Bharat Rakshak

For instance, how does one know the exact utilization per day (in flight hours) that an airline will make of its fleet for 50 years? They go with a simpler calculation that basically looks at the routes that the airplane will serve, the estimated time for each route, the network efficiency factor for the airline and then come up with the number of flights per day- using that they devise the maintenance schedule for 50 years (when a A, B or C check must happen) to come up with the estimated costs of operating that airplane over 50 years.

So in essence, there are bound to be assumptions (which is what I was trying to point to in a round about way as well)..then why the questions? Why not just accept that assumptions are going to be a part of such a complicated calculation process and move on? Why question the assumptions? Is to come up with an alternate set of assumptions as these ones were not representative enough of the potential use of the aircraft? And who's to say those won't be questioned? In which case it sounds like a never ending story..

Reliability and maintainability are two outstanding benefits of the C-17 system. Current operational requirements impose demanding reliability and maintainability. These requirements include an aircraft mission completion success probability rate of 92 percent, only 20 aircraft maintenance man-hours per flying hour, and full and partial mission availability rates of 74.7 and 82.5 percent, respectively. The Boeing warranty assures these figures will be met.

The reason may be that in this case, some of the assumptions may have been made after consulting with the customer. In Boeing's case, they know their equipment and its time before breakdown or failure, so they can give a good ballpark figure of how much it costs to keep a particular piece of equipment in service before a scheduled check comes up.

They aren't inept. THey are simply producing what is the least number of Rafales they can while maintaining that assembly line. The French govt. cannot afford to acquire the number of Rafales that Dassault can produce, so the 12/year is a mutually agreed number. Dassault can scale up that line to 36 per year if they need to.

An old article on the flight test of the Rafale by Peter Collins for FlightGlobal magazine. The best details you'll ever get on the Rafale anywhere! A must read for all BRFites interested in knowing what the Rafale is like.

Flight Test- Rampant Rafale

The final handling manoeuvre was to complete a low-speed loop in full afterburner starting from 170kt and maintaining 16° AoA. The loop was simple to fly and control and I used just over 2,000ft vertically to complete it:

An old article on the flight test of the Rafale by Peter Collins for FlightGlobal magazine. The best details you'll ever get on the Rafale anywhere! A must read for all BRFites interested in knowing what the Rafale is like.

Flight Test- Rampant Rafale

<SNIP>P.S. By the way...let us conveniently ignore the fact that the F-10 and F-11 are shameless (and inferior) copies of the Israeli Lavi and the Russian Su-27.

Mr Menzies is among a group of MPs meeting David Cameron later to "reiterate the importance" the Eurofighter has to the region. He said: "We want to drive home to him that everything must be done even at this late stage to secure this order. "The deal is very important, not just for the export potential of this aircraft, but also for the jobs and the skills we have in the North West."

The air force is more technology oriented than the army or the navy. In a combat scenario, all other factors being the same, the air force with better technology will come out ahead. With two nuclear-armed neighbours, and given India's political relationship with them, it is imperative that the IAF has the best technology that the country can afford. The MMRCA deal is about induction of such technology.

In 1974, the IAF was trying to inculcate cost consciousness among its personnel. One step taken was to mark each item of equipment, including the aircraft, with its cost. Every time you came near the MiG-21 FL, you were reminded that the aircraft cost 076 lakh. Today, you will not get a high-end car for that money! This aspect of the low cost of Soviet/Russian aircraft became a kind of mantra in the IAF. As the IAF progressed professionally, the flaw in this logic came out. The IAF had started the process of ‘life cycle cost' studies of the aircraft in its inventory. By then it had inducted a number of MiG variants (MiG-21, MiG-23, MiG-25, MiG-27 and MiG-29) and the Mirage-2000. The study brought out that, when the life cycle costs are worked out, aircraft like the MiG-29 are not really cheap.

