Russian Flanker and SU-3X Thread: Videos, Pictures, News, Views

[Air Force Brat]

Ahaaa...there's a catch after all! So my babe (Typhoon) was just playing nice after all.

Probably more orientation hops, bringing your guests up to speed on the merge? medium altitude, and showing your own team, they aren't going to beat the Flanker by being drawn into that 200-400 Knt regime. If the Flankers were using OVT the chances are they may have been in the 200-300 knot optimum where OVT excels and where you can point the nose of your aircraft by slewing it with OVT, with-out exceeding the structural limits of your own aircraft. That's how you fight the Flanker and even the Mig 29 with OVT, you pull the other guy into your own little world.

The Typhoon on the other hand is a high and fast bird, keep the energy up, go high and get him up there huffing and puffing, trying to play your game, launch that missle BVR at high speed and he'll never know what hit him? Similar to a Raptor, its a winning combination, not undefeatable, but you better be on your game, and if the "phoon" is fast and high, you won't turn inside of him, and you can run, but you'll only die tired??? Heh! Heh! Heh!

12 to nothing eh?? should convince even the most block-headed that something was amiss? as I said, these are both very fine airplanes, and even though I LOOOVE the Flanker, if it were a duel to the death??? I'd think twice before I choose it over the Phoon? That's why you have these little "excercises", playing with those Flankers, you have to play to your strengths, and that my friend is what keeps everyone coming back for more. In that first go around in 07, no doubt the Indian fellows were at a disadvantage, prolly trying to employ some of those "Soviet" tactics. They learned as we all do, that you you join the "bigs", its a whole nother level of play. By all accounts they came ready, knowing a lot more about how to fly and fight their aircraft, and as both sides were somewhat "demure" about the exact details, it wasn't all one sided? no it wasn't.

 

[Scratch]

I would also in fact be interested in how these exercises ended in precisely 12 match-ups. Or, what constitutes one?

With the training airspace rather nearby there should be enough fuel to easily put 3-4 engagements into one flight. That means the final twelve engagements were complete after only 3 - 4 1vs1 missions. So about a day, or two. What did they do in the other eight to nine?
I understand the score does not include the LFEs, meaing the 4on4 + engagements that were larger then simple "dogfights".
Or were there twelve flights total (in the WVR only phase) including 1v1, 2v1 and 2v2 with the "overall" result of each being a(n arbitrary?) win? Even that seems to be a really small number for such an exercise.

 

[FORBIN]

Some years ago yet a " scandal " for a training btw F-15 vs Su-30MKI and then we learned F-15 restricted during this training, don' t worry

 

[aksha]

Some years ago yet a " scandal " for a training btw F-15 vs Su-30MKI and then we learned F-15 restricted during this training, don' t worry

can you show me a USAF source that says the F15 fought with one hand held behind ???


the restriction , if i remember well , was how the F15's would perform without AWACS , and when faced with superior numbers

and get yer facts right the SU 30 that went up against the F15C in 2004 was not an MKI , it was an ordinary K.

it was only in 2004 that the IAF started getting the MKI's
all the K's were subsequently returned to Russia, and is now being delivered to Algeria

and even mig 21's managed to defeat them.


this is the only official or pilot quoted USAF comments from the Exercises that i can find from that particular exercise
and you must remember that it was the USAF that left the cat out of the bag, by announcing the results

David A. Fulghum in its Cope India report for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine quoted Colonel Mike Snodgrass, commander of the 3rd Wing as saying: “The outcome of the exercise boils down to (the fact that) they ran tactics that were more advanced than we expected…They could come up with a game plan, but if it wasn’t working they would call an audible and change (tactics in flight).”

“The two most formidable IAF aircraft proved to be the MiG-21 Bison, an upgraded version of the Russian-made baseline

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, and the Su-30MK Flanker, also made in Russia,” Snodgrass explained to AW&ST.

Low radar visibility, instantaneous turn rate, and the

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combined with high-off-boresight R-73 air-to-air missiles were among the factors that made the upgraded MiG-21 a deadly adversary for the U.S. F-15s.

