MiG-29/ΜiG-35 Fulcrum: News #2

Tbf, that’s probably because they hadn’t enjoyed 45 years of Soviet domination and life was deemed shitter in the east so didn’t want to repeat it.

Yeah, that is what they wanted... Soviet overlords to leave and American overlords to arrive and take over.

It was western economic sanctions and lack of investment that stunted economic growth for the eastern block... as shown by the massive and rapid growth of communist China with the west using them as their international sweat shop.

Remind me, how many people were shot trying to escape from West Berlin to East? Not as many as the other way round!

Economic migration is perfectly normal, why don't you ask the East Germans how democracy and freedom is working out for them at the moment.... or perhaps you will have to wait while they ask Washington what they can or cannot say in response.

That is a pretty compelling point lol.

I am actually rather surprised the EU outsourced its slave labour to China too... I would have thought it would make rather more sense to outsource production to eastern european countries... you still get cheap labour but you would be building up the economies of EU countries instead of pissing money away to Asia... but now eastern europeans migrate to other EU countries for better paying jobs and most of your cheap goods come from China...

Never forget that the US came out of the War relatively unscathed - in fact they profited immensely from the War. The US was the richest country by far. Germany and the USSR in particular was devastated by the War.

Living standards in eastern europe were much better than living standards in most of Russia, but still the bitched and moaned and complained... which is why Putin is not interested in a return to the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact... Russia is better off without them.

Hence the Berlin Wall and the East-West divide. That divide did not come because Stalin ordered it - it was because of economic blackmail from their Western "partners".

Stalin proposed a return to borders, meaning Soviet forces withdrawing to the Soviet Union and British and French and US forces retreating to their borders but the west was not interested.

As a South African the Buccaneers and the Canberras brings back good memories!

The Bucc... my favourite British aircraft... quite modest looking, but at subsonic speeds with a nuclear bomb under each wing it had better speed and range at low level than an F-16 and it could operate from aircraft carriers...

GarryB wrote:
The Bucc... my favourite British aircraft... quite modest looking, but at subsonic speeds with a nuclear bomb under each wing it had better speed and range at low level than an F-16 and it could operate from aircraft carriers...

The small number of Buccaneers (and Canberras) served the SAF with distinction esp in during the Border War. The Mirages were a bit short ranged so the Buccs were used extensively in the bombing and interdiction roles. On one occasion an empty Bucc was used to effectively harass Angolan troops from attacking surrounded paratroopers during an ops that turned a bit ugly. A superb low level bomber. It even helped the Tornado's out during the Gulf War.

Yeah, I remember in the gulf war they took their buccs because the new flash wonderful Tornados couldn't mark targets and bomb at the same time or something... they were probably toss bombing...

I also remember them talking about the fixed weapon pods the Tornados had... there were two types, but both were fitted to the belly of the aircraft and released submunitions as it flew so the idea was that you flew straight down the length of an enemy runway dropping munitions along its length, so instead of 2 x 500kg bombs making two rather big holes, you had about 500 x 1kg bombs each making a hole down the runway... which takes a lot longer to fix... especially if 10% of them don't explode and become UXO on the runway which has to be cleared first before you do anything.

I seem to remember one was German and the other was used by the other countries in the coalition... BTW the Soviets already use the KGMU-2 fixed units, which just looked like a normal cluster bomb but it was not dropped... the munitions were released and you carried it back to base to be refilled and reused... on an aircraft like the Su-25 with 8 mounted on the wings it would allow minefields to be set up very rapidly.

Taking on runways was a problem however because flying straight and level down the length of a runway led to Shilka kills... kills by Shilkas... no matter what flight speed they got up to... so they stopped talking about these systems after that.

It was the same with hovering helicopters in Afghanistan... the west always criticised the Hind for constantly flying like a plane... suggesting it was under powered and needed the wing lift to remain in the air, but after they spent some time in Afghanistan they realised that a hovering helicopter is a sitting duck and the Afghans will fire anything at you like RPGs and ATGMs which are surprisingly effective against helicopters hovering.

You can't beat combat experience for proving or disproving ideas and combat tactics.

Going back to MiG-29s, it makes me wonder just how many aircraft the RAF would've lost when trying these anti-runway tactics against the Soviets in Zerbst and all the other 16th Air Army bases in East Germany!

With Tunguska and TOR operating in the 1980s I would say all of the ones that tried..., but lets just be relieved it didn't happen and we are here to think about such things.

3. MIG-35K to 2024 for the Navy and India. Value on the best manufacturing quality should be in the foreground.

They could make 150-200 MiG-35s for the VKS to fill out frontal aviation units with cheap modern multirole fighters, and continue development of this new single engined fighter and twin engined carrier based stealth fighter and see what they come up with.

The whole point of retaining different design bureaus as departments in UAC is for variety and choice... even when programmes fail their technology can be used in other areas on other projects.

Keeping it tight

Mig-29SMT it seems.

