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Subject: What is wrong with the Rafale?
Rufus    5/9/2009 10:16:10 AM
I have noticed a lot of discussion on here lately about the Rafale and its inability to compete with the various other late 4th generation designs on the market today. In an effort to shed some light on this issue I have taken a moment to list some of the Rafale's major crippling flaws and their origins. The single biggest issue with the Rafale, and the common thread throughout most of its major design flaws, is that its design team simply lacked sufficient vision of where the future of fighter aviation was heading. Throughout the Rafale's design process its designers chose to go with incremental improvements rather than generational leaps in technology. The Rafale was intended to catch up to, rather than leap ahead of, aircraft that were designed years earlier such as the F-16 and Mig-29. The end result is a somewhat refined, but badly overpriced aircraft that has struggled to even compete with the aircraft it was designed to match, and utterly lacks the potential to compete with newer designs. The most obvious area where this lack of vision is displayed is in the Rafale's overall layout and its notable lack of signature reduction design features. The Rafale exhibits numerous features that would simply never be incorporated into any design intended to have a reduced RCS, including its prominent intakes, a huge vertical stabilizer, canards, a non-retractable refueling probe, and numerous other probes, protrusions, and other serious RCS offenders. What does this mean? Late in the Rafale's design process its engineers realized that they had failed to anticipate the key role RCS reduction would play in future designs and scambled to find ways to reduce the Rafale's RCS. With minimal experience with RCS reduction and an airframe that was already too far along in its design to be fixed, the end result was of course disappointing. Shaping is the single most important consideration in RCS reduction and the Rafale has too many major flaws to ever be considered stealthy. RAM coatings and last minute saw-tooth edge features are at best minimally effective on an aircraft that is otherwise designed all wrong from the start. Not only that, but the Rafale's maneuverability proved to be disappointing, comparable to, but only marginally better than that already offered by earlier 4th generation designs and noticably lacking in comparison to its bigger brother, the Eurofighter. As the US/Israel found with the Lavi design, the improvement in aerodynamic performance available with such a design was insufficient to justfy the cost of creating an entire new airframe and a generational leap in performance would require a new approach. Like its airframe, the Rafale's pit and interfaces sought to close the gap with earlier 4th generation designs. Drawing its inspiration from the US, the Rafale design team sought to replicate the hands on throttle and stick interface the US had adopted by the time the Rafale entered its design phase. While the Rafale was largely successful in matching the interfaces seen in US fighters in the early 90s, its designers failed to see the direction future designs were heading. Today the Rafale's pit and human interface are at best mediocre in comparison to those found in other aircraft in production. It lacks a helmet mounted site, a serious flaw in a WVR fight, and numerous other advanced features such as the Super Hornet's fully decoupled interfaces. Most critically, the Rafale's man machine interface lacks the defining features of a 5th generation design, such as advanced sensor fusion and sophisticated multi-purpose helmet mounted displays. Probably the most famous and inexcusable design flaw in the Rafale is its unusually small and short ranged radar. While the US launched fully funded AESA programs and prepared for a generational leap in radar performance, for some reason the Rafale was designed with a PESA radar, a technological dead-end. Worse, the Rafale was simply not designed to accomodate a radar of sufficient size to operate effectively autonomously. Now, although France is working to retrofit an AESA antenna onto its PESA back-end in the Rafale, the nose of the Rafale will simply not accomodate a competitive radar. The best the Rafale can hope to do is close some of its radar performance gap with aircraft like the F-16, but will never be capable of competing with designs like the Eurofighter or Super Hornet. Finally, one of the most critcal flaws in the Rafale's design is its widely misunderstood "Spectra" self protection jammer and RWR suite. As was done with the F-16 and Super Hornet, the Rafale design team sought to incorporate an internal self protection jammer into the Rafale to improve its survivability against radar guided threats. The major failure of Spectra was that its development cycle was far far too long and France's semiconductor and computer industry was simply incapable of providing the necessary components to create a truely cutti
 
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DarthAmerica       5/18/2009 5:49:04 PM

benellim4   

Well, I'm the most outstanding professional from France who have ever visited this site (for fun and also to know US news quickly or check general average US opinion).It would be a little sad to expel me because I contradicted you with facts and OFFICIAL LINKS.

What DoD document have you produced here?

PS: DoD is Department of Defense in USA - LOL

 

Now for F15 experience, it is true they have never faced a decent opponent in combat.

