F111 for the Australians :)
Yeah that would be cool, one of the few commonwealth jets id quite enjoy having, but not really much help for Britain TT at the moment as its basically just a bigger Gr1
The Tornado IDS was a far more capable strike aircraft than the Phantom so that was going to be purchased anyway
For the air defence role I still don’t think replacing the Phantom fleet with new build Phantoms makes much sense. By the time you’ve purchased a whole new fleet of Phantoms and paid for the development programme to refit them with modern avionics and a new radar it will not be cheap.
At that point you may as well pay for the Tornado ADV and have an all-round more capable aircraft. And yes the Tornado ADV was a better airframe than the Phantom, off the top of my head:
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It was way more fuel efficient (for 420 kts cruise at sea level the Tornado uses 5,800 lb / hour of fuel, while the Phantom uses about 9,000 lb / hour - and that’s with the British engines (which were much more fuel efficient than the American ones). With both aircraft having a roughly equal maximum fuel capacity you can see the Tornado would have much superior range.
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The Tornado has triple redundant fly by wire controls, and backup mechanical control linkages, and a bunch of other survivability features. By comparison the Phantom didn’t even have a fire extinguisher.
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The Tornado was designed to be much more maintainable in the field. As an example an engine could be swapped at the side of a taxiway in under 40 minutes, and the stated maintenance hours per flying hour was about half that of the Phantom.
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The Tornado ADV had a high level of commonality with the Tornado IDS (which as mentioned the UK would be buying regardless). That has obvious benefits when it comes to cost and maintenance.
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Flight performance was generally somewhat superior or equal to the Phantom.
And all those points assume that the Tornado ADV’s advanced avionics avionics and radar could be squeezed into a Phantom, something I’m somewhat skeptical about. Otherwise the list of advantages would be longer.
just a shame the development of the ADV needed so long that germany switched to the F4F ice as an emergency solution
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of Germany ever having any real interest in the Tornado ADV. If timing was their concern though I’d argue they made the wrong choice because the Tornado F.3 ended up entering service before the F-4F ICE.
The Phantom if using the same ordnance / equipment would have done the same job (and likely better).
Why not, this was done cheap in other countries who lacked the technological know-how to begin with.
But it wasn’t, and as far as I’m concerned didn’t really deserve any of the hype it has today. It was a domestic product, almost as bad as that time China touted the J-8F as an F-22 killer.
They could easily have re-engined the Phantom for the amount of money that it cost them to develop the engines for the Tornado.
It would not be the first time they retrofit fly-by-wire into an airframe and made improvements to capitalize on it. Even so, for a strike aircraft it could easily have gone without it.
If they built it in Britain and increased the MTBF of parts, the maintenance time / cost would also significantly go down.
If they had gone with neither Tornado version, they’d likely have been better off. There were better candidates, and they could likely have worked out a method of domestic production that would keep them in the loop on technical know-how and experience in the industry (which was the ENTIRE point of domestic production of an aircraft in the first place for them).
At a time when all other major players were creating aircraft lightyears ahead of any gen3.
I really don’t think it would be difficult in the slightest.
- better solution.
ah yes because it had the ground radar and the systems to keep flying 35m above ground
debatable, restructuring the f4 for all specific ordanances ground radar etc is a loot of work and might not have fitted into the aircraft at the end
Single question: Why is anyone keep typing in the Typhoon thread who hates Typhoon?
Go to your favorite thread and talk about your favorite.
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dont ask me, we practicaly had to banish him from the german typhoon thread because he went completly off topic to discuss the stealthiness of russian aircraft
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What stealthiness? XD
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Yes but the RB199 was being developed anyway and is a far superior engine to the speys both from a performance view and a maintenance veiw. Additionally any attempt to re-engine the UK’s phantom fleet would almost certianly have required the development of a new enigne, spey was geting long in the tooth and adour just wouldnt be fit for purpose.
What do you classify as performance because RB.199 at 16klbf is not what I would call superior or high performing.
Engine temps efficiency and whole metric of other material other than raw power.
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Oh definitely, in basically all metrics of efficiency they were better.
Not too mention politics.
“we’ve spent all this money on developing this aircraft/engines, you can be damn sure we are going to use it”
Not to mention airframe fatigue. F-4s had been in service for a long time by the time Tonka came into service.
Generally when these discussions happen the British aircraft(s) are always overhyped. The Eurofighter is claimed to be low observable and they make comparisons that imply it would perform on par (or better) than 5th gens and the like.
When someone comes along and brings the opinions back down to earth for a bit, that’s when the thread gets chaotic.
I’ll stand by my opinion that the development of an entirely new airframe, engine, complex of sensors for the Tornado to be just about as good as an F-4 Phantom was a waste of money. The Eurofighter took far too long as well. They served a purpose, but even with the knowledge of the time they should have built something far better than they did. I don’t think anyone’s gonna look back and say the same for F-14/15/16/18, F-22/35… And in case anyone thinks I’m biased towards Russia… They messed up similarly in the past (see my namesake).
To imply I was banished from a thread is an… Interesting response. Maybe we can go talk about it’s shortcomings some more and shown the devs it’s a potential addition. Certainly not the overhyped that prevented its addition so far…
I think your not quite understaning what tornado was for or its heritage, the history of tornaod goes alllll the way back to the canberra with the role of the strike bomber, in TSR-2 this switched from a high altitued aircraft to a low altitude one, then when TSR-2 collapsed AFVG popped up and collapsed, then some more stuff happened then tornado came along. Torando wasnt a replacement for Phantom but for canberra the Phantom replacement was a convenient if necessary case of happenstance in the air interceptor role. Tornado was fast stable platform that was avaliable and could be addapted with little effort. The RAF Phantoms were getting old worn out and rapildy becoming outclassed by peers soemthing new was needed.
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I’m aware. The existence of it doesn’t mean it is what GJN are going to do though.