USAF Colonel Greg Newbech said: “What we’ve seen in the last two weeks is the IAF can stand toe-to-toe with the best air force in the world. I pity the pilot who has to face the IAF and chances the day to underestimate him; because he won’t be going home. They made good decisions about when to bring their strikers in. The MiG-21s would be embedded with a (MiG-27) Flogger for integral protection. There was a data link between the Flankers that was used to pass information. They built a very good (radar) picture of what we were doing and were able to make good decisions about when to roll (their aircraft) in and out.”

and this from an f18 pilot

Candid words from a top gun instructor, who now commands roughly half the airborne striking force that the US Navy has over the Pacific. More than that, these are words of any American pilot who's heard all the Sukhoi stories. Captain Hal Murdock(

), commodore at Lemoore Naval Air Station, California, is a Tomcat ace who now spends his time effecting the foundations for the next generation of American naval aviation, a.k.a. the F-35 Lightning-II.

To be honest, I'm yet to find a US pilot (and most defence correspondents have met a whole bunch in the last three years) who wouldn't give something really valuable to get behind the stick of a Su-30MKI. The young US Navy lieutenant Matthew "Bloody" Stoll, who flew me in an F/A-18F Super Hornet in February last year at Yelahanka, said, "Hook me up with a Flanker ride, and I'll get you another F/A-18 flight!"

Anyway, during the briefind we got from Captain Murdock at the Lemoore base, the discussion inevitable shifted to a comparison between the Super Hornet and the Su-30MKI. You can always trust a real pilot to be honest about his gear, and stuff used by his purported adversaries. For starters, he was candidly and unambigiously clear that if a Super Hornet and Su-30MKI went head to head, one on one, it would be an incredibly good fight.


One thing he said outright -- it would be imperative for the Super Hornet to keep the engagement BVR to keep its advantages peaked. The Super Hornet, he said, would be able to paint the MKI with its AESA minutes before the reverse could happen, giving it precious minutes to act. Secondly, in a BVR engagement, the electronic warfare environment made possible by the Super Hornet's integrated EW systems are "far superior to anything known to exist on the best Russian fighters". But, he said, you allow the Su-30 to get into a close-combat engagement with the Super Hornet, and "it's gonna be a very different story, I'm afraid."


For starters, the Super Hornet will be almost hopelessly outmanouvered by the MKI, Murdock says. "We've seen these fellas at air shows. It ain't funny. That thing can swing." Even the Super Hornet's turbo nose-down feature (something pilots love) wont allow it to dodge. And probably most importanty, Murdock indicates that in any engagement, if the Super Hornet doesn't make its kill quickly, it's going to almost ruin the odds of winning. The Su-30 has immensely more endurance and survivability in the air than a Super Hornet, and by the simple virtue of being able to stay in the air longer, has a critical one-up.

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and for people claiming that the Western air forces fight with one hand behind their backs,

"Sukhoi-30MKI is our golden goose. We don't want to expose all its eggs to even friendly forces. We did not exploit its spectrum of capabilities. For instance, we did not open all operating modes of its radars," said a senior IAF officer.

But what was shown was enough to dazzle the visitors. "All our pilots who flew in Sukhoi-30MKIs came out with silly smiles on their faces.

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[aksha]

a bit about the Super 30 upgrade for the MKI

thanks to Karan M for putting all data together
pic of the new 6-channel RWR with the MAWS for Su-30MKI

Six antennae configur tions of R118 Radar Warning Receiver (RWR) system have been certified
and cleared with Eagle Eye Interface Unit for installation and flight trials on SU-30MKI aircraft

DR118 digital RWR is a state-of-the-art, six-channel digital radar warning receiver for Su-30 MKI. It is an airborne, tactical EW system that performs the functions of creating situational awareness to the pilot, about ground-based, airborne or ship-borne emitters present in the scenario. High level system design has been completed. Algorithms for digital reception have been implemented in firmware and
evaluated.

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New DR118 variant is being developed. Digital - so advanced radars can be detected, processed.

