Chapter 911: Needle and Wind

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

Over Bushehr Airport.

The much-anticipated flight show has also begun.

In fact, in the traditional air show schedule, flying performances are generally not scheduled on professional days.

Firstly, there were too few visitors, so it would be a waste to take off specially.

Secondly, at the beginning, the participants of the Professional Day were really professional and rarely let the final decision be affected by the superficial performance display such as the flight show.

But later, more and more organizers found that some countries bought airplanes as carelessly as buying vegetables.

Moreover, the person who makes the final decision may not really understand the Air Force.

So flying shows can really have a certain publicity effect.

In the end, we just set up different performances every day.

And this time, since the air show is held in Paris, the first model to take off will of course be the model belonging to the host country.

The all-black Rafale C01.

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

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

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

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

Watching his own plane, which was close to being put into service, maneuvering in the air, Serge Dassault, who was sitting in the VIP seat, finally smiled with relief.

The Rafale fighter adopts a close-coupled canard layout, in which the distance between the canard and the main wing is very close, focusing on using the close-coupling effect to increase 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, better, making it more suitable for ground attack missions.

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

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

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

It is naturally impossible for Dassault, as the boss, to say such a thing that directly dissed the rival model.

Therefore, it was Edsteiner who was responsible for introducing the details 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 F16C/D with an active phased array radar?"

A lieutenant colonel from the Greek Air Force put down his binoculars and said to Ed Steiner.

"It's just a plan after all."

The latter shrugged and replied:

"Moreover, it only upgrades the phased array antenna, and cannot replace the underlying design of the radar backend."

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

Edsteiner is very familiar with the publicity routine and just briefly mentions the shortcomings of his own aircraft.

For example, due to aerodynamic design limitations, the Rafale's radar antenna area 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 of mechanical scanning radars equipped by its peers in terms of hard indicators such as detection distance and anti-interference capability.

And it is difficult to circumvent this problem through simple upgrades.

However, since several of the audience members were from the Air Force, someone soon asked a related question:

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

The person who spoke was a colonel from Austria.

In fact, Ed Steiner knew very well that this person came here to cause trouble.

Because Austria had actually decided to join the EF2000 research and development program a year ago, it was impossible for it to purchase Rafale.

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 of the latest M88-2 engines, which provide a maximum thrust of 7600kg and a maximum power generation capacity of 25kw, so there is no need to worry about this..."

This is another typical strategy of avoiding the important issues.

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

This results in the failure rate of RBE2 being indeed high.

So, Edsteiner only answered half of the Austrian colonel's question.

Fortunately, at this time, the first round of aerial performances had ended, and applause rang out from the viewing stands, interrupting the conversation between several people.

In fact, the Rafale fighter jet should be considered a regular at air shows throughout the 90s.

I have hardly ever been absent.

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

After the collapse of Operation Allied Force in 99, the relationship between Snecma and General Electric reached a freezing point, and the M88 also stagnated due to the loss of technical support and important components provided by the latter.

By 2000, all four Rafale prototypes were effectively grounded.

Soon, rumors began to spread that the Rafale project might be canceled like the Mirage 4000.

As for Snecma's cooperation with China...

At least at that time, everyone basically treated it as a joke.

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

This time, Dassault Group persuaded the French Aerospace Industry Association to postpone the air show to August specifically so that the Rafale could appear in a full state close to its service life and dispel 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, a representative of the BAE Systems team, occupied a position with the best view in the entire venue. At this moment, he was holding a telephoto camera and taking a series of photos at the tail of the Rafale fighter that was taxiing towards the apron.

"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 Eleanor beside him and asked.

The tone was full of disbelief.

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

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

The former can express freely on a blank sheet of paper, while the latter is like dancing in shackles.

It can be said that the difficulty is actually higher.

What’s more, it has only been about a year and a half since Snecma and Huaxia started their cooperation.

Even if we don't consider the issue of mutual trust between the two parties during the handover process, this efficiency is a bit too exaggerated.

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

Professor Eleanor, however, remained calm:

"When I was cleaning up the EJ200 engine, I accidentally reviewed a paper written by a Chinese scholar on the generation of unstructured overlapping grids. At that time, I knew that they must have a lot of good stuff in their hands."

"So... that paper inspired you?"

Latham looked like a curious baby.

"No."

Although it had been many years since then, and Eleanor had even forgotten who the author of the article was, he still showed a gnashing expression when he heard this question:

"The author stopped writing just before reaching the most crucial part..."

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

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

"Fortunately, our laboratory later built a brand new supercomputer, which can calculate 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 subject:

"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 straightforward:

"Although the Rafale and our Typhoon have their own strengths in design, their overall performance is greatly affected by the engine. I specifically looked at the data on their M88-2 display board a few days ago, and the gap compared to the EJ200 is very obvious."

"In this way, we can have a clear advantage even in the low-altitude and low-speed areas where Rafale is more skilled. 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 Eleanor finished speaking, an EF7 prototype numbered DA2000 began to accelerate from the runway in the distance.

Compared to the gentle movements of the competitor just now, the takeoff of this plane can be said to be extremely violent.

It only needed a runway almost half the length of the former, and relied on the aerodynamic torque brought by the long-coupled canards and the total thrust of 200 tons of the two EJ18s to complete the takeoff in an almost vertical posture.

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

A truly strong person does not need any verbal publicity.

When Typhoon's performance was about halfway through, Edsteiner on the other side realized that he was likely to lose completely in today's long-distance contest.

It has the size of a medium-sized aircraft and is equipped with two high-performance medium thrust engines 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 we want to confront our old rival head-on, we can’t rely on the current state of the art M88-2 alone…