried makes sense... the Su-75 might make sense on land but I think a naval aircraft will need two engines to get the go-ahead.

3) You seem to be traumatized by one crash form almost 40 years ago. But you know technology gone ahead for the last half century you know? There are unmanned aircraft now, control of aerodynamic unstable jets is not problem anymore too. Better, lighter and stronger materials, engins. Better techniology of everything.

Wow... you tell me I am old and that technology has moved on and then you talk about aerodynamically unstable jets using light and strong materials and powerful engines... guess what... that stuff is 40 years old too... they used new lighter stronger materials and powerful engines and unstable flight designs to sell the F-16.

When they were selling the Harrier it was the only fighter that was going to be useable 3 days in to the war after all the airfields had been destroyed so in the future only VSTOL fighters will exist.

Drones? Not actually new at all.

In many ways a stealthy cruise missile is an F-117 with a single bomb payload.

4) Then why USA and China (1) so far are the countries that can afford for such carriers? China had 3 of which 1 with a catapult. Taking into account that so far 12 MiG 35 was ordered and only 76 Su-57 where do you see hundreds of navy jet fighters and couple of 100k ton CVNs? because I dont. Ever.

Russia is in the process of severing ties with the west... most international trade with Russia went through western intermediaries who made profits from Russian trade and business with the rest of the world... that wont continue and the west is going to use its navies to try to isolate and contain Russia... now tell me.... in such a situation do you think Russia is going to double down and just build corvettes and frigates... the fact that they currently continue to operate the Kuznetsov and are building two 40K ton helicopter carriers suggests their navy is going to expand rather than contract.

Spending big money to get the South Koreans to upgrade their Zvezda shipyard in the far east to allow the production of civilian and military ships up to 350K tons and 350m long suggests a future delivering products to the rest of the world and building a navy that can protect their interests and trade relations.

What tiny country is going to trade with Russia if Russia has no navy to speak of?

How are submarines going to deal with US or UK or French blockades of ports of countries taking the risk to trade with Russia... do you think HATO is just going to ignore Russia and turn on China instead... is the US getting in to bed with India because it wants to be friendly and help them with their border disputes with China?

The US wants to see India fight the way the Ukraine and Russia are currently fighting and will stand on the sidelines feeding weapons to India as China and India destroy each other... two rivals eliminated for the price of old weapon stocks.

The US wants the EU to help Ukraine so the sides will be more even so it actually starts damaging Russia, because right now the damage is propaganda.

Looking on the current economy level Russia has a choice - small carriers or no carriers. According to your logic no far sea zone air support is needed ? I guess Russian admirals disagree. They can dream big but accountants will keep them in real life.

Small carriers won't make sense for Russia... the operational costs will be higher for a smaller ship because it would lack endurance and persistance even in peace time... small carriers would be worse than no carriers.

Russia is too smart to build many big carriers. Id presume drone version fighters might be applied. Cheaper and smaller for smaller carriers.

Their new Helicopter carriers went from Mistral type ships... perhaps 20-25K ton to 40K ton so I guess they realise making ships too light and too small limits their potential and puts them at risk when they enter real combat.

BTW Vertical takeoff needs T/W > 1. Su-57 with engines izd 30 has thrust 2x18tons takeoff weight (regular TO weight with 100% fuel ) is 30t...So yes its possible to take off with full fuel.

The vertical component means the balance of the aircraft is screwed up by trying to balance the lift around the centre of gravity of the aircraft.

The Su-33 and MiG-29K can operate from carriers using ski jump launches because they are fighters and fighter loads are generally missiles that are nothing like the max weight of air to ground ordinance.

5th gen fighters with low drag internal weapons carriage and more powerful engines means takeoff performance should be even better... the Su-57 isn't bigger and heavier than the Flankers... it is smaller and lighter and with rather more engine power and no external stores most of the time which makes ski jump takeoffs even more efficient.

EMALS cats promise new performance in electronics, new magnets, new motors, improved electrical power management.... things that are valuable on their own even without assisting heavier aircraft to get airborne from ships.

