Defending Mother Russia......

[Derk]

Interesting stuff .....

 

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1313573

 

Hou doe,

 

Derk

[MigBuster]

Some nice bits in there

[vanir]

That was a nice read, thanks for posting. Been hard trying to guestimate a current 2010 listing of current in service fighters with the reorganised RuAF. I had no idea the Fulcrums had languished quite that much, although I understand the figures are speculative. In the early 90s there were certainly more Fulcrums than Flankers due to the higher production rate for Frontal Aviation as opposed to PVO-strany for whom the Flankers were primarily produced (only something like two Frontal IAP plus a Long Range Aviation mixed IAP had Flankers and a whole lot were lost to Ukraine), considering at the time of 1989 twice as many Fulcrums had been delivered as Flankers from production figures, then Fulcrums were the first to get any attention with upgrades with the shift to 9-13 and conversion kits for existing 9-12 (many were retained unmodified in service alongside though for second echelon and training as Floggers were completely retired so it's a safe bet eg. quite a few Krasnodar Fulcrums are 9-12 with little modification), still the new planar array from the earlier model's cassegrain antenna is a big step up and not an insignificant upgrade to the Fulcrum fleet continuing through the 90s. Certainly development projects had in this time concentrated on the Flanker proposals but as mentioned none were adopted into Russian service, no upgrade was made to the Flanker fleet until the 2000s despite all the development prototyping, they were mostly for the export market for which Fulcrums are generally unsuitable. And now as the SM upgrades are in final stage the SMT upgrade is underway for the 9-13 in service that still have some airframe life (I actually thought these were going to be new build and older types would be retired in equivalent numbers).

So I naturally assumed Fulcrum numbers still outweighed Flanker ones until Su35 deliveries were complete, then approximately concordant.