11 February 2008
High Performance
Sukoy-30MK in flight
The Obama campaign continued to hit the Clinton machine in the midriff yesterday, another victory, this one in Maine. Expectations were managed, and the loss was expected. Still, Senator Clinton sent her campaign manager packing in the biggest shake-up since the parade mounted up last year. Things are getting serious, and an air of desperation seems to hang out there as we in the Olde Dominion go the polls tomorrow.
Obama is probably going to do well here, and I can feel why.
Rev. Huckabee did pretty well, too, and it may be that he is still in the race because he saw some of the mud that is already being thrown at John McCain. It is the same awful stuff that was raised in South Carolina, and it is so astonishing ugly that it will take its own little story to tell.
It turned my stomach, in fact. So much so that I wanted to go wash my hands. I looked out the window at the first flights going out of Reagan National. Then I clicked through the alarming note about the latest decline of America.
“Russia now has the #1 fighter plane in the world! Watch the video of the Big Dog!” There was a link to follow, and I did so. It was spectacular, and being in crisp cold air, it was clean, and the only politics was in the written commentary that went along with it.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/258202/su_30mk/
It may as well have been all in capital letters: “SU-30- Vectored Thrust with Canards.. As you observe this airplane, look at the canards moving along side of, and just below the canopy rail. The "canards" are the small wings forward of the main wings. The smoke and contrails provide a sense of the actual flight path, sometimes in reverse direction!”
The Sukoy MK-30 is beautiful airplane, all right. It can stall from high speed, stopping forward motion in seconds, then descend tail first without causing a compressor stall. It can also “recover from a flat spin in less than a minute.”
The noble F-4 Phantom had “two turns from 10,000 Feet, if I recall the instruction manual properly, so it is indeed impressive. The F-14 had a major flat-spin problem when it was new. It was unrecoverable. The SU-30MK is pretty amazing. It uses canards and vectored thrust to extend performance across a very wide flight envelope. The commentary went on to say that “These maneuver capabilities don't exist in any other aircraft in the world today. This aircraft is of concern to U.S. And NATO planners.
Here is the most ominous part. The commentary concludes; “Neither our current or next generation aircraft now poised for funding & production can, in any way match the performance of this Russian aircraft. Somehow the bankrupt Russian aircraft industry has out produced our complex politically tainted aerospace industry with this technology marvel. Scratch any ideas of close in air-to-air combat with this aircraft in the future. We don't know which nations will soon be flying the SU-30MK.”
That's true, I thought, it could certainly be China, or India. Or anyplace the Russians feel like peddling them.
The Su-30 is the descendent of the venerable SU-27 FLANKER, one of the prettiest scooters of the period at the end of the Cold War. Thrust-to-weight is extraordinary, and it is the first aircraft to perfect the "cobra" maneuver, of which most of these tricks are logical extensions.
I had a chance to tour the Moscow State Aviation Bureau in 1998, and they had a FLANKER naked of its skin, just the structure. The thing was huge- big as a F-14 Tomcat- and graceful, even with the ribs and longerons and mechanical components open to see.
The Sukoy does not stand alone, however.
http://www.kbvp.com/extreme-videos/f-22-raptor
The clip at the link above is of the F-22 RAPTOR, the production of which is bankrupting the Air Force. You will note that it can do most of the stuff that the SU-30 can do; short take-off and into the vertical, still climbing, cobra into another cobra into a zero-airspeed back flip, flat-spin converted to effortless controlled flight. The Blues and the Thunderbirds, the flight demonstration teams of the Navy and Air Force, respectively, both have what they call "Low" and "High" demonstration shows, depending on the visibility conditions for maximum crowd pleasing.
It is a new ballgame. The fourth generation fighters can do the whole show right in front of the crowd.
The Air Force has not yet permitted the F-22 (they cost as much as a Navy guided missile cruiser) to fully exploit the flight envelope, since losing one would be inconvenient and embarrassing. Suffice it to say, the airplane is capable of more than they permit it to show at the moment.
I am hardly an Air Force partisan, so I am not bristling with chauvinism on this topic. I think the Russian jets are visually appealing and highly capable. The SU-33, the naval cousin of the SU-30, makes up the airwing of the only active Russian carrier, Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Kuznetsov. She just came out of the Med on her first deployment in a decade, and she looked pretty cool with the sleek jets packed on deck.
Made me positively nostalgic, in fact. The SU-33 reveals the thrust of the Sukoy Design Bureau's engineering philosophy: power, elegant structure, reliability, and cool looks.
The point of the SU-33 and all the Sukoys is to provide the raw power to defy gravity and the traditional rules of lift and drag. Kuznetsov does not have catapults; they use the extraordinary thrust of the jets in afterburner and the ski-jump bow to go flying.
That gets to the real point of this thing. The SU-30 is a marvelous airframe, as is the RAPTOR, but the key is what it is capable of doing besides parlor tricks. In ancient days, assigned to an ancient F-4 Squadron, I challenged the pilots on how they would engage a helicopter equipped with an infrared air-to-air missile. Their laughter quickly turned to puzzlement, since the helo could turn on its axis, stop in mid air, and essentially bring its weapon to bear on the target (them) in any quadrant.
That sort of maneuverability is the capability that is shared by all these jets. The answer is to stand off and shoot them with something even more maneuverable. Where the vectored thrust and canards permit the SU-30 to do remarkable things, an aircraft going zero knots with a large IR and radar cross section is not a fighter, it is a grape.
Anyone who intends to go dog fighting in an SU-30 may as well open the canopy so his silk scarf can float in the slipstream as confused as the smoke pods on the wings. If you ever even see an opposing fighter, you are probably in your parachute. The RAPTOR is optimized for so many things that the enhanced basic maneuvering envelope is, if not irrelevant, a "nice to have" capability.
That is heresy, of course. Speed and maneuverability are life itself in the air, speed above all.
But there is more to it today.
Stealth, stealth weapons, stealth radar, electronic countermeasures, and advanced flight controls mean survivability and mission success. That is what RAPTOR is intended to bring to the fight., and none of those things bring oohs and ahhs from air show crowds.
A RAPTOR mission is supposed to have arrived, done what it was supposed to do, and exited the area before the Air Defense wakes up and the FLANKERS ever get off the ground, much less bring weapons to bear.
If the recent Israeli strike on the maybe-nuclear site doesn't ring a bell- the way it did not ring the bell of the Russian integrated air defense network- than you are deafened by the sound of the engine's roar.
That is the theory, anyway, and the Air Force Leadership has bet the farm on it. I have heard some good things about the F-22. Considering what comes along with the RAPTOR, the things you cannot see or hear, I don't think the folks at the Sukoy Design bureau is sleeping any better than we are, regardless of how agile they might be.
Of course, they no longer have to worry about the consequences of elections. We will talk some more about that tomorrow. But in the quest for high performance, the hysteria about the SU-30MK is ridiculous.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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