Iran Unveils Its Own Stealth Fighter Jet, the Qaher F-313 260
An anonymous reader writes "Iran has unveiled a new home-made combat aircraft, which officials say can evade radar. The single-seat Qaher F313 (Dominant F313) is the latest design produced by Iran's military since it launched the Azarakhsh (Lightning), in 2007. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad said it had 'almost all the positive features' of the world's most sophisticated jets.Footage from state TV showed the jet in flight, but not its take-off or landing."
Note the intense weasel wording (Score:4, Insightful)
Note the intense weasel wording...
built with "advanced materials" and to have a very low radar signature
So all we really know for certain is its not the "Spruce Goose". Well that's not saying much.
can evade radar
Yeah so can the Cessna 172 I trained in. Now doing it well, and doing it easily, and being optimized for that task, that's a whole nother topic.
Perhaps a little overly ambitious. For people who know nothing about aerospace the best I can do is a standardized slashdot car analogy: This is like Henry Ford hand building his first model T engineering demonstrator but declaring he's going to skip a couple steps and start shipping Tesla model S RSN.
Re:Note the intense weasel wording (Score:4, Insightful)
(Note that I'm not saying that the US and Israel are morally right just because we happen to have stronger military forces. I wish both sides acted responsibly and had far fewer weapons.)
Re:very very stealthy (Score:5, Insightful)
Plane itself is internal propaganda. Look at the unveiling date, compare to the rest of Iranian fighter programs. Vaporware aimed at general populace to foster patriotism.
But cockpit isn't the part that is telling.
Compatible with politics (Score:2, Insightful)
claiming oneself to be a believer in Islam while being an obsessive liar is a bit of a problem.
Explain to me how anyone who seriously claims to follow any organized religion is anything but an obsessive liar. They believe in a bunch of (mostly) made up stories that they by definition cannot prove to have any basis in fact. Hence they are liars at a minimum to themselves and quite probably to others. Making up stories shows no incompatibility with politics whatsoever.
Re:Nice DVD player on that mockup cockpit... (Score:5, Insightful)
What gets me is that they're parading this homemade abortion around as the best effort of a -nation-. They actually had the balls to put it on TV with Mahmoud proudly standing next to it.
Iran will always have a hard time getting their war fighting tactics past the not-so-smart-bombs with semtex wrapped around their midsections.
The last time Iran had a decent military was under Xerxes.
So much hate (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:very very stealthy (Score:4, Insightful)
The USAF will not certify manuals and tech orders written in any language other than English. So, if country X buys USAF stuff, and they want to translate it in to whatever the native language is, they assume full responsibility for the maintenance, care, and feeding of said equipment. Most countries find: A) It's really expensive to translate hundreds of thousands of pages of very technical data; B) English is the international language of aviation; C) As updates, modifications, operating supplements, emergency supplements, Time Compliance Technical Orders, upgrades, revisions, corrections, etc are published it means constantly paying for translation services over the life of the aircraft (unless the country opts out of the Technical Coordination Group and elects full responsibility for all safety, maintenance, inspections, repair procedures, etc). So, it's just cheaper to keep everything in English.