YIMBY wrote:You seem to be very biased against any non-US plane (or non-LM?). I do not deny that F-16 is powerful, but you should show some respect to other producers, too.
Would you remind me when Gripen A/B/C/D and particularly E has lost against the F-16 when directly offered?
I may remember Poland, what else? Maybe those ten aircraft to Chile, but that was accompanied by second hand-fighters that happened to be available, unlike Gripen.
When have Gripen E and F-16 been even truly competing, other than Brazil where F-16 lost in the early phase (but you might say it was due to politics, bribery etc, unknown to US and LM, isn't it?).
How many new customers have ordered F-16 in this century?
When was the last time a first world country ordered F-16?
Last but not least, in a modern war you will not see one fighter against other fighter (except maybe some isolated third world conflicts). It will be the attack system against the defence system, and those consists of much more than a fighter or even squadrons of fighters. And your F-35 will have some mission to do, usually to make a first strike against enemy targets, not just to have fun flights to see if there happens to be inadvertent enemy fighters nearby to shoot them down. With the super-duper bunker buster bomb filling in all the internal weapon bay, and all possible self-defence weapons hanging in the external pods, and tanks at least half full for the long return flight, appropriately equipped Gripen E's supported by a local ground surveillance system are quite on par with F-35's.
P.S. Would you give a quote where the average cost of F-35 is less than 125 MUSD per plane, including all the system to be delivered, i.e. not just the additional cost for another plane to be delivered to existing customers like the US.
The F-16's sales record shows. Since 2000, new F-16's have been sold to Israel, Chile, Morocco, Iraq, Oman, Poland, Singapore, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Pakistan, and the UAE. Used F-16's have been sold to even more nations.
Remember the Swiss evaluation that got leaked to the press? That evaluation said that the Gripen was inferior in many ways to the Swiss F/A-18 Hornet fleet in range, performance, and payload. Even the Gripen E wouldn't be a significant upgrade against the F/A-18. Ad the Swiss evaluation also showed that a Gripen E the expected per unit cost of Gripen E was going to be around $96 million per aircraft; the exchange rate has changed since then and it has only gone up.
And the F-35 price decreases: Have you been paying attention to the other threads here? Here's a graphic:
http://www.airinternational.com/view_ar ... p?ID=10548First time a F-35A's fly away price has dropped below $100 million... and it will continue to fall as the production rate ramps up.
The Gripen E is occupying an unusual sector of the fighter jet market where it's going to get squeezed from multiple directions:
If you are a wealthy Western-aligned nation and have long term defence ties to the US, you are probably going to buy the F-35;
If you are a wealthy Western-aligned nation and don't have access to the F-35, you are probably going to buy something like the F-16, F-15E, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, the Eurofighter Typhoon, or the Rafale;
If you are a Western-aligned nation but aren't that wealthy, you will probably buy a used fighter, like used F-16's, or get a armed version of a high end advanced jet trainer;
If you aren't a Western-aligned nation but is fairly wealthy, you probably won't have access to Gripen anyways due to its American content, and thus would pick something like the Rafale or a Russian offering;
If you aren't a Western-aligned nation but don't have a lot of cash, you can forget about Gripen anyways, and would probably buy a Russian or a Chinese fighter instead
This is not a good area of the market to be in. Too expensive to be the value option, too much American content to be a good non-aligned offering, and too little capability when measured against other aircraft available. Literally, it's too big for the little kids, too little for the big kids.
And it's also going to be late to the market when most customers have already either made their decisions, or the competitors have already matured and had their bugs worked out. Unless your product is absolutely ground breaking (and face it, Gripen E isn't), it's not going to sell well.