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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
why are we buying the cheapest? Pricing doesn't matter as much in a small airforce where your running planes for the next 30 years. Canada has tried that in the past with planes like the CF-5 which were an atrocious choice at the time.
Personally if you're going to have a small airforce with a long window of replacement, you buy the best plane that you can with the best upgrade path and ride it out from there. The Government did that with the CF-18, which was a very good purchase and not the cheap purchase.
To me, I'm not a fan of the Rafale, its a re purposed air to air straight line interceptor, and its ground capability isn't great. Its upgrade path for the next 30 years isn't there aeither, its built on an late 80's airframe
The Saab Griphen has about half of the payload weight of most other planes, I like the advanced capabilities of the F-35 way better, including its interoperability with other Norad units.
The Superhornet is a dead airframe.
The only different recommendation I would make would be to purchase replacements using the Superhornet, to replace the existing airforce with 65 planes, and then set the expiration date for 12 years, which gives the government a chance to restart the process of finding a new airframe.
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EDIT: Interviews with Andrew Leslie and Marc Garneau leads one to believe they go cheapest and dump the extra money into the Navy. It was one of the key platform promises Trudeau sold. Its going to be one of those three.
Curious as to why you think Rafale is so bad at air to ground? They're no worse then Eurofighter at that. And they're effective enough.
MORE EDIT: Here's a quote form an Ottawa sun article this morning about what Leslie said:
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“We’re going to have to give a lot of help to our navy,” said Leslie. “So our plan is to cap the expenditure levels on the new fighter program and use the savings and direct it all towards the navy. Those will all be very tough calls to make but it’s done.”
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