Syrian or Irakis equipement were outdated, downgraded export versions, with poor pilots, without AWAC supports....

Mig 25 is a plane of end of sixties.First flight in 1964.A joke for air combat (but can sometime escape by speed).

At least our old Mirage F1 manned by South African have done a good job against real Russian Mig 23 with Cuban pilots (not Syrians).

 

FS,


Mig-25 has never been used under ideal conditions and almost always with pilots who are probably not as well trained as Soviet Pilots. Even so, Mig-25's did give some impressive dogfight performances in ODS even if they ultimately lost the engagements. It's my understanding that these were not easy fights. If the Iraqi IAD and C3 weren't so dislocated the toll may have been worse.


-DA 



 
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benellim4       5/18/2009 5:50:18 PM
"Well, I'm the most outstanding professional from France who have ever visited this site (for fun and also to know US news quickly or check general average US opinion).It would be a little sad to expel me because I contradicted you with facts and OFFICIAL LINKS."
 Professional what? Airman? Soldier? Sailor? Marine? Engineer? I'd bet money you're none of these. I have yet to see a fact from you that wasn't tortured into sounding like something you want it to be, rather than what it is objectively.
 
Contradicted? When? With your assertion that the AESA radar will be IOC on the Rafale in 2011? When did you provide and official link for that? The fact of the matter is the final delivery for the FIRST system is planned for 2010, when software validation is supposed to start. There are no plans to retrofit the radar to existing Rafales, so that means you'll only get them on new aircraft. New aircraft production has been limited to less than 1 airframe per month. So even if the testing went well and you started building fighters with the new radar in 2011, by 2012 you'd have 12 at best, and more like 8 or 9.  That may be why the actual IOC is supposed to be 2012, and even then that estimate is optimistic because it assumes there will be no problems with the technology, the software validation and the integration into the airframe.
 
h**p://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/RADAR11048.xml

 
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Bluewings12       5/18/2009 5:51:25 PM
ben :
""You have not described the circumstances surrounding the incident. If you could describe it, accurately, you'd know why no missile then in production would have killed the aircraft in question.""
 
??? Do you know something I don' t about these particular encounters ? If you do , prove it please as I am very interested (honest) .
Why do you say that you know what happened ??? I mean you said : "you'd know why no missile then in production would have killed the aircraft in question" , so ?
 
To me , it seems so far that you are only trying to get "air" because your head is under water if I may say . 
 
Cheers .
 
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benellim4       5/18/2009 6:00:29 PM
I like to give the French their due as well. The MU90 is a good torpedo. I'd buy some for the USN if I could, but let's not forget that the Mk50 is considered a dead-end even in the USN and is why the Mk54 CBASS was developed. It's not surprising those in the land of Oz decided against buying them. Not to mention the Mk50 had a ridiculous price tag, something like $3 million each. For what it did it was overpriced (Ironically, much like the Rafale today.)
 
The Mk54 doesn't have the range nor speed advantage of the MU90, but then again when you put the Mk54 on a helo or drop it off of a Vertically Launched ASROC (VLA) against a diesel sub those advantages don't matter as much.
 
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warpig       5/18/2009 6:01:52 PM




Herald



 



At the risk of adding fuel to the fire and providing more ammunition for the banal - uber missile combines two roles without compromising either role- argument.



 



and please forgive me if i sprang a herald trap.



 



BW and FS maintain that to swap IR to RF roles is just a seeker swap.



No it is not in practice.. In summary, an IR seeker can track lead by built in offset predict and the GCU will use the most energy efficient direct chase profile to close the maneuvering target.That is bearing only data (scalar) and relies on continuous point.. You  have to constantly correct lead over tau (time interval) and chase the image or the heat source as it drifts across the IR seeker's FoV This means the IR GCU uses the heat blob or image drift and nudges or slams the actuators to make small continuous or gross adjustments to fins and vanes and thrusters to mantain pursuit lead point until final merge at which it tries to center the hottest spot in the blob detected or the image and jerks directly into the target it sees.


