The Strategist
Touring Normandy beaches shortly after D-Day in 1944, General Dwight D Eisenhower reportedly said, ‘If I didn’t have air supremacy, I wouldn’t be here.
Author: Michael
In a recent interview on his new book on the F-35 program, combat aviation expert Abraham Abrams has evaluated how the aircraft compares to the only other Western fifth generation fighter type, the F-22. The F-22 made its first flight and was first brought into service a decade before the F-35 program achieved these same milestones, and was initially expected to serve as a heavier and longer ranged counterpart to the fighter as part of a high-low combination, much as the F-15 did for the F-16 in the previous generation, and as the Chinese J-20 does for the J-35 fifth generation fighter.
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RAF’s first Boeing E-7 Wedgetail has official
Japanese Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi has discussed the development of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with the program’s CEO, Marco Zoff, stressing that development was “an extremely important project that will determine Japan’s future air capabilities.” Zoff informed the minister that moving the program forward with greater speed was essential. Originating in the United Kingdom as the Tempest program, Japan joined the program in December 2022, while Italy had previously joined as a more minor partner.
The Polish Air Force has received its first three F-35A fifth generation fighters, which landed at the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Lask, making Poland the first former Warsaw Pact state other than Russia itself to field the latest generation of fighter aircraft. Senior Polish political and military leadership figures attended the aircraft’s arrival ceremony, with the F-35 representing the first NATO standard fighter type the country has procured following the U.S. F-16C/D and the South Korean FA-50.
Just six years after the start of the COVID-19 “pandemic,” people across the globe are being treated to non-stop coverage of something known as the Hantavirus.
Why all the attention? 7 deaths, 23 more cases, and 12 countries exposed to the virus and because symptoms can take weeks to appear, infected passengers may have unwittingly traveled across borders before realizing they’re sick.
What is Hantavirus?
According to Dr.
Leading U.S. defence contractor Northrop Grumman has delivered the 1,000th AN/APG-83 radar for F-16 fighters, which are produced both for newly built F-16 Block 70/72 fighters, and more widely produced to modernise older F-16s to a similar ‘4+ generation’ avionics standard. The AN/APG-83 is an active electronically scanned array radar that first entered service in the mid-2010s, and uses many of the same technologies as the new F-35 fifth generation fighter’s AN/APG-81 radar, although it is significantly smaller to be accommodated by the much lighter older fighter type.
Summary and Key Points: Russia’s MiG 1.44 stealth fighter prototype flew for the first time on February 29, 2000 from the Gromov Flight Research Institute at Zhukovsky near Moscow — and effectively disappeared after just two test flights totaling less than 40 minutes.
-Test pilot Vladimir Gorboonov took the aircraft to roughly 1,000 meters and 600 kilometers per hour on the 18-minute maiden flight.
-A second flight in April 2000 lasted roughly 22 minutes. The MiG 1.44 was developed under the Soviet MFI Multifunctional Frontline Fighter program as Moscow’s answer to the U.S.
Grumman’s Super Tomcat 21 — and its ASF-14 evolution — was the company’s 1990s effort to transform the F-14 Tomcat into a long-range multirole strike fighter with limited supercruise at Mach 1.3, an active electronically scanned array radar, FLIR sensors, possible thrust-vectoring nozzles, more internal fuel, and General Electric F110-GE-429 engines. It was designed to replace both the canceled A-12 Avenger II and the retiring A-6 Intruder. The Navy chose McDonnell Douglas’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet instead. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney called the F-14 a jobs program.