Su-33 sucks when compared to modern fighters. Unless they upgrade them to su-35 standard they should throw them in garbage and use only mig-29K.
The Russian Navy never had the funding or the interest to have super planes... you are mistaking them for the west.
What naval person worth their salt wants to spend big money on aircraft... you spend money on ships and subs and missiles... the planes are there to deliver the missiles.
An Su-33 has good flight range and lots of weapons pylons and will be operating under the umbrella equivalent to hundreds of S-350 and S-400 and eventually S-500 as well as Pantsir and TOR batteries... it probably wont get to do much actual fighting in combat... more likely inspection and ID during peace time and possibly carriage and launch of 2.5 ton air launched Zircon variants.
It will get minor upgrades but nothing radical... they had an Su-33KUB upgrade that was a bit like an Su-34 upgrade but even more including active wings instead of just flaps and slats to change the wing shape, but it cost too much and was rejected.
The MiG-29KR was put into production for India so they tagged their own orders on the end of that so they didn't have to pay for tooling and setting up production.
If they build new CVNs in the 80-90K ton weight range I would think it would be guaranteed they will have Su-57s, with MiGs in support... MiG-29KR to start and LMFS later on.
It's not a surprise they send it for a major upgrade after seeing what it did in Syria. But even the upgrade was full of accidents.
That is the way things work though... you give something a real world test and then decide what needs to be upgraded and altered or just fixed.
There was a Chinese ship and an American ship that also caught fire during upgrades/routine maintenance, so while not desirable it is not unusual either.
Kuznetsov is the exemple of what a carrier shouldn't be. Chinese and indians have similar carriers and do better than the Russians.
How can you say they are better when they have never been to war... we really don't know how well they would perform...
And lets face it the real test in Syria is not about can the planes take off and land. One problem with arrester gear that could not be repaired in place caused the loss of two aircraft, and the 5 year olds here get really upset about that... the tantrums are amusing...
But you are a grown up... you understand that getting planes to fly off the deck and then come back is the easy shit... the real hard shit that never enters into exercises or training is going to a real world place and finding real world badguys and having the C4IR to track down their locations in real time and create a mission to fly there and drop real weapons without hitting a Chinese embassy or a baby milk factory and to kill the target without destroying $50 worth of enemy junk using a 20 million dollar super precision guided missile... but using a 5000 dollar 500kg bomb to kill a group of terrorists and their bomb making factory.
After they lost those two planes they kept working, they planned the missions on board and went through the motions like it was happening from the carrier even though the flights were from a land base. All the procedures including the attack and the attack evaluations and planning any further follow up strikes were done from the carrier like it was a carrier based operation.
That is why it was a success and that is why it was worth while and I don't know whether China or India could do the same with their carriers but to be honest I really don't think they could.
Their arrester gear might work flawlessly, and I would think Indias MiG-29KRs should be able to drop dumb bombs with that level of accuracy, but would it be on the correct hill? There was no enemy air activity so China would be able to use Su-33 clones for the job but would they know what to attack and they likely would have to use more expensive laser guided weapons to hit the target as accurately as these upgraded Russian Su-33s did with iron bombs from altitude.
Writing off the Kuznetsov is like writing off all Indian and Chinese carriers because they are directly related... if one is shit then they all are.
Makes you wonder why they have persisted with the K, but that is obvious isn't it... they are not going to make a fixed wing full sized aircraft carrier till they have cruisers and destroyers that can operate with it. And making a mini carrier would be the dumbest move they could possibly make... though if they were going to do that the K would already be gone... no point keeping a big one if you are going to make small ones and you would make the small fixed wing carriers before you bothered making helicopter landing ships... a small fixed wing carrier doesn't need helicopter landing ships for normal operations but a helicopter landing ship needs fixed wing aircraft support... so the first two helicopter carriers would be VSTOL air defence carriers... and they would likely make 8 of them... four aircraft carriers with VSTOL fighters and four helicopter carriers.
But they are keeping the K and making the helicopter carriers with helicopter fighters with AESA radars in the form of the Ka-52K first.
Well they also need to use it properly. Most of the drawbacks in Syria were because of poor maintenance or bad decisions.
The only problem with the Kuznetsov in Syria was the arrester gear gearbox was faulty.
It they had been able to fix it on site they could have continued operating as normal.
The old were totally destroyed yet they changed only half of them.
Would be interesting to find out how you knew they were all destroyed, and certainly interesting to find out why you think they would replace only half of them if you think all were destroyed.
It's the military that turned this ship into a useless barge and the repair may just be to keep a carrier for formation untill a new one arrives.
For goodness sake... there is blame for everyone isn't there... can't possibly be that an air defence carrier is only useful when your navy is operating away from ground based defences and that for the last 30 years the Russian Navy has had no reason to piss away money operating a long way away from Russian waters for long enough periods to justify an aircraft carrier escort... but they should have spent top dollar on it and kept it in perfect nick... maybe take the money away from the Poseidon programme, or maybe Bulava... or Husky...