MAWS

Dual-Colour Missile Approach Warning System
DARE along with MoD, Israel, is in the process of design and development of Dual-Colour
Missile Approach Warning System (DCMAWS) for Su-30 MKI aircraft. The system will provide
protection to the aircraft from surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles. The spectral information of
two colours is used to discriminate efficiently between sunlight reflections, background radiation
and the radiation from the missile. The DCMAWS consists of a set of up to six dual-band IR
sensors installed on the platform, which samples the space in accordance with the defined spatial
coverage, and on advanced processors running state-of-the-art algorithms for online defective pixel
identification and image line-of-sight test. Design and development of data processor unit, which is the
heart of the DCMAWS, have been completed successfully.

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Probably retain the original Siva pod for KH-31 and DRDO NGARM.

 

[aksha]

continued from previous post

The large format display engineering rig at DARE for Su-30 is seen on Page 12 (2012)

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This is an Irkut prototype for the Su-30 (not the Su-35 - see the HUD)

Wonder if its two parallel efforts.


the LCA project helps the indians do a lot of upgrades on their own, provided they pay a premium to the Russians

 

[aksha]

this was the original plan

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The upgrades, costing Rs109.2 billion, will include the strengthening and service life-extension of the Su-30MKI airframes; and installation of uprated turbofans, new glass cockpit avionics, mission management avionics, and integrated defensive aids suites. This will be followed by another batch of 42 new-build Su-30MKIs to be subjected to identical upgrades

accommodate two uprated Lyulka AL-31FP turbofans. The AL-31FP, presently rated at 126kN with afterburning, will offer 20% more power when uprated by NPO Saturn—its manufacturer--and will have a total technical service life of 6,000 hours, instead of the present 2,000 hours. The uprated engine will also employ a larger diameter fan, redesigned key hot-end components and cooling system technologies to permit reduced thrust lapse rates with altitude, which in turn will permit supercruise flight regimes. Also to be incorporated into the uprated engine will be new-generation full-authority digital engine controls (FADEC) as well as all-axis thrust-vectoring nozzles (±15 degrees in the vertical plane and ±8 degrees in the horizontal plane, with deflection angle rates of up to 60 degrees per second). The digital flight-control computer too will be replaced to achieve harmonisation of the digital flight control laws associated with supercruise and all-aspect supermanoeuvrability.

The glass cockpit avionics package, developed byRussia’s Avionica MRPC and Tekhnocomplex Scientific and Production Centre, will include new-generation hands-on-throttle-and-stick (HOTAS) controls made by KB Aviaavtomatika, panoramic active-matrix liquid crystal displays, and a compact OLS infra-red search-and-track sensor developed by the Ekaterinburg-basedUrals Optical & Mechanical Plant. The mission management avionics package will include dual redundant core avionics computers developed by the Defence Research & development Organisation’s (DRDO) Bangalore-based Defence Avionics Research Establishment (DARE) and built by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). The integrated defensive aids suite, now being developed by a joint venture of DARE and Cassidian of Germany, will include the MILDS AN/AAR-60 missile approach warning system (MAWS).

The open-architecture IDAS has been under joint development by DARE and Germany-based Cassidian since 2006, and will include the AAR-60(V)2 MILDS F missile approach warning system, the EW management computer and Tarang Mk3 radar warning receiver (developed by DARE and built by Bharat Electronics Ltd), a countermeasures dispenser built by Bharat Dynamics Ltd, TsNIRTI-developed expendable active electronic decoys, a reusable fibre-optic ABRL active radar towed-decoy using suppression, deception and seduction techniques, and an internal EW suite supplied by Elettronica of Italy (the very same Virgilius suite that is on board the MiG-29UPG). The Virgilius family of directional jammers, which are also used by the Eurofighter EF-2000, make use of active phased-array transmitters for jamming hostile low-band (E-G) and high-band (G-J) emitters, and is considered an equivalent of the AESA aperture-based jammers of THALES’ Spectra EW suite. The ABRL can be deployed manually from the cockpit, or automatically upon threat detection. It provides active interference to the terminal guidance of incoming air combat/surface-to-air missiles in order to provide for an increased miss-distance to outside lethal range. The ABRL features four rear-mounted lattice control fins to provide for decoy control and providing a certain amount of drag for enhanced stability during extreme manoeuvring. The advantages of lattice controls are that they can be folded down to facilitate carriage (in this application) inside a compact launch tube, are capable of unstalled operation at up to 50-degree angles of attack, and significantly reduce the demands placed on their actuators. In essence, they provide a great deal of lifting area despite having a very small chord, so combine outstanding effectiveness with comparatively small hinge moments. In the ABRL, the lattice fins are hinged forward into a recess in the decoy body and deploy rearwards upon decoy deployment.

