I just saw 7 pics of the Iranian fighter jet on CNN.

Umm, who in the world do they think they are fooling? It looks like a plywood skinned toy! The pilot sitting in the cockpit doesn't fit and it looks like he has a car stereo on the top of his instruments!

I could go on but, it's time to scratch my head.....alot.

Chuck

I think the Iraqi's are buying US F-16's. Did you mean Iranian, the F-22 copy?

It does look like a mockup.

Munster

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GO NAVY!

So who is selling it to them? China? Russia? France?

YOU ARE CORRECT SIR I spelt it wrong. The boasting of the Iranian government reminds me of the saber rattling of WMD's that the dead and forgotten dictator of Iraq.

Chuck

Iran has a bunch of hardly used F-14 Tomcats the US provided to them under the Shah. They can't get them to fly. Grumman employees filled their software full of worms before they left town

All the need to do to test that puppy is start it out over the Gulf. We'll see how good it is.

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James L. "Jim" Rhiner

Doesn't matter....the famous rocket monkey will be piloting it.

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Thirty characters. Exactly...

Woe. That monkey's gotta be old.

I guess with the world economy being what it is he's gotta find work where he can.

So much for his Socialist retirement plan.

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Dum vivo cano

A few additional things I noticed:

That canopy looks wrong. You can't see through it clearly...if looks like plastic.

The air intakes look way too small.

While this may be a test bed, and not completely "operational", I can't see any hardpoints for weapons mounting.

On other photos posted online, I see the control stick is mounted right between the pilots legs. I don't believe they've been putting sticks there since the '80's, at least. All modern fighters (that I'm aware of) have the stick mounted to the right so that the pilots hand rests on it naturally when his arm is resting on the arm rest...to minimize the effects of the "G" forces.

There is a control panel mounted just forward of the stick, and some of the buttons on it would require the pilot to practically stand on his head to access them.

There are no visible nozzles on the engine. There are parts of the aircraft that are aft of the engine and in close proximity to it, with no protection from the blast of an engine in full afterburner. I was not a jet engine mechanic, but it just looks wrong to me.

The whole thing looks like a joke.

Tim

False. The Iranians have developed an aviation industry of their own, and routinely conduct depot level maintenance and rebuilds of the aircraft we gave/sold them in the past, such as C130s.
They have also managed to reverse engineer a lot of the components to keep the Tomcats flying (along with help from other countries), and still use them. Their Tomcats were sometimes used in past conflicts as an AWACS system due to their extremely capable radar.
Since 2006, the Iranians have had the honor of being the only operational user of F14 Tomcats in the world, since there were only two users anyway, and we retired ours.

and the moral of the story is, Don't think Iranians are stupid. They do have an educated class that was educated here and in Europe.

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Dum vivo cano

If it flies it only does so slowly. Look at the thickness of the wing and the small air intakes. Then we have to consider what local abilities they have to build jet engines and sophisticated avionics.

BTW It looks like a pool toy.

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Dum vivo cano

Which one? The one that went up or the one that came back?

Real or not...the pilots don't need to learn how to land them if our boys/girls in our birds are around...

Hadn't heard that. I stand now wrong and humbly corrected.


Aircraft aside , I doubt if ANY combat pilots in the world can match our Air Force , Navy or Marine Corps fighter jocks.