https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...rnet-deal.html
Government officials look to sit down with various manufacturers at the Paris Airshow next week to talk Interim fighters and possibly kick off the fighter competition.
Somehow this is starting to become a bit of a mess. It was originally the Superhornet, but it sounds like Boeing is on the outs.
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But the Paris meetings offer an opportunity for U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin, French firm Dassault, Swedish company Saab, and European consortium Eurofighter to make their best pitches on the issue.
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Suddenly we're going away from something at least similar in the Superhornet, and go completely mixed mess airforce where we're going to have to have multiple training programs, maintenance, tool and logistics and capability packages.
On top of that, this process of buying Interim jets is now going to probably become the new jet, which means that there' a possibility that we're going to be buying under capable planes.
In terms of Lockheed Martin, we know that the F-35 is probably going to be the jet of the future in Canada, but do they cut us a cheap deal on a strengthened squadron of F-16s? Because I doubt that they send us some not for export F-22s? Maybe they could send us some A-10's to up boost our ground attack (I'm joking here)
Does Dausault sell us some Rafales? When we looked at it last time there were concerns about its ability to operate within NORAD with US planes, also there were concerns about cold weather performance and logistics as well.
Also its fly away cost would probably be in the 100 to 120 million per plane cost minimum
Or Saab and their Griphen E/F which is probably too light of a multirole function with half the load weight of the other plane and its pretty solidly a gen 4 fighter and the problems listed with the Rafale come to mind. The biggest advantage is its probably cheap at between 50 and 80 million roughly us per plane depending on variants
The Typhoon is a good fighter, but again as an interim fighter it has the same issues as the above two. As well its expensive at between 130 million per copy to 160 million per copy US. And has inter operability questions. Its decidedly 4th generation as well.
I think there needs to just be a serious discussion about this whole Interim fighter program as it sounds like its probably going to cost a lot more then the Liberals are promoting for a limited life span aircraft that's going to throw the Airforce into Chaos.
At this point just kick off the fighter competition and make it a crash program (bad choice of words).
Canada operating two distinctive aircraft makes absolutely no sense given the size of our airforce and the way that its run now.