Even having a full length CAT system for launching cruise missiles without solid rocket boosters would be a useful thing to improve their performance and cut down on their weight and cost....

VSTOL fighters does not deal with the core problem of getting a decent sized radar into the air for very long periods of the time... now CATS solve that problem but equally airships would too, but conventional fighters are cheaper and safer and more reliable than VSTOL.

Most next gen fighters will be STOL.

Since max thrust of izd 30 is 18,000kG and J-39 MTOW is 14.000kg oh well

It is not that simple... if putting a big engine into a tiny plane was what it was all about a NK-32 engine in a MiG-21 body would be amazing... a 25 ton thrust engine in a 10 ton aircraft... except it would probably run out of fuel by the time it got to the end of the runway.

Thrust is calculated based on KG thrust so even if the engine is very efficient an 18 ton thrust engine is going to drain your fuel tanks faster than you could fill them.

MAKS-2021

Twin engined MiG.

They should make a single engine light fighter like su-75. It can have clients around the world and even in russian air force.

The Russian military is conservative and like twin engined aircraft... look at how many single engined helicopters they have for instance...

The Su-75 doesn't actually look very light to me... 3,000km range and 7.5 ton payload... light fighter my backside.

But a heavy twin engine mig has no future.

True, but this is not a heavy twin engined MiG, this is a light carrier capable MiG twin jet aircraft.

It is cheaper to operate than the Su-57 and that is all it needs to achieve.

You don't go to war with the cheapest aircraft you could justify... otherwise no one would buy Rafales for instance.

It all comes down to value for money and what makes sense to spend money on and what does not.

However there is plenty of room for light single engine aircraft. Jf-17 uses the mig-29's engine and it proved to be reliable as a single engine aircraft. 7 ton class aircraft, 0.5m2 rcs, 1 weapon bay for 4 r-77-1 or 2 bigger r-37M or bombs, a stealthy IR missile under wings (thrust vectoring with no wings), zhuk-AShE aesa radar, ols-35 already developed, ECM pods. And keep the price below 25 million.

Amusing people pretend that it is the engine that makes aircraft expensive...

VTOL fighter aircraft are a waste of money.
You get a compromised design with lackluster payload and range. And you get an aircraft which is way more prone to fatal accidents and hull losses than other airplanes.

The Chinese are putting electromagnetic catapults even into their LHDs. They will likely use those as drone carriers.

The Su-57 would work great on a large carrier with either a ski jump or a catapult.
Russia today has way more paved roads than the USSR ever did. The Su-57 also can takeoff and land in an incredibly short piece of strip. It would be much more reasonable to make it capable of taking off from public paved roads instead of wasting time and money on a specific VTOL design.

VTOL fighter aircraft are a waste of money.

Unless there is a new super technology break through that makes them more efficient and less fragile... say electric jet engines that don't blow super heated air and wont stall the engine if the lifting gas gets sucked into the air intake for the main propulsion engine... thrust vectoring nozzles in 3D angles would allow the lift jets and main jet engine to stabilise the aircraft in the hover without needing puffer jets at the wingtips and tail and nose areas with all the piping and weight.

But look at the promised performance:

These unique, three-engined aircraft (1 Tumansky R-28 V-300 vectored thrust turbofan and 2 RD-38 turbojets) had a crew of one, a top speed up of nearly 1,300 km per hour, an 11 km service ceiling and a practical combat radius with vertical takeoff and landing and full weapons complement of up to 185 km.

First if all three jet engines means three times more chance of a crash than a single engined fighter, it is practically subsonic so why did they make it with such thin low drag wings... thicker wings for more lift for lower conventional takeoff speeds and more internal volume for fuel makes rather more sense than wasting time trying to make it supersonic. Max weapon load radius of 900km... not amazing.... and not better than the MiG-29K which can fly rather faster and higher.

Russian aircraft designer and manufacturer Yakovlev is ready to resume the development of a fifth-generation VTOL capable aircraft, if asked to do so by the Defense Ministry, Yakovlev general director Andrei Boginsky told Sputnik.

