Farnborough Airshow: The Scorpion in search of a customer | Hacker News Reader

Farnborough Airshow: The Scorpion in search of a customer

bbc.co.uk

127 pointsrollthehard695 comments

Something you guys haven't discussed is there's an old PR move in .mil aviation to propose a ridiculous theoretical possible cost per hour of operation compared to actual results from deployed weapon systems. Then when its deployed the cost of of the new weapon system goes to the traditional "twenty grand per hour" or so, unsurprisingly.

The problem is you can make things a little faster or slower but fundamentally the labor cost of an air wing is about the same and the support of the support troops is literally a constant. Replacing a wing of A-10 with this thing isn't magically going to make the gate guard work for less money or remove the need for a diversity officer from HQ. Inspecting a really expensive XYZ costs the same labor as inspecting a cheap XYZ. Ditto replacing landing lights or tires or whatever other consumables.

So take the total budget of an air wing, divide it by total hours flown (some a/c are more or less reliable than others) and you get about twenty grand per flying hour.

Another tradition is you pick something thats a labor nightmare. Lets say Osprey super high pressure hydraulics. Now you can fix that in a new A/C using somewhat better hydraulics design. But its like a murphys law that you'll just mess up the ... engine controller or some ridiculous thing. Another way to put it is since pre-roman era times, the troops are always complaining about something, although what they complain about varies a bit over the centuries. So its never all that much cheaper to maintain and operate one similar plane over another.

Unless they can built it using plants in all 50 states then they don't stand a chance. The F35 is already built using parts sourced from all 48 continental states.

Defense procurement has been using pork barrel strategies for decades, its the industry standard. You can literally sell something that doesn't works for whatever price you want as long as you got the political backing to do so.

Can you help guide me sell something that doesn't work to the government for massive profits? I'd like to be able to buy a house in the Bay Area.

There you go, just learn from this guy: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/in-iraq-the-...

He was selling a device that literally had a battery connected to an LED, and that was it,no active component what so ever.

"McCormick had spent three years selling the Iraqi government these devices, sometimes for more than $30,000 each. The best estimates suggest that the authorities in Baghdad bought more than 6,000 useless bomb detectors, at a cost of at least $38 million."

But it's not like it's just the Iraqis that got tricked:

"By the end of 1995, distributors across the U.S. had sold about 1,000 Quadro Trackers to customers including police departments in Georgia and Illinois and school districts in Kansas and Florida."

"Kelly instructed his agents to bring in an example of the device, ran it through the X-ray machine at the Beaumont courthouse to see what was inside it, and sent it to the FBI labs in Washington. “They said, ‘This is a car antenna and a plastic handle. It doesn’t do anything.’ ”

Not entirely sure what that says about the due diligence or common sense of any of the hundreds/thousands of people surely involved

Tom Clancy shilled for them in one of his novels:

"Tell Noonan that his letter about that people-finder gadget has generated results. The company's sending a new unit for him to play with-four of them, as a matter of fact. Improved antenna and GPS locator, too. What is that thing, anyway?"

                                           "I've only seen it once. It seems to track people from their heartbeats."

                                            "Oh, how's it do that?" Foley asked.

                                            "Damned if I know, Ed, but I've seen it track people through blank walls. Noonan's going nuts over it. He said it needed improvements, though."

                                            "Well, DKL - that's the company - must have listened. Four new sets are in the same shipment with a request for our evaluation of the upgrade."

r/nottheonion

My guess is they're not aiming their sights at the Pentagon, but rather medium sized country exports. Plenty of countries want a modern yet cheap to maintain air capability.

And those countries want to build their own industries and employ their own people as well, same problem.

Take the recent failure to sell the SuperHornet and the Rafale to the Brazilian Air Force: they lost the bid because both Boeing and Dassault refused to do a complete technology transfer to the Brazilians. So the BAF went with the Grippen because Saab gave them the blueprints and code to everything, to the point that Brazil can make their own Grippens in the future and their own weapon systems without sharing information with the Swedes.

I wouldn't expect Brazil to be a market for this sort of plane, but rather more countries which currently primarily purchase used or refurbished soviet fighters.

