Chapter 911: Needle and Wind Facing Each Other

Just as Yang Quanzhi used his eloquence to promote the various performances of the J-10E to Lieutenant General Jidita.

Above the Bushel Airport.

The much-anticipated flight show has also begun.

In fact, in the traditional air show schedule, the flight show is generally not arranged in the professional day.

First, there are too few visitors, and it is a waste to take off once.

Second, at the beginning, the participants of the professional day are really professional, and the final decision is rarely affected by the shallow performance display of the flight show.

But later, more and more organizers found that some countries buy aircraft as carelessly as buying vegetables.

Moreover, the person who makes the final decision may not really understand the air force.

So the flight show can really play a certain publicity effect.

In the end, different performances were set up every day.

And this time, since it was held in Paris, the first model to take off was of course the host model.

The all-black Rafale C01.

Due to funding issues, only one prototype of the Rafale B and C models was built, and only the carrier-based M model completed two aircraft, M01 and M02, as originally planned.

From flight testing to participating in air shows, all tasks can only be completed by these four aircraft.

Fortunately, the M88-2 engine has now been buffed by Chang Haonan. Although the performance indicators may not be very advanced, there is absolutely no problem with stability.

Even under such high-intensity continuous rotation, the fault interval above the standard line is still guaranteed.

Watching his own aircraft, which is close to service status, dart around in the air, Serge Dassault, who is in the VIP seat, finally showed a relieved smile.

The Rafale fighter adopts a close-coupled canard layout, with a close distance between the canard and the main wing, focusing on using the close-coupled effect to increase the unsteady vortex lift and delay the stall of the main wing.

This design makes the Rafale's performance at low altitude and low speed, especially its agility, more excellent, and therefore more suitable for ground attack missions.

Of course, this is also an old tradition of Dassault products.

French fighters have always had shortcomings in terms of power, so they are better at, or have to be good at, differentiated competition.

"The Rafale fighter is equipped with the REB2 passive phased array radar produced by Thomson, which is stronger than the mechanical scanning radars on the Typhoon, JAS39 and F16 in terms of scanning frequency, detection accuracy and multi-target tracking capabilities."

Such a direct diss of the rival model is naturally impossible to be said by Dassault, the boss.

Therefore, it was Edsteiner who was responsible for introducing the specific situation of the Rafale fighter to several exhibitors from Egypt, Greece, South Korea, Austria and Singapore.

"But I heard that Lockheed Martin already has a plan to upgrade the active phased array radar for the F16C/D?"

A lieutenant colonel from the Greek Air Force put down the telescope and said to Edsteiner.

"That's just a plan after all."

The latter shrugged and replied:

"And it's just upgrading the phased array antenna, and the underlying design of the radar rear end cannot be replaced."

"In addition, our Rafale is far superior to the F16C in terms of maneuverability and payload."

Edsteiner is very familiar with the propaganda routine, and he just mentioned the shortcomings of his own aircraft.

For example, due to the limitations of aerodynamic design, the radar antenna area of ​​the Rafale is almost the smallest among the third-generation aircraft.

This results in RBE2, as a more advanced electronic scanning radar, being inferior to the last-generation mechanical scanning radar equipped by its peers in terms of hard indicators such as detection distance and anti-interference ability.

And it is difficult to circumvent this problem by simply upgrading.

However, several listeners were from the Air Force after all, and someone soon asked a related question:

"The heat generated and power required by the phased array radar during operation are greater than those of the mechanical scanning radar. Can your model guarantee stability and reliability under working conditions?"

The one who spoke was a colonel from Austria.

In fact, Edsteiner knew very well that this person came here to make trouble.

Because Austria had actually decided to join the EF2000 development plan a year ago, it was impossible to buy Rafale again.

But the air show was open, and he couldn't drive people away from the viewing platform, so he had to bite the bullet and explain:

"The Rafale fighter uses two latest M88-2 engines, which can provide a maximum thrust of 7600kg while also taking into account the maximum power generation capacity of 25kw, so there is no need to worry about this aspect..."

Another typical strategy of avoiding the important and focusing on the trivial.

Because the nose is already very small, the Rafale does not retain a large number of fuel lines for liquid cooling of the radar during the design like the J-11B and Su-27SM.

This leads to a high failure rate of RBE2.

Therefore, Edelsteiner only answered half of the Austrian colonel's question.

Fortunately, at this time, the first round of air performances had ended, and applause broke out on the viewing platform, interrupting the conversation between several people.