PapaDragon wrote:

joker88 wrote:New contract MiG-35
https://ria.ru/20210720/mig-35-1741957753.html

Export contracts (two of them)

How many planes ? I don't read russian.

joker88 wrote:New contract MiG-35
https://ria.ru/20210720/mig-35-1741957753.html

this link is from July

This july the Russian AF had two MiG-35s and had an order for more on the books so the request for demonstration will not be the local military.

It might be India wanting a new look at the current aircraft model MiG-35.

The orders might be Egypt and Algeria...

GarryB wrote:This july the Russian AF had two MiG-35s and had an order for more on the books so the request for demonstration will not be the local military.

It might be India wanting a new look at the current aircraft model MiG-35.

The orders might be Egypt and Algeria...

Both have mig-29M ordered so very unlikely they ordered the mig-35. Certainly not to test it since without the AESA radar it's just a mig-29M.

India is switching for western jets. Still purchasing old upg to keep up with numbers but new fighters will come from the west or from Russia but only if it's a 5th gen fighter.

I see an african country buy it. Maybe Mali as they ordered choppers today and are working on a russian presence in the country.

Very unlikely but not impossible, it could be Turkey. Greece is buying frenchvstuff in mass and know very well the f-16 and amraams operated byvturkish air force. Mig-35 has also an open architecture which allows integration of turkish hardware on it.

Both have mig-29M ordered so very unlikely they ordered the mig-35. Certainly not to test it since without the AESA radar it's just a mig-29M.

The main purpose of the MiG-29M is a cheaper numbers fighter and I rather suspect both countries would actually have preferred to buy MiG-35s but they weren't ready for purchase in a useful time scale so they bought MiG-29Ms.

The MiG-29M uses the same airframe as the MiG-35 so buying one does not exclude buying the other as they could essentially swap parts and spares between them... in fact that is how I think they should actually be used... if you need a numbers aircraft buying a mix of MiG-29Ms and MiG-35s means you are essentially buying the equivalent of two different versions of the same aircraft that are not so different as previous gen MiG-29s and the new aircraft... it is more like buying F-16 Block 50s and block 60s or some such thing (not totally familiar with what they are specifically, but it is not the case of buying block 10s and block 50s which are probably more like different aircraft).

You could upgrade a MiG-29M into a MiG-35 by replacing internal parts and bits and pieces, but the reality is that if you have fleet of say 300 aircraft then you might only need a MiG-35 for say 50 of those planes and the rest could be MiG-29Ms that are cheaper to buy and operate and almost as good in most areas.

After 5 years of service instead of scrapping them like the British did with their first Typhoons they could replace all the 29M bits with 35 bits which by then will be much cheaper I would expect, and by that time there will be new radars and engines and systems they could upgrade their MiG-35s with it all remaining affordable and easier to manage than if they bought different types.

India is switching for western jets.

They bought some M2Ks for spare parts... introducing enough Rafales to be significant would not be affordable.... what other western types could they be interested in? They are all too expensive and some of them don't even work properly (F-35).

Modi has walked them up a dead end path... if they think second hand F-16s and F-18s or even new build F-15s then that will be very entertaining because they will want local production and these already more expensive aircraft will become incredibly expensive and I don't think they will hand over secrets to the Indians... they wouldn't even give Britain access to F-35s secrets...

Still purchasing old upg to keep up with numbers but new fighters will come from the west or from Russia but only if it's a 5th gen fighter.

Considering they will need to set up factories for production of western aircraft how long do you think it will take before they get production numbers up to the point where they could replace MiG-21s and MiG-27s and Jaguars as they retire?

At one point or another they are going to have to bite the bullet and just accept that their best replacement for their ageing MiG-21 fleet and MiG-27 fleet and Jaguars and current model MiG-29s (essentially SMT2 or 3 really) would be a large number of cheap to buy and cheap to operate MiG-29Ms... the Chinese MiG-21 replacement costs 53 million per aircraft for goodness sake and it is certainly not better than a MiG-29M.

Gomig-21 wrote:

Isos wrote:Both have mig-29M ordered so very unlikely they ordered the mig-35. Certainly not to test it since without the AESA radar it's just a mig-29M.

What does that mean?  I don't really care about Algeria but why wouldn't Egypt buy the MiG-35?  Because it has the Zhuk-AE while their 46 MiG-29Ms have the Zhuk-ME?  That doesn't make any sense.  I would think that if the EAF was interested in increasing their numbers, they would most certainly buy the MiG-35 since the only difference is the AESA radar and a built-in target designator and that's really it.  Besides, the M is just about as close to the 35 as any MiG out there and with the T-220 pod, it has a designator so it's really just the difference in the radar and those could be upgraded if need be.

I mean they already fly the mig-29M which is a mig-35 without the aesa radar so they don't need to buy 2 of them for testing purpose. They already know the aircraft.

Yes if they want to increase numbers they can buy it. Which could happen. They clearly want to get ride of US stuff quickly. Thry already bough 48 mig-29 + 24 Rafale + 24 su-35. So almost 100 fighters. They need another 96 to replace all the f-16 fleet which would be kept as a reserve plane.