But then again, given their low development costs, who's to say that Textron wouldn't approve such a production model for this plane? It's not like Saab is losing money on the Brazil deal.

>>> I wouldn't expect Brazil to be a market for this sort of plane, but rather more countries which currently primarily purchase used or refurbished soviet fighters.

I would presume this means a lot of middle eastern and northern African countries - most of whom are engaged in some kind of civil war.

I'm wondering how this affect a company's conscious to know their planes are being used to support some pretty sketchy governments.

Uganda had to ask the US for jet fuel to be able to pursue Kony and his LRA, where are they going to get the money for new planes?

No, I'm thinking more of stable governments which have reasonable defense budgets. That was meant to be captured by "Medium sized countries", but I guess not.

Think South America, larger SE Asian economies, etc. This is all speculation, so meh.

You don't get into the arms business if you worry about how they'll be used.

And those countries will keep buying those derelict Soviet planes because those are dirt cheap to the point most are hand-me-downs obtained for free. In those cases the countries have a bigger problem fueling the planes.

And I wouldn't subestimate those old Soviet planes, the Indians have updated and overhauled the old Mig-21 to the point that is a very capable fighter jet able to compete against a block 50 F-16. There are many companies offering updates for such planes and those are much cheaper than brand-new units.

All true. But this would be an alternative, the same that Mirage's were a popular alternative for MiGs. At some point, those soviet planes become so expensive to maintain that it's worth it to purchase new ones. Of course, to properly manage that scenario, you need a competent accountant...

It will never get more expensive than $20 million per plane + all the new support structure needed, from new ground radars and data systems to even new tooling for the mechanics.

In any case those countries are more far more likely to buy drones instead, which is why the number of companies in that sector is huge.

> all the new support structure needed

They will not require an "all new" support structure. The same basic facilities will work for any single-seat fighter-bomber. The main things needed will be special tooling and ground carts. These are usually provided as part of the purchase package and may already be factored into the $20m price tag.

> new ground radars

Ground-based radar sets are irrelevant.

> and data systems

All those Soviet bird upgrades tear out every piece of of Soviet electronics and refit them with new, Western systems. Data links and similar systems will need to be upgraded anyway. On top of that, the Scorpion and the upgrade packages are going to use compatible data link technology, so an air force can even mix Scorpions with Soviet retreads.

>all the new support structure needed

This is built from civilian components, isn't it?

It's a really sexy skin on a cessna citation business jet.

Even the same turbofan engines...

I thought that the "buy a bunch of old MiGs" model was blown apart by Middle Eastern MiGs getting annihilated by Israelis in F-15s.

If you put the Israeli pilots in the MIGs and the Middle Eastern pilots in the F-15s, the result would probably not change. Hardware is sexy but sexy doesn't win battles.

Remind me again where Israel is located...

There's a world of difference between a rusted barely fly worthy Mig and the "Bison" upgrade the Indians and Israelis created.

Case in point the old Mig-21 had a so-so radar from the start, the Bison version has a state-of-the-art radar able to target and fire at multiple objectives at the same time.

And that's just once component of many that were upgraded.

The problem with the old Soviet planes is that they're old. The USSR collapsed in 1991; they're now 23+ years old. The design life of a civil airliner is 30 years, after which it's effectively a beater flying air freight in the developing world. For a warplane, it may be shorter -- either it flies regularly, racking up airframe hours in a very demanding environment, or the pilots are so undertrained it's useless as an asset.

So my guess is that the supply of ex-USSR planes is going to gradually dry up over the next decade, leaving only refurbs and aircraft that have been stuck at the back of a hangar. The price will climb -- after all, Russia is still exporting newer, better versions -- and sooner or later the lowering cost curve of the largely-COTS-based Scorpion will overlap with the rising cost curve of keeping the old Soviet kit airworthy.

(India ... is not a good comparison. India builds nuclear reactors and sent a home-built probe to Mars on a home-built space launcher. India is developing its own supersonic strike fighter. Upgrading old Soviet kit is something they've got a lot of experience at. I expect Scorpion to sell to the sort of governments who don't have much of an aerospace industry. Argentina, for example, who've bought no new warplanes since the kicking they took in 1982. Or Iran, if a decade hence they come off the US government's shit list and turn into the west's BFF against wahhabism.)

