Free Republic

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Russia will build more than 1,000 stealth fighter jets within four decades, including at least 200 for its traditional weapons buyer India, the head of plane maker Sukhoi said on Friday. Sukhoi test-flew its long-delayed fifth-generation fighter at the end of January, and Moscow said it would be able to compete with its U.S. F-22 Raptor rival built more than a decade ago. Sukhoi said last week it hoped the fighter, codenamed T-50, would be ready for use in 2015.

Sukhoi's Stealth Fighter May Be Quick Export to India Posted by David A. Fulghum at 2/2/2010 9:12 AM CST U.S. intelligence officials are closely monitoring the testing of Sukhoi’s T-50 stealth fighter prototype. It’s first flight from Komsomolsk has packed Russian blogs with pictures and videos taken from the base’s fence line and transcripts of in-flight conversations between Russian aircrews. Funding aid for the program is expected to come from India, say U.S. officials. India's air force is becoming sophisticated and has adopted an operational flexibility and tactical innovation similar to U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter units. The flights...

It has become common in the aviation community to classify fighter aircraft by "generations" for historical purposes. There are no official definitions of these generations; rather, they represent the notion that these are stages in the development of fighter design approaches, performance capabilities, and technological evolution. Fifth Generation Fighters represent a quantum leap in air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities that provide an order of magnitude increase in operational effectiveness over legacy fighters. These fighters are characterised by being designed from the start to operate in a network-centric combat environment, and to feature extremely low, all-aspect, multi-spectral signatures employing advanced materials and...

The Air Force is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on two fighter jets that probably will never be used to support troops on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Congress has decided to cap production of the F-22, removing funding for the fifth-generation fighter from the 2010 military budget. And the F-35 — also known as the Joint Strike Fighter — won’t be ready for prime time before 2013, according to the latest estimates. Critics of the new fighters say they are too expensive and not needed in today's warfare, while proponents argue that the current aircraft are not...