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Originally Posted by Akai-Sesui
I love all this fighter talk;
If i'm not mistaken countries that took part in the JSF knew that it was a competition between 3 companies; Boeing, Mcdonnell-Douglas, and Lockheed Martin. Correct me if I'm wrong, but participation in the project was because there were many countries looking to replace their aging fleets.
JSF is essentially what Ford did; common design to reduce costs and increase operating efficiency between allied countries using the same designed planes. Canada not committing to buy initially just means that they took the data from the competition and evaluated the eventual winner.
Someone I know suggested that we could open up a discussion to buy the next generation Sukhoi (SU) fighters from Russia or whatever China's whipping up (which are fifth generation)...but that would unleash a whole can of political worms that I'd personally not like to see.
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I just have bad feelings about adopting Russian Fighters as primary fighters in our airforce, it does go against one of the key concepts of interoperability with NATO and being able to keep to the NATO standards.
Now I know that the Russians being clever engineers designed their fighters to be able to use NATO Ordinance so that in wartime they could take a NATO field and use our weapons against us. I also like the philosophy of Russian engineering when it comes to durability.
But Russia has never had a good reputation in terms of building military hardware.
I looked at the Chinese 5th generation, tentatively dubbed the J-20 Black Silk (Awesome name).
The thing looks like a really huge variation of the F-22, but that size is going to have drawbacks in terms of maneuverability and thrust to weight unless they have massive engines in them.
I doubt that the Chinese would be willing to sell this aircraft to North America or Europe because they wouldn't want these planes to be ripped apart and figured out by NATO.