The F-15 is 42 years old, and yet its still being built, still being upgraded, still being sold and still kicking ass. Same with the Mig-29 and Su-27 which are still the mainstay of the Russian forces until the PAK-FA moves into mass production, same situation than the F-15 if you consider the state of the F-22 and F-35 programs right now.

Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth, and many would-be buyers of the F-35 like South Korea are now considering that 42 year old plane over the brand new model.

The countries you name actually DO have an aerospace industry, you should've googled that before. Iran in particular had to create one after the embargo.

If you buy a new MiG-29 or Su-27 from Russia, that's not an ex-USSR plane; it's new-build. Ditto buying a new F15-K, as opposed to a 30 year old beater.

New planes of these types are not exactly bargain basement items; an F15-K will cost you around $100M, an Su-27 around $32M, an Su-35 about $65M.

The Scorpion, at $20M new, is therefore rather cheaper than an F15 or Su-27, unless you hit the second-hand market ... in which case you have the maintenance issues I alluded to.

(As for Iran's ability to build jet fighters, the Azarakhsh and Saeqeh look to be partial clones of the old Northrop F-5, and may or may not live up to promises; numbers built of each type are in single digits. The Argentinian military aerospace sector makes the Iranian one look like a front-rank power.)

Yep, if Iran had an indigenous production capability worth a damn they wouldn't have been desperate to refit all those old Iraqi Su-22s. More generally, if they had the technical capability to run production-scale assembly of their indigenous designs, they probably would have also done a better job keeping their existing airframes mission-capable, rather than have them aging out into spare parts and scrap.

Returning to the article, the Scorpion is an interesting example of sophisticated mil-tech becoming a commodity game. A brand-new, $20m multi-role fighter that can be maintained using COTS parts, with a per-hour cost at half of a MiG-21? It's an indication that, in time, any company or state with a reasonable level of sophistication and access to the international tech market could develop, from a purely technical sense, near-peer status to the world's top-line militaries. Iran may be too isolated to make that play, but I could see an Argentina being there within ten years.

Even then you can upgrade the older Mig-29s. Same with the F-15, even a brand new one shares a lot of technology with the original model from 3 or 4 decades ago. And BTW a brand-new Mig-29K is $30MM, far more bang for your buck than this Scorpion.

As for the aerospace industry of those countries again you are missing the point: they would rather invest the billions it would take to buy a decent amount of modern jets in their own companies to grow the local sector than to essentially subsidize foreign conglomerates.

Case in point until 1994 Brazil had no domestic-built planes. Now Embraer is an international player in the aerospace industry with exports to many other countries.

> Case in point until 1994 Brazil had no domestic-built planes. Now Embraer is an international player in the aerospace industry with exports to many other countries.

Embraer has been building planes for the Brazilian Air Force, both self-designed and licensed-production, since the early 70s.

They assembled kits and built licensed models with slight modifications, the company didn't take off until it was privatized.

The company debuted with the EMB 110 Bandeirante in their product line, which was a 100% Embraer design sold both to domestic air carriers and the Brazilian Air Force.

Using a lot of foreign parts and designed by a French engineer brought over just for this project, all bankrolled by the Brazilian state which the next decade suffered a massive inflationary crisis due in part to these forced industrialization strategies.

The reality is before the privatization Embraer was pretty much a nobody in the aerospace industry, unlike now.

>The F-15 is 42 years old, and yet its still being built, still being upgraded, still being sold and still kicking ass.

The problem isn't that the designs are old. It's that the physical airframes are old.

The entire F-15C fleet has been grounded multiple times in the past decade due to failures related to the sheer age and wear on the airframes in inventory. One of those failures included a plane literally breaking apart in midair during training.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/28/f15.grounded/

>Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth

Boeing put together a demonstrator with some stealth enhancements. To date there have been no buyers and they've been shopping it around for several years.

I don't think S Korea is considering additional F-15 anymore.

OT (ish): As an aside do TRIPS and the Berne Convention and such have clauses that allow for this sort of wholesale copying; it appears to fail the "Berne 3-step test". Or is it simply that everyone ignore military copyright infringement, or ?