 

Radar, at the least the active type radar on AMRAAM supplies a VECTOR not a SCALAR to the GCU missile computer which can use the vector or TRACK to predict where the target will be in the near future and the missile computer will directly POINT at the predict point. Its a fairly stupid cheap computer in AMRAAM, but its machine (hardware) logics and preset (data tables) solutions are good enough so that it applies shove forces to POINT the missile in a single correction and the missile flies to meet and greet as opposed to IR chase and meet.  When the radar guided missile is close enough that the proximty fuses kick in, it, the missile explodes its warhead and relies on spall more than direct missile impact and then explosion to do the job.  





You have stated this isn't the case as a different flight profile is required thus software package.

 

The two dufferent approaches require purpose designed missile bodies, actuators, and control systems to get the most efficient use out of the coastimg potential energy involved in flyout after rocket motor burnout.  Just how you turn dictates how you design the missile body. For example AMRAAM you unload inertia forces late (tail controls) and you reduce drag as much as possible consistent with the lift you need to maximize usable flyout after lob. The planes on the missile midbody are there for lift and to damp roll while the tail controls are for SHOVE and point and not continuous lead correction. 

 

The MICA needs all the lift she can get and relies heavily on those strakes you see on her  for it. She also relies on her fins and vane controls to fine adjust for point lead drift to center both her radar returns and IR images the same way. The software packages as stated are different logics for radar (vector/track) and IR (scalar/bearing ); but because THALES screwed up the machine intercept pursuit logics for the GCU/RH seeker combo trying to use an IR solution for an active radar thay robbed the MICA of almost 20% of its usable flyout potential energy. Furthermore, as with the stupid RBE2, they did not solve for parasitic noise in the MICA seeker so they now get a halo where the "noise" overwhelms the radar return signal giving them a FoV picture that looks something like a doughnut  when you graph the returns across that rather myopic FoV cone.      




My field of relative (in)expertise is aircraft maintenance and systems design and antegration and consequently i know little about missiles. so to me it isn't inconceivable that the seeker unit and brain could be a combined plug and play assembly.



Missiles are not piloted aircraft. Missil
 
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Bluewings12       5/18/2009 6:04:07 PM
uh ??? Should we ask Dassault to make a MU90 torpedo compatible with Rafale ?
 
Cheers .
 
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benellim4       5/18/2009 6:08:21 PM
"Do you know something I don' t about these particular encounters ? If you do , prove it please as I am very interested (honest) .
Why do you say that you know what happened ??? I mean you said : "you'd know why no missile then in production would have killed the aircraft in question" , so ?"
 
They were baiting the F-14s and F-15s into what is known as a "SAMbush." The Iraqi Migs would dash across the No-Fly Zone in an area where no Coalition fighters were present. When the Coalition fighters were vectored to the intruders the Iraqi Migs would then turn tail and run into the cover of friendly surface to air missile coverage. While I was not in the cockpit, I imagine the missiles were launched out of frustration as much as anything else.  A good book on the subject is F-15 Eagle Engaged.
 
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Bluewings12       5/18/2009 6:14:39 PM
Warpig :
""For that matter, I have yet to see any source for MICA ever using any lofting flight path, whether RF or IR versions.  Here is one instance where I would like to see a citation, any citation.""
 
It is in French but I will translate it roughly :
h*tp://frenchnavy.free.fr/weapons/mica/mica_fr.htm

Inertial reference : "Knowing the parameters of shooting (starting position, initial position and elements of flights of the target), it makes it possible to calculate the future position of the target, and thus to calculate the optimal trajectory to follow to detect and intercept it"
 
Is that enough or you need more ?
 
Cheers .
 
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Bluewings12       5/18/2009 6:20:19 PM
ben :
""They were baiting the F-14s and F-15s into what is known as a "SAMbush." The Iraqi Migs would dash across the No-Fly Zone in an area where no Coalition fighters were present. When the Coalition fighters were vectored to the intruders the Iraqi Migs would then turn tail and run into the cover of friendly surface to air missile coverage. While I was not in the cockpit, I imagine the missiles were launched out of frustration as much as anything else.""
 
Thank you , that makes sense . But still ...
 
Cheers .
 
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benellim4       5/18/2009 6:23:44 PM
"Thank you , that makes sense . But still ..."
 
But still what? Even if French aircraft had a higher top speed than the F-14s and F-15s and had missiles with a longer range the Iraqis would not have come into firing range, just as they did not with the F-14s and F-15s. What the F-14s and F-15s were trying to do was "steal the bait." It's a low Pk shot, but if you're successful it causes the enemy to rethink their tactics.
 
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