The principal on-board mission management avionics components of the upgraded Su-30MKIs will be the multi-mode MIRES X-band active electronically steered-array (AESA) multi-mode radar (MMR), developed and built by the V Tikhomirov Scientific-Research Institute of Instrument Design along with Ryazan Instrument-Making Plant Federal State Unitary Enterprise, and modular L-band and S-band transmit/receive (T/R) modules that will be housed within the Su-30MKI’s forward wing and wing-root sections, as well as on the vertical tail sections. The MIRES, using the back-end elements of the Su-30MKI’s existing NO-11M ‘Bars’ PESA-based MMR, will be able to simultaneously perform up to five ‘core’ functions, comprising look-up and shoot-up; look-down and shoot-down; directional jamming of hostile data-links; real-beam ground mapping via Doppler-beam sharpening in the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) mode; and ground moving target indication. This will give the Super Su-30MKIs an unprecedented degree of all-round situational awareness and interleaving mission synchronicity (performed by the two-man crew), which will be available, for the most part, from only the F/A-18 Super Hornet’s International Roadmap variant once it becomes available from 2013 onwards.

 

[aksha]

contd.

The MIRES radar’s GaAs-based RF components (transistors, diodes and MMICs) have been developed and made by Moscow-based NPO ‘Istok’. The wing-/tail-mounted L-band or S-band T/R modules will be employed for secondary airspace surveillance, as well as for missile approach warning and directional jamming of airborne tactical data-links associated with BVRAAMs and AEW & C platforms, thus transforming the upgraded Su-30MKI into a combined airborne early warning/tactical battlespace management platform. With operating in wavelengths of between 6 and 12 inches, L-band permits good long-range airspace search performance with modestly-sized antennae, while providing excellent weather penetration and reasonably well-behaved ground clutter environments, compared to shorter wavelength bands. The basic L-band modular AESA array design and its integration into the leading edge flap structure have already been flight-certified. The physical alignment of the array is with the leading edge of the wing, at 42 degrees for the Su-30MKI’s airframe. Each array will employ 12 antenna elements. Three quad T/R modules each drive four antenna elements, for a total of 12 elements per array, in three sub-arrays. The linear array is embedded in the leading edge of the wing flap, with the geometrical broadside direction normal to the leading edge. The leading edge skin of the flap covering the AESA is a dielectric radome, which is conformal with the flap leading-edge shape. The array geometry produces a fan-shaped main lobe, which is swept in azimuth by phase control of the 12 T/R modules, providing a two dimensional volume-search capability. The arrangement of the AESA produces a fan-shaped beam, which is swept in azimuth to cover a volume in the forward hemisphere of the aircraft. The distributed AESA arrays (X-band, L-band and an optional S-band) are nothing less than the ‘shared multifunction aperture’ model now very popular in the design of Western X-band AESA-based MMRs, including the Raytheon APG-79 and Northrop Grumman APG-80. However, the greatest advantage of such on-board distributed AESA arrays is that they will convert the Su-30MKI into a mini-AEW & C platform capable of undertaking tactical airborne battle management tasks in support of offensive air campaigns deep within hostile airspace, thereby doing away with the need for dedicated AEW & C platforms, which could then be more gainfully employed for strategic airspace surveillance-cum-management. Thus far, the IAF has projected a requirement for 50 Su-30MKIs to be configured as mini-AEW & C platforms.

