its not about that as some country operate the f35 in cold weather.
its about current use of plane in the current war era. payload matter most today and gripen have this card while f35 dont.
long range strike: gripen win as it can carry 5 Taurus or 4 strom shadow missile who are miles better than agm154 ER
air combat : non stealth gripen win, having accces to aim120D and meteor / aim9x / IRST is miles better than f35 who in none stealth mode only carry 6 fox3 and 2 fox1 when gripen carry 5 fox3 and 2 fox1, including fuel tanks.
anti ships : no need to talk, gripen clearly win here RBS-15 with 5 of them.
Well de compression is need around 12.0-13.3 to separate late gen fox1 (like su33/f15A other jets like those) from fox 3 (f16adf,su30mkk/su30mk2, jf17,j11,tornado f3.late,f16D barak 2,j8f, mig29n , and JA37DI/JA37DI F21) a lil more so their not always fighting against them
Considering Canada is the only G7 nation without a mixed fighter fleet… well, our peers can run them, so should we.
And the currnt goverment acctuly doing to build up the CAF, to the point that many projects have had an accelerated time frame, and life extension projects dropped for replacement program and getting new equipment we haven’t had in years.
Indeed, plenty of issues with them; there are a few cases where I see having ~2 squadrons would be good. But with their issues, I don’t see them being good picks to do everything.
But for saying “hi” to the cold war stragatet bomber flying over the Arctic is not one of them. A 4.5/4.5+ gen is perfectly good for that. (no it is not like buying a WW1 plane in WW2, to get a 4.5 Gen aircraft. (real argument I’ve seen by the pro only F-35 crowd, that anything not a 5th gen is a WW1 plane in WW2))
Nah, was just saying it as a nice bonus. Theres no additional changes needed to help it in cold weather. When we bought our F16s they had problems starting in low temps so we had to make changes for them