In 1985, I joined the newly inducted Mirage-2000 fleet. The aircraft was a technological marvel. What surprised me the most was the ease with which you could adapt to and assimilate these new technologies. I think it was the way in which it was presented to the pilot in the cockpit. It all seemed so natural and logical, and left you wondering how you managed without these technologies so far. While the aircraft performance was in a different league, mainly because of the innovative fly-by-wire system, basic flying was extremely simple. It was the management of the onboard systems that required skill. The availability of onboard systems like the multimode radar and the navigation and weapon-aiming systems made it possible to exploit the aircraft operationally for tasks limited only by your imagination.

Also, the Mirage-2000 has an exceptionally good flight safety record. As I went up in the hierarchy of the IAF, I got to see these aircraft from a different perspective. As the chief operations officer of a flying base, and thereafter as a base commander, I realised that the MiG-21 and other Soviet/Russian aircraft were not really maintenance friendly. Keeping these aircraft fly-worthy was a challenge. Compared with them, the Mirage-2000 was in a totally different league.

The Mirage-2000 is built on a modular concept. Most modules had built-in test equipment. If the test showed ‘no-go', the faulty module just had to be pulled out and replaced with a functional module, and you were good to go. Even the engine was a module. Replacing an engine, which is required at times, took a little more than an hour. In the case of the MiG-21, an engine change was a major job which took significantly longer time and more effort to accomplish.

In 1993, I was part of the team bringing in more Mirage-2000 aircraft from France. Dassault, the manufacturer of the aircraft, made it a point to show us the Rafale, which was in the process of being operationalised for induction into the French air force and navy. The aircraft embodied an extension of the Mirage-2000 philosophy, but was more than a generation ahead in technology.

My association with the Mirage-2000 fleet included a fair amount of interaction with the French representatives, especially from Dassault. They are hard-nosed businessmen. If you have the money, and are willing to pay, they will deliver the required service. They did not seem too concerned with matters like foreign policy. However, like any businessmen, they will not waste an opportunity to exploit the customer if the opportunity arises.

In 2006, I was part of a delegation to the Farnborough Air Show. The Indian delegation was in demand because of the MMRCA deal. We were given briefings by all vendors in the fray. One common point about the two American vendors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was that, when queried about specific equipment or weapon options for the F-18 and the F-16, the standard reply was “We will have to check with the State Department”. I do not think Dassault does business under such constraints. The induction of the Rafale will pose challenges to the IAF. In my opinion, the main challenges will be training and infrastructure creation. The assimilation of these new technologies will not pose much of a problem, but the volume of personnel to be trained, especially for maintenance, will be a challenge. Induction of such high technology will also require the creation of dedicated equipment servicing and repair bays, and other allied infrastructure. This is a mammoth task.

Technological innovations have caused a fundamental shift in the science and management of warfare and national defence preparedness, especially in the past 25 ye­ars. Rather than being a te­st of numerical strength, organisation and bravery, wars have become extensions of computer games, joysticks and GPS systems picking up data from satellite systems. Unmanned US drone aircraft are a great example where experts sitting in front of computer screens command it to aim at and destroy a high-value target sitting in a moving vehicle 5,000 km away (from Hawaii) in an otherwise inaccessible Waziristan area. Firms are introducing other major technological innovations such as remote ja­mming of communication eq­uipment, enemy radars and aircraft, hacking computers for intelligence, and hitting the enemy precisely.

A state-of-the-art airplane has to do all of these while maintaining its firing systems integrity, achieving quick advantage in case of dogfights and dropping payloads precisely deep into enemy territory while avoiding detection. Each of these technologies is an extremely sophisticated combination of other pieces of technologies. An example is stealth capability, which is a combination of plane design, flight capabilities (high-angle vertical manoeuvres and low-flying), material coatings and onboard software. The pilot’s seat and cockpit, his visor-helmets, and onboard avionics are pieces of fly-by-wire technology that helps control and maintain the man-machine interface. Nations that have such technologies have a great sense of pride and accomplishment and showcase it to the rest of the world. French president Nicholas Sarkozy, for example, hops from one country capital to the next across the globe whether it is Brasilia, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi or Kuwait, lobbying to sell the planes. One should not expect our prime minister to go out and sell rice, wheat and tea to the world — that would be humiliating.

