PAK FA, T-50: News #1

AirInternational Dec 2010 ( sorry about the scan quality )

Mean Raptor

MeanRaptor-1
MeanRaptor-2

Russian-Indian second prototype T-50 fighter to fly in 2011

The Russian-Indian second prototype T-50 fighter aircraft will take to the skies in early 2011, United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) President Alexei Fyodorov said on Monday.

"We have put the deadline forward to the start of 2011," he said.

"It is important for us that the second prototype is a development of the first, not simply a repeat," he added.

Work is underway on the third prototype, incorporating even more advanced systems, he said.

Russia's Sukhoi holding and India's Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) agreed in early 2010 to jointly develop a fifth-generation fighter jet based on the T-50 design.

They later put the estimated project design cost at $295 million.

The contract is to be signed by HAL and UAC officials during Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to India on December 20-22.

The two sides agreed to develop both a single-seat and a two-seat version of the aircraft by 2016, initially focusing on the single-seat version. The costs will be shared equally between Russia and India.

The first Russian prototype T-50 made its maiden flight in January 2010.

The new fighter aircraft is expected to enter service with the Indian Air Force by 2020.

NEW DELHI, December 20 (RIA Novosti)

source: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101220/161853847.html

Especially interested in this bit
""It is important for us that the second prototype is a development of the first, not simply a repeat," he added.

Work is underway on the third prototype, incorporating even more advanced systems, he said."

So rather than freezing the design each new prototype will be further improved... presumably using the improvements perfected and developed from experience of previous models.

That makes sense of course, because if you are building 10 more to speed up testing there is no reason why they should all be the same as long as they are all properly tested and earlier models are upgraded over time with newer developments.

Specialising each prototype to test certain specific components makes things easier because faults can be caused by interactions with other components, so testing specific components or component groups without the cost and complication of all the bits makes testing easier. It doesn't matter how you test things you need to test individual components and then finally put them all together and test everything together.

For instance an aircraft prototype... say number 6 might be used to test datalink communications with an S-400 unit and a satellite and an A-50. It doesn't really matter if that 6th prototype doesn't have a fully operating IRST. The fully tested datalink setup can then be retrofitted to the other prototypes once it is fully tested.

India, Russia Formalise 5th Gen Fighter Effort


The Contract was signed by Mr. A Isaykin, General Director, Rosoboronexport and Mr. M Pogosyan, General Director RAC MiG & Sukhoi from the Russian side and Mr. Ashok Nayak, Chairman, HAL and Mr. NC Agarwal, Director (D&D), HAL from the Indian side at Delhi.
Official statement:

A contract for Preliminary Design of the Indo-Russian Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft was signed between Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Rosoboronexport and Sukhoi here today. The Project involves design and development of a Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft that will have advanced features such as stealth, supercruise, ultra-maneuvrability, highly integrated avionics suite, enhanced situational awareness, internal carriage of weapons and Network Centric Warfare capabilities.

The aircraft to be jointly developed is termed Perspective Multi-role Fighter (PMF). PMF draws upon the basic structural and system design of the Russian FGFA Technology Demonstrator with modifications to meet IAF specifications which are much more stringent. The broad scope of bilateral cooperation during the joint project covers the design & development of the PMF, its productionization and joint marketing to third countries. Programme options include the design & development of a twin seater variant and the integration of an advanced engine with higher thrust at a later stage.

Today's contract is only the first in a series of such contracts which will cover different stages of this complex programme. The total cost including options and the value of production aircraft will make this the biggest Defence programme ever in the history of India involving production of over 200-250 aircraft.

Viktor wrote:J-20 should go to a new thread.

btw that thing looks hudge and fat. I will be interesting to see its abilities as a fighter/striker.

Your right!

http://russiadefence.forumotion.com/t1199-chinese-stealth-fighter-j-20

Austin wrote:I think reading all about F-22 that aircraft has been shut down for couple of reasons including the fact it is very expensive.

Reading an official document it was mentioned that F-22 needs 30 hours of maintenance for every one hour of flight , translated it needs more than a day to remain on ground for every one hour it flies.

Militarly its unafordable and of little use to military planners in the era of budget cuts and the massive debt that US is in.
and is claimed to have 2.5D TVC , right now for first batch it will be the rounded 3D nozzle.

