Okay all you Aircraft experts, tell this Grunt how good is this Russian plane?
I’m pretty skeptical myself. At this point, they don’t HAVE this plane. What they have shown is a prototype of an airframe with a lot of promises about what it is going to be in the future.
The airframe flies, but at this point, that’s all anyone knows. We don’t know how stealthy it will be, we don’t know if the promised avionics are going to perform as they claim, we don’t know if it is going to be as cheap to build as they say, and the timeline they give on development and deployment of this aircraft seem awfully optimistic to me.
Even if the design, stealth, avionics, etc., all work exactly as advertised (something I am also skeptical about), to build these things in the numbers they are talking about is going to require many new factories to be built, hundreds if not thousands of skilled workers (many of which are going to have to be trained from scratch) and all the ancillary infrastructure that accompanies a program of this magnitude — schools and hospitals for the base workers, commissary and exchanges, etc.
Given the state of the Russian economy and looking at other Russian defense programs, such as the conversion of the Gorshkov for the Indian Navy (way over time and budget), I just do not see this bird as an immediate or even near future threat.
Russians are master bluffers. I won’t say this thing is a complete bluff, but...