Military Aviation Pictures
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Michael
Torque Titan
One thing I find very interesting is the fact that the Su-37 was using an elevator in the front of the aircraft. What role did this play aerodynamically?
Take for instance an aircraft has a rudder (vertical stabilizer), elevator(horizantal stabilizer) and a wing with ailerons. Why add an additional elevator?
Thrust vectoring is not new, but weren't the Russians the first to experiment with that. I always thought that the Su-37 was going to make it into production. I thought that aircraft was superb and personally don't know why the Russians did a away with it.
I don't know a lot about military aircraft and their history but I do know some.
Take for instance an aircraft has a rudder (vertical stabilizer), elevator(horizantal stabilizer) and a wing with ailerons. Why add an additional elevator?
Thrust vectoring is not new, but weren't the Russians the first to experiment with that. I always thought that the Su-37 was going to make it into production. I thought that aircraft was superb and personally don't know why the Russians did a away with it.
I don't know a lot about military aircraft and their history but I do know some.
NarutoRamen
Kraftwagen König
BMWFREAK said:
I'm not sure if the Russians were the first to play around with Thrust Vectoring, but I'm sure that they were the first to perfect it. The new JSF from Lockheed and the F22 have thrust vectoring to a certain degree but not anything like the SU-37 and i guess Su-47(?) The reason Russians did away with Su-37 is because lack of funding. I'm sure you remember the state the Russian gov was in, in the mid 90s? They weren't doing to good.
What I seriously hate about the new Jet-fighters coming out is that they are all Fly-By-Wire. The two top planes in the world, F-22 and Eurofighter, are sitting ducks if their computer system crashes or fails. They are not aerodynamically efficient and the only reason that can be in the air is because the computer is correcting the wing/rudder angles and such like 100+times a second. Compare that to the A-10 Warthog who can drop it's engines if they get shot or fail and the can just glide down back to earth.
Like BMWFREAK said its hard to say what is the best jet fighter overall, because they all are designed for different environments etc. For example, there is only one pilot that has flown the Eurofighter and the F22. He's says its like comparing apples with oranges.
NarutoRamen said:
From my understanding the Su-37 was dropped because of lack of funding, and there are different parties saying the Su-47 is production-ready and others saying its still experimental.
Not too sure what to say about you hating fly-by-wire. Everyone wants to give their pilots a competitive advantage, particularly when it comes to life and death, and computers and software provide that by offloading the extra monotonous workload and allow the pilot to focus at the task on hand. I don't think any jet fighter developer would say "lets remove fly-by-wire" because it possibly may fail. Truth of the matter is that most computer systems/software fails due to human fault. It is possible to develop a almost fault-less piece of software provided you follow a hardened development path, where everything is mathematically proven etc. Its not like they are flying up there using Windows/Linux/MacOS who are known to failing unexpectedly. In terms of computer hardware, good maintainece as with any computer will prevent failure.
In terms of the A10, chunks of it can be missing and it'll still fly, but then again thats what it was designed to do. Because it spends most of its military life close to the ground where it can be attacked by small arms fire, AA fire etc. A Eurofighter or F-22 are air superiority fighters, so this isn't a requirement for them. In saying this, theres an anecdotal story of an Israeli F-15 Eagle, whose entire wing got blown off (there was something like 0.6metres of it left from the body), and the pilot managed to land the plane with one wing despite being told to eject by his commander.
Oh, and I wouldn't say that the Eurofighter or F22 are aerodynamically inefficient at all. I would say they maybe less efficient only because they use stealth technology. But nowadays even stealth can aerodynamically efficient. Also recall that the Eurofighter and F22 are the only known aircraft with supercruise ability. Now they couldn't be aerodynamically inefficient to be able to get to supercruise
Michael
Torque Titan
NarutoRamen said:
Fly-by-wire is not good? What!?!
I bet you are unaware of Airbus then, because they have perfected Fly-by-wire in commercial use. Actually that was the way Airbus got into the market--with fly by wire. Fly by wire is not just a computer. There are up to 5 back ups that are working simultaneously in order to assure that something does not go wrong. If the main computer goes down there are 4 more to go, and truthfully those 4 are going to be very hard to knock out one by one. So, the odds of knocking out all 4 back ups is extremely unlikely.
Also an aircraft that can fly is aerodynamic, so saying that any aircraft is not is just absurd. I was not aware that the computer on board an F-22 was correcting the aerodynamics such as the rudder,elevator, and aileron constantly. I think that is rather odd don't you think?
Mr. M
Tire Trailblazer
Awesome pics, Christian!
I concur. I wanted to give Karma but needed to spread it around first...
bmer
Tire Trailblazer
I somehow like this one, such a pity it never went to production:
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