In fact, the Rafale fighter should be regarded as a frequent visitor to the air show throughout the 1990s.

It has hardly been absent.

But the significance of today's appearance is obviously extraordinary.

After the collapse of Operation Allied Force in 1999, the relationship between Snecma and General Electric fell into a freezing point, and the M88 also stalled due to the loss of technical support and important parts provided by the latter.

By 2000, all four Rafale prototypes had entered a de facto grounding.

So rumors soon spread that Rafale might be canceled directly like the Mirage 4000.

As for Snecma’s cooperation with China...

At least at the time, everyone basically took it as a joke.

Therefore, several countries that originally had the intention to purchase have also turned to other models.

This time, the Dassault Group persuaded the French Aerospace Industry Association to postpone the air show to August specifically to allow the Rafale to be unveiled in a state close to service and to shatter all doubts about this model.

Judging from the results, it should be considered a success.

…

On the other side of the viewing platform, Andy Latham, the team representative of BAE Systems, occupied the position with the best view in the audience. At this time, he was holding a telephoto camera and pointed it at the aircraft that was heading towards the aircraft. There was a burst of continuous shooting from the tail of the Rafale fighter jet taxiing on the tarmac.

"So...could it be that the Chinese really helped Snecma solve the reliability problem of the M88 engine?"

Latham put down the camera and turned to Professor Roger Elinor next to him.

The tone was full of disbelief.

It is true that the Chinese people publicly demonstrated their third-generation turbofan engine in 1999.

But developing a model yourself and helping others improve an immature model are two completely different concepts.

The former can be played freely on a piece of white paper, while the latter is equivalent to dancing in shackles.

It can be said that the difficulty is higher.

What's more, it has only been about a year and a half since Snecma cooperated with Huaxia.

Even if we do not consider the issue of mutual trust in the handover process between the two parties, this efficiency is a bit too exaggerated.

"I said several years ago that China's level in the field of aero-engine design is likely to far exceed our expectations."

Professor Elinor, on the other hand, looked calm:

"When I was wiping the butt of the EJ200 engine, I accidentally reviewed a paper written by a Chinese scholar about the generation of unstructured overlapping grids. At that time, I knew that they must have something hidden in their hands. Lots of good stuff.”

"So...that paper inspired you?"

Latham looked like a curious baby.

"no."

Although it had been many years, Elinor had even forgotten who the author of that article was, but when he heard this question, he still showed an expression of gritted teeth:

"The author happened to stop writing just before reaching the most critical point..."

Having said this, Eleanor calmed down a little, and then continued to explain:

"I spent about a year afterwards, but I still couldn't figure out how to implement the grid form mentioned in that article on an engineering level."

"Fortunately, our laboratory later built a brand new supercomputer, and the calculation speed is thousands of times faster than before, so even if we use the old method, we can still solve the problem."

"Ah this..."

Latham never expected this kind of plot, but he didn't know how to comfort the other party, so he had to change the conversation and change the topic:

"So...if everything goes well with the Rafale project, will it pose a threat to our EF2000 in the international market?"

"Not very likely."

Elinor's answer was very straightforward:

"Although the Rafale and our Typhoon have their own strengths in design, the overall performance is too much affected by the engine. I saw the data on their M88-2 exhibition board two days ago, and the gap compared to the EJ200 is very obvious. "

"In this way, even in the low-altitude and low-speed areas where Rafale is better, we can still have a clear advantage. Only the mechanical scanning radar is a hidden danger, so you BAE must speed up the progress..."

As if to verify his statement.

As soon as Elinor finished speaking, an EF2000 prototype numbered DA7 began to accelerate from the distant runway.

Compared to the gentle movements of its competitors just now, the takeoff of this plane can be said to be extremely violent——

With a runway that is almost half the length of the former, it relies on the aerodynamic torque brought by the remotely coupled canards and the total thrust of the two EJ200s of 18 tons to complete the takeoff in an almost vertical attitude.

It even has a transition configuration with three auxiliary fuel tanks.

A truly strong person does not need to conduct word-of-mouth propaganda at all.

When Typhoon's performance was about halfway through, Ed Steiner on the other side realized that his side would probably lose completely in today's air-to-air contest.

The size of a mid-sized machine is matched with two high-performance mid-range thrusters with a thrust-to-weight ratio close to 10.

Even in the low-altitude and low-speed range where it is not good at, it still brings extremely incredible agility and maneuverability.

Obviously, if you want to confront your old rival head-on, you cannot do it solely relying on the current technical state of the M88-2...