Congratulations to Dassault!!! 10.4 billion Indian Air Force Rafale contract!
 

:)

In the end they had to choose between Rafale and Eurofighter. The rafale won. They couldn't go wrong with either of them.
I kinda like the Rafale a bit better.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/da...sources-171975

and the mandatory sexy Rafale pictures.:-P

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1162/raf1z.jpg

http://img848.imageshack.us/img848/9274/s4n19.jpg

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/1783/r433.jpg

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/8...7072009110.jpg

On one hand I'm happy for the aviaton market as a whole as this is a major boost to Dassault who operate in a Europe that doesn't really have a variety of aircraft companies any more (and those that it does have spend too much time cooperating with each other, which the pro-EU and pro-European in me loves, but the aircraft enthusiast in me hates as it leads to a lack of variety of planes to look at :P ), so it's nice to see Dassault getting some cash that might hopefully mean we see more from them in the future.

On the other hand, being British, I'm a bit miffed that the money didn't end up in the hands of BAe Systems, but you can't have the best of both worlds, so mustn't grumble I suppose :D

But what about the fm/dm?

Thank you India for choosing the french ahead of us. All those Brit connections paid off I see, but you bought the worse machine. Bad luck.

The Germans were running with this one on behalf of Euro-fighter, (would that make it Gmbh?) BAE got the Saudi deal. Anyway, it wouldn't be the first time Dassault's been to the altar and been jilted, so it ain't over yet. I'd agree that Tiffie's by far the better combat system but it's expensive and so much about this sort of thing is to do with dimensions beyond the combat efficacy of the product. It may well be that, in addition to price, aspects such as technology transfer, which is a subject very dear to India, were much sweeter with the Rafale. It's election year in France, I dare say the Indians will be looking to seal the deal before election day to ensure the best outcome for themselves.

LOL! There goes a dent on British pride...

Agreed, the Brit connections paid off, they did not forget... LOL, LOL...

And for the objective part, I presume you know why a single role combat aircraft (converted to multi-role) is better than a multi-role aircraft all together.

~S~

The one thing it has going for it though is more configurations, most importantly for aircraft carriers. I think the Eurofighter is better than the Rafale in a lot of ways, but certainly not carrier capabilities. The carrier-modded Eurofighter idea is just plain awful, since to mod the Eurofighter to take all the cat and trap gear (I suppose the only way to get it off a carrier) would have robbed it of a lot of its manouverability since it was never designed for that. You know it's bad since we took the, uh, 'wonderful' F-35 for our carriers instead of building converted Eurofighters.

You know, would it've killed Dassault to have made that refuelling probe retractable?

Not sure I agree with how that point is made, but it's still fair enough. If Libya has taught us anything, it's that that Eurofighter needs to undergo serious development to become a decent multirole aircraft. There's a reason we're still using Tornados for the ground attack role, simply because the Eurofighter still hasn't met that capability yet. It's like strapping bombs on a Spitfire - sure, it works just fine, but it's not what it's designed for and there are aircraft that can do the job much better, freeing the fighters up to do what they were designed for.

I guess the Indians didn't like the one Kurt tank designed for them ;) nice pics OP

s!