Quote:
Originally Posted by Rotax
The small Gripen is good for small contries, but becomes irrelevant when you have a huge airspace to defend.
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Tell that to the Brazilian Air Force. They have a rather massive country to defend, and right now they're giving the Gripen very serious consideration. Mainly because it's reliable, cheap to buy and extremely cheap to maintain. The single engine design is a bit of an issue, but as J-P pointed out, it is still capable of supercruising and the range is not even that much worse than our existing CF-18 Hornets.
Whether we go with Saab or not is irrelevant, we could go with Boeing or the Eurofighter Typhoon, I just personally think Saab aircraft are superior in a fighting role. The overriding topic is that Lockheed Martin is basically the Chrysler of Aircraft manufacturers. The only difference between the two is that Chrysler's products tend to at least be cheap. Everything they've made has some sort of overriding reliability issue; especially the Raptor, which proved to be an overpriced piece of crap; rusting ejection mechnisms, can't fly over 25,000 feet, practically useless for all intents and purposes. The stealth skin on the F-35 will prove to be the aviation equivalent of the 2.7L engine.
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