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Comment by geezerjay | Hacker News Reader

Your comment made me wonder: if nowadays air battles are being decided based on stealth, long-range sensors and long-range AA missiles, why aren't we seeing a resurgence of cheap prop planes such as the Hawker Fury?

I mean, the price of a single F22 Raptor is speculated to be around $180M, while the price of a single Hawker Fury was established to be around $55k.

Although a F22 may dominate all technical criteria, it loses heavily on cost and the amount of resources that need to be spent to get one up and running.

Moreover, it appears that the cost of building a single F22 is enough to build, maintain, man and train a hefty number of complete squadrons, which could also be equipped with the same long-range sensors and weaponry.

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That's what modern drone aircraft are.

They cost more than 55k because of inflation, but also because the sensor systems satellite uplink etc are a large chunk of the overall costs. Still at 4Million a pop the MQ-1 Predator's are cheap. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predato...

It's successor is 16 million but it's larger and "An MQ-9 with two 1,000 pounds (450 kg) external fuel tanks and one thousand pounds of munitions has an endurance of 42 hours."

    at 4Million a pop the MQ-1 Predator's are cheap

Less than the pilot alone: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-train-a-fight...

We are seeing a resurgence of prop planes, but only for low-intensity roles. [1] However, low and slow planes are vulnerable to cheap MANPADs [2], and in the event of a near-peer conflict (ie, US vs China), they simply can't operate on the front lines. A ~$600,000 Sidewinder from an F-22 can shoot one down with ease, but a cheap prop plane simply doesn't have the sensors for shooting back.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-portable_air-defense_syste...

Yes, aside from unpiloted aircraft, there is a current Air Force project/competition for a prop driven light attack aircraft. One of the competitors is a crop duster conversion.

You have to have some sort of admiration for something called an "Air Tractor" (http://802u.com/).

Something other people haven't brought up but I think is important:

Military aviation is still in the exponential part of the technology S curve. Each new generation isn't just a little better than the previous one, it is massively better and embodies some new piece of technology the previous generation is nearly helpless against. The Fury is multiple such technology leaps out of date, and as a result is basically helpless in the sky.

Consider:

The Sea Fury has a maximum takeoff weight of 6,600 kg. The F-22 has a maximum takeoff weight of 38,000 kg. How do you take a plane like the Sea Fury, and let it carry 6 times the weapons/sensors/gadgets? A revolution in engine technology.

The Sea Fury's skin is made from duralumin, and sticks out like a sore thumb on radar. The F22's skin is made of a composite material that makes it nearly invisible to radar. How do you take a plane like the Sea Fury, and let it operate with impunity against radar? A revolution in materials technology.

And so on and so on. The F22 embodies something like five separate revolutionary technologies, any one of which would enable it to defeat nearly unlimited numbers of Furys. But all put together and it's - well, the Furys become so outdated they're almost not even worth killing.

Unlimited? It doesn't carry the stores. At 10:1 the F22 would have to watch helplessly as a few of them slipped through. What's it going to do, ram them?

Worse with the F35 which has no gun and can only carry 2 missiles without losing stealth.

>Unlimited? It doesn't carry the stores.

The F22 is nearly 2000 km/h faster than the Sea Fury, and the turn around time is said to be on the order of 20 minutes. In the time it takes the Sea Furys to go to the target, do their business, and go home you're looking at 3+ F22 sorties each hitting a nearly guaranteed 12 kills (maximum anti-air missile load with twinning racks) plus however many they can kill with 480 rounds of 20mm cannon fire.

So yes, damn near unlimited. That's what happens when the enemy can kill a dozen pilots every 20 minutes with no fear of retaliation. You get a bloodbath.

>Worse with the F35 which has no gun and can only carry 2 missiles without losing stealth.

Why do people who know nothing about planes instantly forget that fact the moment the F-35 is brought up?

The F-35A does have a cannon, while the F-35B and C have the option for an external cannon pod. The F-35 can carry four missiles in its internal bays, not two.

turn around time is said to be on the order of 20 minutes

And for how many sorties can it sustain that? Even if you had enough F22 pilots to keep it going...

Send just enough Sea Furies to force the F22s to scramble until they are forced into deep maintenance - then waltz in with your main force, game over.

I don't think you can multiply costs like that. The expenses of maintaining the logistics for that many planes would be exorbitant, and I believe the unit costs of modern aircraft would be far lower if we made more of them.

Among other things, you still need speed, even with long-range weapons. And speed is expensive, once you get into supersonic and beyond, you need special materials etc etc

I don't think a Fury, even a hypothetical one that's been modified with modern sensors and weapons, would ever prevail against an F-22.

Let's say you put identical missiles on both. Once in range, both fire. The F-22 can then turn around and get back out of range before it's hit. The Fury is essentially motionless, and will be shot down. Repeat ad infinitum.

Sure, but you can afford to field 2,700 Furies against that F-22, which will quickly run out of ammo and return to base, while the remaining 2,690 Furies are running around machine gunning your ground troops. (Sure, this is a bit contrived... but even 100-to-1 probably still makes sense. Iran's already taking this sort of low-cost approach with small speedboats intended to go up against US aircraft carriers.)

>you can afford to field 2,700 Furies against that F-22

You can't just divide the cost of a Fury into the cost of an F-22 and assume that's even remotely reasonable as a fieldable proportion. The limiting factor isn't the cost of building the planes, it's the logistics of coming up with with enough fuel, pilots, maintenance, and ground facilities to keep them flying. There's nobody who couldn't afford something better that could afford to field maybe 3:1 vs the F-22.

The salesman for Burt Rutan's little gun-armed midget ARES fighter/attack plane liked to tell people to "imagine how the Falklands War would have been different" if the British Harriers had been faced with waves of hundreds of ARES planes.... completely failing to address the fact that Argentina couldn't possibly train enough qualified pilots to sit in those hundreds of cockpits.

Hence my statement that it's a bit of a contrived example.

Fuel's relatively cheap for a prop plane, one pilot would manage more than one drone aircraft at once, maintenance is dramatically easier and cheaper on a prop plane, etc.

The F-22 can go out, shoot a bunch down, return, go out again, shoot a bunch more down, and keep on going. With a more realistic ratio, it looks pretty bad for the Furies.

> The F-22 can then turn around and get back out of range before it's hit. The Fury

Why are you assuming that a hypothetical 1-on-1 scenario is the only feasible scenario? If an operator can man half a dozen of fury squadrons for the same cost that an operator is able to afford a single F22, why would you assume that they would put up a single fury to counter a F22?

And let's assume that a wave of furys managed to down a F22. Now what? Will the operator of the F22 spend an additional $180M to churn out a single unit? Because for the same cost, the opponent can churn out 100-fold units. Is this sustainable?

I don't think it really assumes 1-on-1. "And let's assume that a wave of furys managed to down a F22." Let's not. I don't see how that could happen. No quantity of Furies would be able to shoot one down. The F-22 will just keep picking them off until it runs out of ammo or targets. If the former, it'll return to base, rearm, and keep going.

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