I'm doubt its copyright infringement - more likely there's some kind of technology transfer language in the agreement.

Does the US really export anything at all if the money is really 'aid' from the US (military aid)?

I wonder if this sort of plane would open the door for private contractors to provide air support.

"The Pentagon, along with defence departments around the world, have made no secret that the days when defence contractors would be spoon-fed dollars to produce long-delayed and over-budget equipment are over.

Mr Peters says the Scorpion fits squarely into this new environment."

The naivete displayed here is staggering. I guess they're just trying to put a positive spin on their chances in the procurement process, but still.

Its very upsetting to me that you are correct in saying this is naive.

At the same time, I wish them all the best.

Not a great deal that is novelty in terms of off-the-shelf here; the undercarriage, seats, engines and avionics are, but the rest of the airframe and structure are new or restressed ( the wings - CitationJets don't tend to carry ordnance ). A pretty standard mix of re-use and new development for second-tier types.

For nearly 100 years the axiom in fighter development has been: never a new airframe and a new engine at the same time. All this does differently from the F-35 is obey that.

It does look useful, sort of a sub-Northrop F-5 for the new era. The KAI T-50 and Aermacchi / Yak M346 would be in the same category, though a little more performant; obviously their marketing departments aren't quite as aggressive as Textron.

How do the KAI/Yak alternatives compare when it comes to running costs?

Northrup tried "fast light cheap" back in the 70's with the F-20 Tigershark:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-20_Tigershark

As a direct competitor to the F-16, it was squashed (IMO). Are these guys savvy, have they learned the Tigersharks lesson? Maybe. This aircraft seems to compete with the A10, which has been retired.

Edit: Correction the A10 is not retired yet, they keep talking about it though.

A ton of people are irritated about the A-10 being retired to make way for the F-35, since the A-10 is vastly better at the ground-attack missions that are currently needed in Iraq.

Building a cheap plane with low running costs which can fulfill that roll would make a lot of people very happy (although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect).

> (although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect).

Depending on the flight characteristics and just how strong the airframe is, it's possible it might be able to carry a GAU-13 gun pod, which is the GAU-8s 4 barreled little brother. The F-20 Tigershark mentioned elsewhere in the thread could carry it in a GPU-5/A gunpod and it was only slightly larger than the Scorpion. The 25mm GAU-12 from the Harrier or -- more likely -- the GAU-22 from the JSF would be more likely though.

But, yeah, nothing else is going to lug around 1200 rounds of 30x173 like the A-10. :)

> GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect.

You could fit it but considering the thrust of the Scorpion you'd fall out the sky everytime you fired it ;).

A lot of talk about the A-10 Vs. Scorpion. I just wanted to throw a little bit of interesting data into the mix...

Cost per hour:

  * Scorpion (3K/hour)    
 * F-35 (18K/hour)    
 * A-10 (17.7K/hour)    
 * AC-130U gunship (45.9K/hour)    
 * B-1B "Lancer" (57.8K/hour)    
 * B-2A "Stealth bomber" (169K/hour)    
 * B-52H Stratofortress (69K/hour)   
 * C-17 Globemaster (23K/hour)   
 * CV-22B Osprey (83K/hour)    
 * F-16C (22.5K/hour)   
 * MQ-1B Predator Drone (3.6K/hour)   
 * RQ-4B Global Hawk Drone (49K/hour)

To me that really puts things into perspective. If the 3K figure is true, they're competing against drones not against the A-10 which cost almost as much as the F-35.

That is the key, even a small country can deploy these things with people as opposed to drones. It will be interesting to see if any of them take a bite.

Where'd you get those numbers?

Two places, the BBC article from the OP (Scorpion + F-35 per hour figures), and this Times article from 2013: http://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/

Since I posted the above I have learnt that the Global Hawk Drone's per hour cost has decreased quite substantially. It is now closer to 18.9K/hour, instead of 49K per above.

You can read more about that on this Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-4_Global_Hawk#Cost_increase...

FWIW, those F-35 numbers are flat out wrong.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-estimates-f-3...

They're from the BBC's article linked in the OP. So take it up with them.

No need to be defensive. I was just clarifying for others reading.