Other new-generation avionics to be installed on the Super Su-30MKI will include the RAM-1701AS radio altimeter, TACAN-2901AJ and DME-2950A tactical air navigation system combined with the ANS-1100A VOL/ILS marker, CIT-4000A Mk12 IFF transponder, COM-1150A UHF standby comms radio, UHF SATCOM transceiver, and the SDR-2010 SoftNET four-channel software-defined radio (working in VHF/UHF and L-band for voice and data communications), and the Bheem-EU brake control/engine/electrical monitoring system, all of which have been developed in-house by the Hyderabad-based Strategic Electronics R & D Centre of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL). The digital air data computers and flight data recorders and their automated test benches will be supplied by Bengaluru-based SLN Technologies Pvt Ltd.

For air dominance operations the upgraded Su-30MKI will be armed with two types of new-generation air combat missiles from Vympel JSC: the RVV-MD within-visual-range missile, and the RVV-SD beyond-visual-range missile. The RVV-MD’s maximum range is 40km (the existing R-73E has 30km range) and comes equipped with a two-colour imaging infra-red sensor that has +/-60-degree off-boresight tracking capability. The manoeuvre controls are aero- and gas-dynamical. The maximum angle-of-attack is significantly higher than that of the R-73E, and can hit targets that are manoeuvring at 12 G. The RVV-SD has a maximum range of 110km and engage targets flying at an altitude of 25km. Equipped with both laser-based and contact fuzes, the RVV-SD has a 22.5kg warhead, mass of 190kg, length of 3.71 metres, diameter of 0.2 metres, and wingspan of 0.42 metres. It too can engage targets manoeuvring at 12G. The guidance system is inertial for the middle course, with radio-correction and a jam-resistant active radar for the terminal phase.

Like the existing Su-30MKIs, the upgraded models too will be equipped with COBHAM's 754 buddy-buddy refuelling pod (20 units have already been delivered to the IAF to date), Elbit Systems’ Condor 2 LOROP pod, IAI/ELTA’s ELM-2060P ISAR pod, and RAFAEL’s Litening-3 laser designator pod. To date, India has ordered a total of 272 Su-30MKIs, with deliveries continuing till 2018. Thus far, about 120 Su-30MKIs have been delivered to the IAF. These are presently deployed with the Lohegaon, Pune-based No2 ‘Winged Arrows’ Sqn, No20 ‘Lightnings’ Sqn, No30 ‘Rhinos’ Sqn and No31 ‘Lions’ Sqn; Bareilly-based No24 ‘Hunting Hawks’ Sqn; Tezpur-based No8 ‘Pursoots’ Sqn; and No102 ‘Trisonics’ Sqn at Chabua.—Prasun K. Sengupta

The IAF’s MiG-29UPGs, in fact, have the IAF’s most advanced internally-mounted integrated EW suite, which includes Elettronica of Italy’s ELT-568 AESA-based jamming system (see below), which will also go on board the yet-to-be-upgraded Su-30MKIs.

 

[FORBIN]

can you show me a USAF source that says the F15 fought with one hand held behind ???


the restriction , if i remember well , was how the F15's would perform without AWACS , and when faced with superior numbers

and get yer facts right the SU 30 that went up against the F15C in 2004 was not an MKI , it was an ordinary K.

it was only in 2004 that the IAF started getting the MKI's
all the K's were subsequently returned to Russia, and is now being delivered to Algeria

Excercise in 2008

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No for Su-30K, 18, returned to Sukhoi as expected by the deal, stored in Belarus, Angola have buy 12 first receipts soon.

 

[thunderchief]

Interesting article, especially that part about L-band and S-band elements in wings. L-band radar was announced as one of the main strengths of PAK FA , later we learned that Su-35 also has L-band "IFF interrogator" in wings . Now they claim that Super Su-30 MKI would also have this for secondary surveillance . I don't know when would they start with Super 30 program, but it looks like anti-stealth technology already started to proliferate .