Cables even snap on US carriers. They were running the Kuz hard. In real combat. Something China or India haven't done in their dreams. If I recall , one of the jet losses in the Syria op was just because they ran it out of fuel because it wasn't calculated right
Cables do snap... quite regularly... that is why there are four or five lined up for each landing and they can be replaced very quickly and easily....
Having a cable snap is not a big deal... the plane normally follows through and comes around straight away and has another go on the 3 or 4 remaining wires.
Two wires snapping is very unlikely... they are normally used dozens of times before they fail.
To lose two aircraft including a Flanker that ran out of fuel suggests multiple attempts to land that failed, which likely means multiple failed cables.
Cables don't fail like that.
The cables are attached to arrester gears so when the hook of the plane catches them they don't immediately pull tight... they are not strong enough to stop a plane based on their strength alone. They are normally attached to a gearbox that starts out relatively firm but able to feed out several metres of cable but it gets tighter and tighter till it stops. A faulty gearbox means the cable will be tight and will snap immediately every time.
Per Wikipedia, it says that the refit is supposed to extend the life of the boat for 25 years. That article a couple pages back said it would extend the life for 5 years.dunno
Refit
A carrier will have a useful life of half a century or more, and different refits and upgrades will be for different periods... it might be that they are doing a temporary refit but a refit to last 5 years makes no sense after 5 years it will likely only have been back in the water for 3 or 4 years. In that short space of time it is likely not long enough to look at the situation with new destroyers and new cruisers and potential new carriers and the decide whether to fully upgrade it with all new weapons and systems and equipment including cats and perhaps even improved propulsion design... maybe even a small nuclear propulsion system to boost the boilers, or whatever, or they might just use it as a training carrier and accelerate their first CVN.
Building destroyers and cruisers will mean production of large AESA radar arrays and other large systems that wont fit on smaller lighter ships, and of course putting weapons into very large scale service which makes them more useful too.
The ship was sitting at port since 1991 and used only to keep a carrier aviation training so it's more a barge than a carrier.
Which makes French presidents brains beef stew... well they don't use them as brains now do they...
Please entertain the Chinese threads on their barges that have never done anything either, or the Indian thread... their barges have been absolutely critical...
Su-33 are already getting replaced by mig-29K. They don't even produce su-33 which is totally outdated. It's ground counterpart is su-27P which was replaced by the su-27SM/SM2/SM3 then su-30SM then su-35 then su-57.
Its range and speed are fine and its level of manouver are fine too. With R-77-1s it should be as capable as a fighter as any other carrier aircraft currently in use.
They already have 5 new sukhoi class of fighter in the flanker family. So yeah its totally outdated.
Yet it could murder Libyans by the thousands just like the Rafales did...
You have pictures of the boilers when they were changed. They looked like destroyed and not just old and used. And they changed only half of them.
Looked destroyed like 103 targets in Syria destroyed?
It was sent to a real operation and failed. What they learned was either scrap it or improve it. The choice was quickly made.
It was sent on a real operation in Syria and it did its job. There was a problem with the arrester gear so it could not recover fighter aircraft till that was repaired, but it achieved its mission and did its job.
Again I'm not saying the ship is shitty but russians use it like an old prostitue. Indians and Chinese often sail their carriers, probably even more than russians since 1991, and have no problems with them.
Which missions have these Chinese and Indian boats accomplished... for that matter I would say French Rafales murdering some Libyan civilians and starting a civil war that reduced a functioning successful country into chaos that destroyed that country and whose people are still paying the ultimate price for Frances interference are not as good as the Su-33s and MiG-29s that were launched from the Kuznetsov and land based airfields that killed terrorists and criminals and helped keep Syria as a viable functioning state... I say keep the junk and the trash planes...
The ratio incident/time of use shows their carriers are billion times better than the kuznetsov.
The ratio of cables snapping when the arrester gear is not working is 100%... it is not a cable issue it is an arrester gear issue... the fact that you don't understand this after I have said this plenty of times seems to me to you be stirring the pot... or just being a bit thick, and I don't think it is the latter.
It just shiped 7 fighters and 2 choppers to Hmeimim and waited off the coast.
They were testing new upgrades and new features and also new tactics and new communications and strategies.
They hardly needed any more fighters to test if they can locate a target and organise a flight to go and attack the target and then determine if follow up attacks are needed using cheap simple dumb iron bombs from 10km altitude with aircraft that don't need escorts.
China and India use theirs more often. Using it for training or some easy bombing in the desert against a very very very weak enemy is not different.
You keep saying they use them more often but where and when?
What terrorist targets have they defeated with air power, how many missions... what is their mission rate... why would that matter if they can't find targets to attack in the first place?
Syria was more a test than a real deployment BTW.
It would not have been a test if it was not a real deployment...
Wow, such a Russian fail. Not a shred of effort to evaluate the actual functionality of the Su-33.
Obviously it is not capable if it doesn't cost more than 200 million a plane...
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Cables even snap on US carriers. They were running the Kuz hard. In real combat. Something China or India haven't done in their dreams. If I recall , one of the jet losses in the Syria op was just because they ran it out of fuel because it wasn't calculated right