EDIT:

Now that I look at the OP article more closely, it appears you may have conflated the F-16 CPFH quoted in the article as representing the F-35 CPFH. I don't see mention of CPFH for the F-35.

>although no one's going to fit a GAU-8 onto anything but the A-10 airframe I suspect

You're probably right about that one. The designers of the A-10 didn't look at the plane and ask, "What gun can we fit on this?" They looked at the GAU-8 and asked, "How can we make this fly?"

Less people than you think (people that matter, not people who blog). The A-10 is running into the same problem that the A-1 ran into before it: it's a world beater when it comes to CAS for a period in time, so good you can't imagine not having it. But the guys on the receiving end aren't standing still, and there will come a time when the A-10, just like the A-1, is no longer survivable on the modern battlefield. The people who are killing the A-10 see that day coming, and you don't want to figure out when that is the hard way.

Not that they've got a decent replacement...

The F-20's problem was that it was directly competing with the F-16 (and in some ways actually outclassed it). It was always intended to compete mostly for the foreign export market. The problem was that the USAF had already selected the F-16 and thus had a vested interest in increasing F-16 adoption to get their own costs down.

The Scorpion is interesting in that it doesn't really have a domestic competitor. We're talking about a plane that that's going to cost less than a fifth what the JSF does, cost about 1/10th as much per flight hour to operate, and can fulfill a mission the JSF isn't all that well suited to in the first place.

The problem they're going to run into, though, is the same one the A-10's constantly facing - the USAF doesn't really want to be in the CAS business. Personally, I'd be in favor of just axing the 60 year old Key West Agreement and giving the A-10s (and potentially the Scorpions) over to the Army.

I agree about A-10s being transferred to Army. The A-10 ground support missions are too "unsexy" for Airforce.

> The problem they're going to run into, though, is the same one the A-10's constantly facing - the USAF doesn't really want to be in the CAS business. Personally, I'd be in favor of just axing the 60 year old Key West Agreement and giving the A-10s (and potentially the Scorpions) over to the Army.

Absolutely agreed. The Air Force has three primary missions: 1) bomb shit for the Army; 2) haul shit for the Army; 3) stop the enemy air force from performing missions 1 and 2 for their army. If the Air Force would like to focus on being a giant intelligence agency with hella expensive but cool toys, than the Army absolutely should take those missions into their own hands to ensure the shit gets done properly.

With the exception of #3, the USAF doesn't want to do any of that. The USAF has from the start believed that it can bomb an enemy into submission through strategic bombing. There is some truth to this idea but I can't recall any major war where this has worked by itself without boots on the ground. Given that, the USAF must continue to perform #1 and #2. It's kind of unsettling that the USAF continues to want to neglect the less glamorous but vital roles.

Interesting section from the F-20 Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-20_Tigershark#Cancel...

Seems the playbooks was/is almost the same (hoping for sales to other countries). I wonder what lessons they learned from this failure, and how it effected their current efforts.

I touched on it upthread and the wiki very briefly mentions it, but politics killed the F-20. It essentially ended up being a direct competitor to the F-16 which the USAF had already selected as its light fighter.

The USAF wanted the F-16 to be adopted as widely as possible to help reduce their own operating costs. As a result, friendly nations that had previously been customers for aircraft like the F-20's direct predecessor, the F-5 Freedom Fighter, were being lobbied quite hard by the USAF to adopt the same aircraft. The USAF either didn't promote the F-20 at all or actively downplayed it versus the F-16.

It didn't lose because it was inferior. It was a very solid aircraft and, in some ways, actually exceeded the F-16; it was BVR capable from the start while the F-16 didn't gain BVR capability until years later, for example. But the USAF was already all-in on the F-16 and Northrop lost the political game.

The Scorpion is targeting a completely different market than anything the USAF really has a vested interest in currently other than the Air Force being hostile on spending on anything that isn't the JSF. I don't have particularly high hopes for the US adopting it given that, but the market they're going after is different enough that they're not fighting for the same customers like the F-20 did.

I'll reiterate what I said recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009579

Procurement is almost entirely political; whether you get something working at the end of it is determined by how that impacts the careers of the procurers. And it's rare that it does.

