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US buys 81 Soviet-era combat aircraft from Russia's ally costing on average less than $20,000 each, report says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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The article frames them as garbage, but they're still 4th gen fighters. Same vintage as the F-16 and F-15, and the US still operates tons of those. 4th gen stuff is a whole lot cheaper to run than 5th gen, and that will probably keep 4th gen stuff flying for a long time.
Granted, they're probably not very well maintained, and the F-16 and F-15 have gotten upgrades over the decades and these probably didn't. The US doesn't have spare parts to keep them maintained (except by cannibalizing one plane to keep the other one running), and any weapon hardpoints would need to be adapted to US missiles. There probably isn't any interesting intelligence to be gained from them anymore. So, yeah, spare parts for Ukraine seems most likely.
To say that the F-16 "got upgrades over the decades" is quite the understatement. A block 1/5/10/15 F-16 would get straight up destroyed by a Block 52 or 60. The airframes may be the same but every major system ON that airframe has seen continuous improvements over the years. Engines upgraded to improve power and reliability, control surface upgrades to improve handling and safety, avionics upgrades to improve flight controls, FoF performance, weapons targeting and on and on. As technology progressed we spent tens of billions keeping the F-16 current.
I highly doubt that Russia or Kazakhstan made those same investments so while those MiGs and SUs are 4th Gen they wouldn't fare well at all against "Modern" 4th Gen.
Edit: That ignores the upgrades that COULD be put on an F-16 too. There's at least some of them now flying around with Stealth Coatings and 3D vectoring engine nozzles!
Holy shit, thrust vector nozzle on a 16? I’ve been watching them overhead daily my entire life and the Falcon is still going strong. I’ll just look at the Wikipedia…
”System for Autonomous Control of Simulation (SACS) will be added in order to operate X-62A as a Skyborg”
Oh shit.
The Skyborg has 3d Thrust Vectoring. If you're on YT you can see a brief video clip of it on "Sandboxx News". Also Skyborg and it's SACS, with 3D vectoring, has already flown! :)
Edit: Here's the link to the video I'm talking about.
Oh it looks awesome and I’m glad to see the frame still being advanced, it’s the quintessential multi role jet. Just hoping skyborg never gets any ideas about skynet