“Air battles of fifth generation fighters with subsonic attack aircraft of the second generation of jet aircraft is like a battle of a real hawk with a rooster, even if it is a fighting one and even bearing the name of a“ skyhawk ”- this is how the word skyhawk is translated. Meanwhile, NATO countries have MiG-29 fighters - at least these are fourth-generation aircraft. But for some reason they do not want to converge with them in training battles F-35. However, there are explanations for this, ”the newspaper notes.
Over the past decade, modern American and European fighters have conducted many training air battles with Su-30 aircraft, and almost always the victory went to Russian-made aircraft, the newspaper writes.
So during the Cope India-2004 exercise, Indian pilots on the Su-30K defeated the American F-15 Eagle with a score of 9: 1. And in November 2005, another American-Indian exercise Cope India-2005 took place, during which the F-16C Block 50 and Su-30MKI were used. And then almost all the battles were won by Russian fighters. In 2006, Indian pilots defeated French pilots in the Mirage 2000, and in 2009, the Su-30MKI proved their superiority over the latest multirole Rafale fighters. And at the end of this summer, the best pilots of the British Air Force on the Eurofighter Typhoon lost to the Indian aces on the Su-30MKI during a joint exercise.
But the "real sensation" happened in August 2008, the newspaper notes. The Australian military planned to purchase a batch of F-35 fighters, but first decided to conduct a virtual battle between them and the Russian Su-30. Data from two aircraft were entered into a simulation computer program developed by the Americans. As a result, the Russian fourth-generation fighter outperformed the American fifth-generation fighter.
“The Pentagon said that, they say, they themselves, for reasons of secrecy, introduced into the computer the reduced capabilities of the F-35. And the capabilities of the Su-30, on the contrary, were overestimated. This is unlikely to be so, since it was a multibillion-dollar deal. In such cases, they usually overestimate just the characteristics of their own, and not other people's aircraft, ”the newspaper notes.
Therefore, now, most likely, the stake on the obviously weak aircraft - the A-4 Skyhawk - was not made by chance: the American military needs their fifth-generation fighter to be guaranteed to defeat the enemy, all the more so using "Russian tactics" of combat.