If it were actually necessary to use this plane, or any plane, to win a war, it would be very successful. In a world of irrelevant wars of choice, it's simply not expensive enough or high-tech enough to sell well.

Beyond the low purchase price the running cost is so low in comparison to other planes that I can't help but wonder if grabbing these would free up budget for more planes/men etc in your department/group which is often at the core of politics. I wouldn't be surprised if someone said something amusing like they could have 1 of X or 3 of these, but because it isn't as "good" they will need to have 4. :D

I'm really a fan of this thing as a potential replacement for the A-10C since the USAF is hellbent on retiring the Hog. It's not a direct replacement, but it's a better fit for the role than the F-35 would be and the things are so cheap that you could field a ton of them.

It's supposed to be a sub-$20M jet and I've seen cost per flight hour numbers in the range of $3-5000. In comparison, the A-10 runs around $15-20k/hour, the F-16 anywhere from $15-30k/hour depending on the numbers you can find, and the F-35 is reportedly around $30+/-5k.

It might be cheap enough, and given the wings might have the loiter time, but can it carry the ordinance that an A-10 can? Certainly doesn't seem to have the same survivability characteristics either.

Nope. That's why I said it's not a direct replacement. The A-10 can carry a larger payload than the entire dry Scorpion airframe weighs.

But it fills the slot better than the JSF which is just plain too fast a design to fill a loitering CAS role well. The fact that the Scorpion's so cheap to run means you could could sortie a lot more of them for the same cost as even a single A-10 (which is one of, if not the, cheapest to operate combat aircraft in the USAF inventory today).

Absolutely. The idea that JSF can fill the role, even with UCAVs in support, is laughable.

I could see it as a combination of a trainer plane and freeing up boarder patrol etc duties. It's a jet fighter, so pilots will rack up useful experience. And you do not need performance to shoot down an airliner - a WWII prop plane could do it.

Aviation Week had a pretty good article about this plane

http://aviationweek.com/awin/textron-unveils-scorpion-light-...

Outside of the politics, the bigger issue is that it lies in a kinda idiotic middle ground. It's not good enough to go against more advanced fighter jets (so you can't use it to ensure air superiority) and it's not as cheap as "weaponized" trainer aircraft - which is what most governments need (to bomb rebels or whatever)

You can buy a L-39 for ~$200K, retrofit it with modern weapon systems (easier said than done, but still) and you won't be that much worse off than a guy with a $20m Scorpion.

Just a cost comparison from wikipedia

Aero L-159 Alca - $13-17 million Northrop T-38 Talon - $5.9 million Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano - $9–14 million

Your article touches on just where it differentiates from those options, though.

>Comparatively, Scorpion offers speed over the twin-turboprops and simplicity versus the trainers, which are structurally optimized to withstand high G forces in order to prepare pilots for the F-22 or F-35. And, although some parties may want to recast Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft for air and border patrols in the future, these UAVs remain blocked from operating in most of the domestic airspace.

I'd also be curious to know what percentage of that price tag is made up by the modern avionics and datalink systems that you get out of the box with the Scorpion.

I found The Pentagon Wars, both the film and the book, to be absolutely brilliant at explaining how things like the F-35 can happen and why cheap, fast, light, targeted vehicles like this aren't produced.

I highly recommended that my fellow HNers to either view the film (10/10) or read the original book.

You will not be disappointed.

Police forces across the U.S. are now salivating at the chance to add this to their 4th of July parades... right behind their swat team with armored trucks and tanks.

Hey don't forget AFT, DEA, EPA... IRS. Fighters for everybody!

Simple and cheap can certainly do the job. Their obstacle will likely be the pilots themselves, who may think that this aircraft isn't as survivable in a threat environment as something like the F-16 would be.

For small countries with mostly ground based threats it's a perfect buy. Not everyone can even afford a used F-16 and its extended costs.

An APC is more survivable in a threat environment than a truck, but it doesn't imply that it makes sense to use APCs for all military transportation, or that truck drivers can put a veto on using trucks - they're soldiers, and military planning is all about deaths-to-deaths tradeoffs.