Which means they have not been asked to do so. This is good news IMHO.

“Our designers have explored the prospects for creating even more advanced aircraft corresponding to the level of the fifth generation of combat aviation,” Boginsky said. “The topic of vertical take-off and landing aircraft was frozen in the difficult 1990s, but we have retained the scientific and technical basis” for their development.

If they can get conventional fighter aircraft performance from a 5th gen fighter design that allows VSTOL or even just STOL performance then that would be interesting, but the V is rather redundant because of the compromises and costs in terms of design and performance.

It is much easier to create an EM cat system... most of the technology would be useful anyway... even if it wasn't used to launch aircraft.

Technology would include super magnets and also the electric systems and components to concentrate electrical power to accelerate heavy objects... even if it is just to launch drones from 10m EM cats on conventional ships would be useful.

Vertical take off jets would make sense if catapults were impossible, but they are not only possible, they are useful... especially with new ships and vehicles moving to all electric drive anyway.

Most lift jet aircraft have the problems of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft they are trying to replace... the cost is generally steep.

If Russian plans were for 40K ton carriers or even 20K ton mini carriers then VSTOL fighters might make sense... but then surface launched missiles are rather good so future carriers might be able to get by with AWACS early warning and super long range scramjet powered SAMs and scramjet powered guided artillery shells.

The point is that the plans are for a 90K ton carrier so conventional fighters should be just fine and could be paired with equivalent land based types to save money on development.

Given the current realities of precision munitions and intelligence on the battlefield. VTOL aircraft may be the best option in any defensive conflict or even in a protracted one. It would be easy to relocate, hide or even fortify positions for such aircraft especially if they had stealth characteristics.

That was the selling point of the Harrier... they said after 12 hours all the airfields will be destroyed and the only aircraft flying will be the Harrier... and of course that was before they had any operational experience with the aircraft.

After they got a bit of experience... and if you think about physics it is obvious.

When you stand up all your bodies weight is concentrated on your feet. If you are standing in soft mud or deep snow you will sink.

A helicopter spreads the lift or weight over the entire main rotor disk, but a supersonic jet aircraft concentrates it in the narrow high speed high temperature airflow from turbojet engines.

Have you ever seen a harrier hover at very low altitude over grass?

It rips up the turf better than a rotary hoe... which for those who don't know... it is not a fat hooker, it is a farming device for ripping up and turning over turf so you can plant seeds.



The pitch was that Harriers could operate from supermarket car parks in big cities, but when they tried it they damaged a lot of jet engines which really don't work well when ingesting plastic bags and McDonalds boxes and other crap. They don't even like ingesting leaves or grass or dirt like they would if they landed in any open field.

The Harrier operated from conventional airfields and when landing or operating on "grass" they had to lay down a material called Pierced Steel Planking, which is a metal mesh that stops the jet exhaust ripping the ground up into a shower of mud and having that mud be ingested into the jet engines.

Million dollar jet engines don't work full of mud and plastic bags and rubbish and when they fail at such low altitudes gravity brings the aircraft down far faster than it is designed to come down.

The MiG-29 and the new upgraded MiGs have protection for foreign object damage (FOD), the early MiGs had above wing louvers for clean air to go into the engines and solid engine doors to block the intakes to prevent stuff entering. The newer MiGs use the same mesh screens the Flankers use making the over wing louver redundant but it gets the job done.

Airfields are becoming increasingly deadly. A system similar to shoot and scoot or dug in positions for artillery could best for survivability.

Mobile airfields that carry fuel and weapons that can operate on the road and find a stretch of motorway to operate from seems to be the most effective option, but obviously in the case of the west they don't expect the enemy to be able to control the skies over their heads so they don't think it is a problem for them.

The MiG's proposed carrier-based fighter jet model is based on Yak-201's design but obviously without the vertical lift capacity.

Actually I would say the twin engined MiG design is simply a scaled down version of the MiG design they offered for the MFI project...



Note it had control surfaces between the engines and the wings too... not really that unique and revolutionary after all.



This is a twin engined version of the Yak I think...