Yeah... a lot of maintainers complaining on amount of work they put into F22s... its very expensive to keep in the air... they said its poorly designed aircraft, and it has pretty bad corrosion problem =/

The 117 engine is indeed a nice piece of engineering achievement not only did they manage to reduce weight considering even reducing 1 kg of weight for an engine is a challenging task at best , they managed to reduce 150 kg of weight but also managed to add ~ 0.5 - 1 T of thrust over 117S.

Looking at the T/W ratio of these engine here are some figures

AL-31FP: T/W ~ 8.2:1 ( Su-30MKI )
117S: T/W ~ 9.5:1 ( Su-35 )
117: T/W ~ 11.1:1 ( PAK-FA )

A Thrust/Weight Ratio of 11:1 is really nice and should be labeled as new engine in its own right , considering just 5-6 years back AL-31FP was considered a an absolute modern engine by Western Observer and powers the Indian MKI.

Is it true that russia sold 117 engine to china so they could use it for their 5 gen fighter.


OHH and one more thing I heard this from JANES.

I rather doubt it.

An official at Sukhoi said a while back that Su-35s are in hot demand but that sales to China will not commence till late in this decade when T-50 is entering service.

If they don't want to sell China the Su-35 now I rather doubt they will sell 117S engines any time soon.

Janes is not a great source of info with regard to Russia as much of their analysis is based on pure speculation and a lot of it is biased.

GarryB wrote:I rather doubt it.

An official at Sukhoi said a while back that Su-35s are in hot demand but that sales to China will not commence till late in this decade when T-50 is entering service.

If they don't want to sell China the Su-35 now I rather doubt they will sell 117S engines any time soon.

Janes is not a great source of info with regard to Russia as much of their analysis is based on pure speculation and a lot of it is biased.

Thanks for the explanation, I was kinda confused when I first heard this, i was like why would russia do something like this, its like US selling their latest aerospace technology to russia it doesn't
make sense.

In the 1990s and early 2000s when times were hard and the Russian military was not spending much at all then in those hard times some sales were made that would never be made any other time.

For example an old model Tunguska was sold to Britain, and S-300V which is called SA-12 in the west was sold to the US, though not a complete unit with all the vehicles.

The money earned was used to update the Tunguska and S-300V, with the latter evolving into the S-300VM. Of course with the makers of the S-300 and S-300V merging the S-400 and S-500 will benefit from the talents of both companies and sales of one or two systems will no longer be considered.

Right now the only things likely to be sold to China will be existing models or especially made models for China like the Su-30MKM. This Flanker version is not even as good as the Su-27SM let alone the Su-30MKI or the Su-35S.

The problem is not so much the Chinese copying, but their copying without a production licence.

The Russians have shown where they lag in a technology area their solution is to buy the technology... thermal imagers is a classic example where when the Soviet Union broke up, not only was there a lack of development in Thermal imagers (they had focussed on Low Light Level TVs) but the limited progress on thermal imagers was now in foreign states like Belarus, so the Russians had a lot of work to do.

They invested in their optics companies and bought the relevant technology, but things are not perfect yet. Having said that such optics technology can be applied to almost all areas of weapons and systems to make them much more capable. As an example an Igla-S missile is a very capable man portable air defence system, but fit it with a thermal sight and all of a sudden it becomes even more useful. Same for rifles and vehicles and aircraft of all types.
Huge production volumes of course also reduce prices and have a larger impact on armed forces performance. Of course operating at night is much more than just being able to see.

Austin wrote:The 117 engine is indeed a nice piece of engineering achievement not only did they manage to reduce weight considering even reducing 1 kg of weight for an engine is a challenging task at best , they managed to reduce 150 kg of weight but also managed to add ~ 0.5 - 1 T of thrust over 117S.

Looking at the T/W ratio of these engine here are some figures

AL-31FP: T/W ~ 8.2:1 ( Su-30MKI )
117S: T/W ~ 9.5:1 ( Su-35 )
117: T/W ~ 11.1:1 ( PAK-FA )

A Thrust/Weight Ratio of 11:1 is really nice and should be labeled as new engine in its own right , considering just 5-6 years back AL-31FP was considered a an absolute modern engine by Western Observer and powers the Indian MKI.