If having more planes and weaker planes (which both mean more pilot casualties) is required to preserve more lives on the ground and/or achieve the campaign goals, then it's a good decision and the pilots can either shut up and do their job, of which risking their life is a natural part; or switch over to piloting UAVs if they can't take it.

Interesting. The Scorpion appears to be designed to fill the role that the F5 largely filled in practice. Well, up here in Canada, at least. The F5 may not have been designed for the role, but it filled it much better than the 104 or the Voodoo could have, and those were the alternatives before we got the F18.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have the advantage of being quite as pretty as the F5 (which, like the Spitfire, was as much a Platonic projection of what a fighter of the era should look like as it was a real aircraft). It looks like what it is, and, politics aside, it's not going to tickle any fancies. Customers, if any, will be those who realise that this aircraft is what they need, not what they dream of.

As for the politics of procurement, Textron isn't exactly a virgin here (although Bell has been helicopters and Cessna hasn't done much since the T37/A37). And the F35 (well, the whole JSF debacle, going back to before the F35 was selected) has left some rather bad tastes in some rather important mouths.

It does have a few capabilities that would make it (unlike the F-35) quite useful in Canada or Australia.

Twin engines: lose one and you should be able to nurse the plane home.

Awesome range: Canada and Australia have long borders to patrol and as a tandem seater allows for a pilot and spotter. A very cost efficient platform compared to the P-8 which probably costs similar to the E-7 to operate. (45k/hour)

Unmanned: They plan to offer an unmanned version which could give you far more range than a Reaper.

Isn't the main competitor to this drones and not the F35?

I wonder how this could work against the F35 etc when being flown by a country with greater manpower. EG if (for the sake of argument) China could put 10-20 of these in the air for every F35, could it win an air battle?

I don't think the mission for this plane is air-to-air. It would be at a huge disadvantage vs. the F-35 and F-22 in the range and sophistication of its radar and targeting. A ridiculous amount of the expense and software code is dedicated to radar, targeting, and communications on modern planes.

I would imagine it depends a lot on the weapons systems. Air to air missiles would need to be able to stay locked and catch the F35, unless they were lucky enough to hit it with one of the canons. My money would be on the F35.

As described in the article the Scorpion doesn't have any beyond visual range capability, only short range infrared missiles and guns. A fleet of Scorpions would only stand a chance if the opposing force ran out of long range missiles and if the Scorpions were able to get to close range. Even then it would likely be outclassed by the F-22's maneuverability.

Thanks all for your replies. Makes sense!

I don't think a WW2 style air battle will be seen again in our lifetimes; it'll be skirmishes and deniable warfare (eg Ukraine), one-sided obliterations of a weaker tech force on the ground (eg Iraq, Six Days War), counterinsurgency (no opposing air force at all, minor AA), or nuclear exchanges.

The nearest thing in recent history might be the Falklands war, in which some Argentine aircraft were shot down by missiles launched from British Sea Harriers.

That's political, however, rather than technical.

As one example a combination of Korea going hot again and China wanting to maintain a buffer state at all costs.

Vietnam wasn't all that long ago, and there's no really good technological reason that couldn't happen again.

We're also reaching a technological stage where it doesn't necessarily take two superpowers to fight a proxy war. Could India and Pakistan fight a proxy war without superpower involvement with a substantial air war component? Technologically, sure.

Here's an excellent piece written by Mark Bowden on the topic of American air superiority: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/the-last...

If we have a war with China, the type of planes we've been building will be the last of our concern.

I wish they'd just let us civilians have these things. I'd love nothing more than to use one to go visit the relatives in Australia every now and then.

This is completely random and insane; but what would a jet like this in the hands of the "rebels" do in Syria? Would it allow the government opposing force to compete in the air, or would Syria's air defenses and jets easily handle something like this?

Curious to know how this jet would effect smaller scale conflicts, in the hands of small, well financed forces.

This plane and it's described mission profile remind me of the A-10 Warthog ... I'd love to see a relatively cheap and virtually indestructible plane to replace the beloved A-10.

Another US-built plane with comparable performance stats and an even lower price tag ($2.6M 2014 adjusted):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-82_Twin_Mustan...

Iraq just bought used su-25 - about the same.

Impressive. I wonder how it stacks up to Korea's Goldean Eagle FA-50

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