The Commander of the Brazilian Air Force denied that the FAB plans to purchase the Lockheed Martin F-35 multi-role fighter, and stated that it is looking to acquire an additional batch of SAAB Gripen.
The statement came after comments circulated that the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) wanted to supplement the fleet of SAAB Gripen E/F fighters, which have not yet become operational, with other aircraft, with the aim of not relying on a single vector, something that existed previously with Mirage III/2000s and F-5 Tiger.
According to Defesanet, an active officer reported that one of these options would be the F-35, the first fifth-generation multi-role fighter, and the only aircraft with “stealth” radar technology that has a vertical take-off and landing version (F-35B VTOL).
The project to have all this on a single platform, albeit split into three versions (standard “A”, vertical take-off “B” and naval “C”) made the F-35 project the most expensive in U.S. history.
With the program’s recent wins in the new aircraft competition in Canada and Switzerland, beating out Gripen NG bids, there has been much talk of possibly reducing the price of the F-35 through cost dilution and larger-scale production.
According to the site, the official said that “Lockheed Martin (manufacturer of the F-35) is offering the aircraft on the international market for about the same price as the Swedish fighter.”
The news surprised many, as the F-35 will still be expensive, especially in operating cost, and if the FAB opted for the cheapest fighter of the last three options (among which were the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet and the Dassault Rafale), why go back to the initial selection where the F-35 was and had already been discarded due to its price?
In this regard, the website Poder Aéreo spoke with the Air Force Commander, Air Brigadier Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, who denied the alleged information.
For the Commander, the decision taken by the Aeronautical High Command is definitive and of clear knowledge to all, and for him the focus now is “to seek the contracting of a second batch of Gripen […] of 30 aircraft, still without defining the quantity between E (one pilot) and F (two pilots)”.
As reported by our partner site Aeroin, even before the Gripen selection the force had always wanted something similar to the 43 F-5 Tiger fighters it currently has, as well as to partially or fully replace the 54 AMX ground attack aircraft.
However, budget constraints have always prevented the purchase of more aircraft, always remaining below the ideal, which for many is above 60 and in a utopian scenario would approach 120. To meet this goal, the FAB has even cut back on the tactical transport KC-390, manufactured by Embraer.
The F-35 didn’t win in Canada, what lies!
yeah you might wanna correct the F-35 Canada comment. The Canadian Future Fighter Capability competition is still ongoing, and both the F-35 and Gripen remain for now.
First, Canada has still not chosen its aircraft and we may have some surprises coming from Switzerland : remember that they have direct democracy and the acquisition of a new jet fighter was only approved by 50.1% while the early 10’s decision for the Gripen has already been cancelled by a referendum,especially as someone in the Swiss AF leaked the test results showing that nonetheless the Gripen-C had the worse test results, but also inferior results compared to the AF’s legacy Hornets…
Rafale was given as the AF’s favourite until Joe Biden came and rumours say that he did threats on Swiss banks operating on US market would F-35 not “win”… Another referendum is likely to happen about F-35 and considering the disastrous availability of F-35 and the vast array of technical issues, added that the exorbitant costs of use are not popular in the population, you can expect another leak about F-35’s dubious results just before the referendum.
According to Lockheed’s own cmmuniqué to Aviation Week, they achieved a great leap for both F-22 and F-35 maintenance : their outstanding new stealth coating reduces from 32 to 28 hours per flight hour the time their aircraft will spend in the hangar…
Do F-35 clients know that France uses baked-in radar absorbent material in Rafale’s skin material for 20 years, so there is no need for stealth coating so the aircraft get anti-IR paint instead? Russia started to use such materials with Su-35, MiG-35 and Su-57, India with the HAL Tejas and Sweden with the Gripen-E/F. China failed at producing such a material so they recently announced that the J-31 would be returned to the use of the same stealth coating as the J-20…
Note that Rafale had the favour of FAB too… The sale of the then still existing only on paper Gripen-E/F was achieved thanks to briberies, and, how funny, after 10 years, the deliveries still haven’t started!!!
BTW, according to Lockheed-Martin’s own definition of a 5th gen fighter still in use about 10 years ago, F-35 is not 5th gen since it can’t supercruise! Actually, AFAIK, the F-35 is even banned from going supersonic as the tail starts to re-shape at Mach1.2 and even to melt after a few minutes at Mach1.4…
Many think that the F-22 was the 1st 5th gen jet-fighter but, in fact, there was another aircraft introduced a year prior to F-22 that was already 5th gen, except that this fact was classified until December 2015, this aircraft being… the Rafale !!!!!
Rafale uses different methods to achieve stealth : there are radar absorbent materials and even geometric features, although not as pushed as for the US/Chinese gear, but the main feature is simply deleting radar waves, so, connoisseurs speak about Rafale in terms of “active stealth”. It has been recently reinforced with the introduction of the F4 standard which comes on a new form of plasma discovered by the ONERA at the end of the 00’s. This feature has been added with the M51.3 upgrade to the SLBM, in other terms, if France decides to use nukes, radars will neither detect the launch, nor the missile in flight (!), the upcoming ASN4G nuclear cruise missile will receive this too.
Note that active stealth also works against low frequency radars while F-22, F-35, J-20 or J-31 are not stealth for radars with frequencies under 3GHz.. Go figure why near all air defence radars sold nowadays operate around 2.8-2.9 GHz! The Thales Ground Master or Ground Smarter series win all the competitions… High sales are also achieved by passive radars in the 2.3-2.5GHz range, just where you have all civilian radio waves frequencies ; sats, land-TV, wi-fi, cell-phones…
One thing for sure : considering the countries’ sizes, the best fit for both Canada and Brazil would be Rafale, add to this that since both have rather small air-forces, Rafale has another big advantage : it can fly 3-4x more than a F-16, F/A-18 or Gripen and… 12x more than a F-35…