T/W is really impressive!!
Looks like Russian metallurgical advancements with respect to weight reduction yet greater thrust

PAK-FA close up canopy pics link

Saturn 117 Engine

pic-1
pic-2
pic-3
pic-4
pic-5

Salyut Engine
pic-1
pic-2

^^So unfortunate can't read Russian

nightcrawler wrote:^^So unfortunate can't read Russian

I can !!!!!

i gonna translate pic1

Engine 117c- Deep thrust-resource modernization of Engine AL-31PF, made for multifunction fighter of 4++ generation SU-35

Goal:
Finding out critical rotation frequencies (one of the main goals in design of GTD)

Methods that have been used earlier can not account for hard (?)characteristics of starter, as well as uniqueness of its construction (ex. Asymmetry)

Exit: Using MKE (?)

nightcrawler wrote:^^So unfortunate can't read Russian

Pic 2

End-Element Model of Engine 117s
Left to right

Rotor VD, Rotor ND, Power Elements of Stator

Is T-50 an outgrowth of SU-35 or a radically new design??
I think they are quiet similar(feel free to disagree)

nightcrawler wrote:Is T-50 an outgrowth of SU-35 or a radically new design??
I think they are quiet similar(feel free to disagree)

They are "quiet' similar? The T-50 is an offshoot of the Flanker as it is made by Sukhoi. The J-20 is an offshoot of the J-10 as it is made by Chengdu and the F-35 is an offshoot of the F-16 as it is made by LockMart.

Well lets look closer at this.

By the numbers.

Number 1 the intakes look the same.

Do they?


Number 2 where else should they put an IRST? And is it a copy of the Su-27 or the Mig-29 which also has an IRST there? The Mig-23 has its IRST under its nose, as does the Mig-31 in a retractible setup. The Mig-27K has its optics in the tip of its nose, but these are the three most sensible places to put forward looking optics in a low drag design.
The F-117 also had its IRST in its upper nose. Rafale, Typhoon... sounds pretty common... why not circle the twin vertical fins and the radar in the nose too?

Number 3... this is just silly... did they even look at what they were circling? On the Su-35 they have circled the new tape LED navigation lights. On the PAK-FA they circled a pitot tube sensor for testing that is very unlikely to be on the final aircraft is the upper object and the lower object is the 30mm cannon with muzzle cover and rear vent for gas release. The only thing this shows is they both have "things" there. Hardly evidence of anything at all.

Number 4 is an IR threat warning ball, part of the self defense Suite. I have never seen it position anywhere else on an aircraft so I don't find it strange that they would be in the same place on both fighter aircraft. The ball on the Su-24 is also there too.

Number 5 shows the PAK FA has a much more widely separated main landing gear than the Flanker... no real surprises here... most aircraft have two main gear situated near the rear of the aircraft.

Number 6 a tail stinger is an aerodynamic feature to improve flow over the rear of the aircraft, while at the same time offering a place for more equipment behind the centre of gravity to allow more weight in the nose of the aircraft and a longer nose for the aircraft which further improves aerodynamic performance.

There is nothing aerodynamically wrong with the Flanker design, it is an excellent shape for flight. Its only problems are with the fact that it is not stealthy, which is what the T-50 design has as its goal.

You could post a picture of a Mig-25 and compare it to a Mig-29 or an F-15 in fact. Or you could post a picture of an F-15 and compare it will a photo of an F-22 and you will likely find a lot of similarities too.

Not sure what your conclusion is supposed to be... a T-50 is actually an Su-27? No.

Not sure of this photo was uploaded before but I'll post it anyway

PAK-FA will most likely be offered to Brasil if it accepts Su-35 on its reopened contest.

I wondering if we are going to see some major changes in the second prototype.

This is pure speculation on my part, but seeing as the Su-30M has been used to test the radar and likely this first prototype has proven the basic aerodynamic design that the next prototype will likely start on testing things like the IRST and the wing mounted radar and etc.

They will also need to start testing weapon release from internal and external weapon points and of course they will also need to refine the shape of the various bits like putting dogtooth edges on surfaces and reshaping the IRST ball and other things.

The question is will the stealth improvements be shown early or kept for later?

I think I read somewhere that the prototypes are definitely going to be different with what was learned from earlier models applied to later models, though of course many changes will be internal.

Latest Air International has comprehensive update on PAK-FA development , scanned and posted it below { Request to not post this any where }

Russian Supercruiser
Piotr Butowski

^^Thnx Austin