It is indeed ironical that a nation, which worships Ma Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and Ma Laxhmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, has to import the former and export the latter. Ideally, it should the other way around. Unfortunately, we as a nation rely heavily on destiny, heavenly miracles and false oracles hoping to come out of miseries and afflictions. Prosperity is an outcome of a nation’s capability to imagine and envision a future and determinedly create an eco-system where brain-intensive enterprises thrive. Small nations without many natural resources in Europe are prosperous by selling brain-made goods to developing nations (such as Rafale or Eurofighter Typhoon).

Finally, based on personal observations as a professor at universities in France, Britain and Germany, I offer three pieces of gratuitous advice to the Indian team that will negotiate price and business terms with Dassault Aviation — makers of Rafale: One, there are steep experience curve effects on high-tech and capital intensive-items such as a fighter plane. In brief, this scientific principle means that for every doubling of cumulative output, the production costs come down by a certain exponential factor. In simple terms, this can result in huge cost benefits to the manufacturer. For example, if an item costs Rs 1,000 for the first output, and has an experience effect factor of say 20 per cent (common in equipment with large development costs), the 128th piece shall cost only Rs 380. At this factor rate, conceptually, if the first Rafale costs Rs 600 crore, then the 128th would cost only Rs 228 crore. Second, do not let the glamorous yet chimerical ch­arm of Paris, champagne, Mo­ulin Rouge cabaret and other (monetary and material) allurements soften the hardball approach required to safeguard Indian security and financial interests. It happened in the case of Mirage fighter aircraft. Third, the project has long gestation periods, delivery and transfer-of-tec­hn­ology and maintenance sch­edules. The team needs to have a watertight contract on price escalations. The country has already suffered steep cost increases for the retro-fitted Ru­ssian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov (now INS Vikramaditya). The French negotiating te­am will certainly have tho­ught deeply about the scientific principles, financial aspects, as well as how to exploit the traditional psychological we­aknesses of Indians. Negotiation is also a high-tech game, implications of which cannot be underestimated.

flyingjok john neilson

PR and communications platespinner,with multi-sector and multi-channel experience, working internationally. Views expressed are entirely my own.

flyingjok French media suggesting #dassault offered #rafale to #India #mmrca for almost 1/2 cost paid by #france taxpayers - no wonder it won on price

Only China makes the world's best - with the exception of America - military equipment. The rest...like the Europeans and others make only inferior and useless equipment.

You counter-revolutionary bourgeois you......you need to be sent immediately to the re-education camp for spreading western propaganda against the glorious movement of the proletariat.....

New horizons
The Week - Air Vice Marshal Mohan John (retd)

The main challenges in inducting the Rafale to the IAF will be training and infrastructure

WRONG WRONG WRONG

China makes the world's best military equipment.

AND

Pakistan makes the world's second best military equipment.

The rest of the world like the Europeans and others make only inferior and useless equipment.

SO WHY THE HELLWE DID NOT CONSIDER THIS J10, J11,J23.3434, J31.54 ?

Why do we settle for the nth best equipmnet

K



Kersi

Meanwhile, the company continues to keep its eye on the Indian Medium Multirole Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition, where Dassault Aviation was named the lowest-cost compliant bidder. There is precedent for talks between the lowest-cost bidder and the government to stall, and the runner-up lowest-cost bidder – in this case the Eurofighter Typhoon – to win the final contract, BAE Systems CEO Ian King notes.

BAE Systems is now working with Cassidian, the German EADS unit leading the campaign, to improve the offer on the table in case New Delhi turns away from Rafale. The goal is to sharpen the proposal “without slashing margins,” says Guy Griffiths, BAE Systems managing director, international. “We and the U.K. government will be pushing hard to get our German partners to move forward,” King adds.

Minister of State at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Jeremy Browne, on Thursday said India deserves place at top tables where decisions are taken on security.

Browne was speaking at the Conference on CBRN Disaster Management and Security. He said that UK was keen to share its expertise in this field with India and there was much to be gained through sharing of experiences. He lauded India's economic rise and its strong industrial base

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so its the PLAAF which is kimono shivering this time - the writer saying the J-10B and J-11 even with improved engines and radars would be insufficient to deal with the rafale.