Indian Rafales, anyone?

[PolluxDeltaSeven]

Man it must be hell for their maintenance crews to be able to keep so many different aircraft in flying order. You would think that they would want to ween it down to 2-3 modern airframes.

I mean why not get rid of all the Mig 21s, yes parts are probably plentiful considering the sheer number of airframes that were built, but lets face it, the Mig 21 has been obsolete since about the mid 70s.

Jaguar....probably still a fair number of parts around for it, since most other countries have mothballed their fleets, but again, its an old design, and a one dimensional platform....yeah I know you can mount a pair of winders on the wing roofs but that is just for sheer self defence, I sure as hell wouldn't want to go dogfighting with one.

Mirage 2000, ok...now we are getting into a newer class of fighter, but they only have 40?? Whats the point?? Sell them to some other country that are flying them and replace them with a newer fighter. Yes parts are still available, yes they are a newer aircraft, but having such a small number of them among the rest of the aircraft they fly. Has to be a nightmare getting parts and keeping them maintained when alot of the budget is being spent on parts for the numerous 1960's fighters.

For the Mig-21 and Jaguar, even if some of them suffer from maintain problems (due to low quality of localy build spare parts), a large number of them are modernised, or even totally new, as India is now the only producer of new-build Jaguar in the world. And they build their own Mig parts, as they used to license build the aircraft.

For the Mirage 2000, they still are around 45 of them and they will be soon modernised in a close Mirage 2000-5Mk2 standard (equal to the Greek one, with new weapons and radar). For the moment, the Mirage's squadron are, alongside the Su-30, the spearhead of the IAF. Don't forget that the last batch of Mirage 2000H was delivered only 3 or 4 years ago!!


So, in the future, the IAF will have a main frame articulates around three main type of multipurpose aircrafts:
-The "new build" high-end around the Su-30
-The "new build" low-end around the new "light" MRCA (Rafale, Gripen, Mig-35, F-16, Typhoon or Super Bug)
-The "modernised" high quality fighters around modernised Mig-29 and Mirage 2000-5, very close to the MRCA in capabilities.
Alongside those high quality fighters, a loarg number of old or modernised small fighters (Mig-21, Mig-27, Jaguar mainly) have to stay only until their replacment by the LCA Tejas or another batch of MRCA.




For the MRCA competition, my "sources" give to me some interesting points of view.
If we only keep in mind the actual request of proposal and what is said in it, it appears that the Gripen and eventually the F-16 could be very good contender, as they are both cheap to buy and cheap to maintain. Moreover, they are very close to the now out-of-production Mirage 2000 that used to be the alone contender of the MRCA.
But if we speak in terms of technologies' transfers and offset, the Mig-35 and the Rafale could be better contenders, as the industrials involved in those programs (for example SAFRAN and Thales, for the Rafale) have a lot of interest and some joint program with Indian industrials...

[GTX]

Given the fact that so many countries are already involved with the F-35, I cannot see to much in the way of offsets being offered - if for no other reason, the existing partners would complain.

Regards,

Greg