How many times in this epic thread has someone gotten frustrated and demanded that the Military Aviation section be sealed off from the non-operational riff-raff, only to be reminded that any such action would be impracticable in an anonymous forum?
Anyway, let's be clear about one thing. A bunch of professional operators, tacticians and engineers in Russia decided that it was worth doubling down on the Su-27's already world-leading agility to create the Su-35, and their bosses decided that it was worth spending a lot of Euros to demonstrate that to potential customers. If you want to call them uninformed fanboys, go and do it to their face,
tovarich. New Russian words, you will learn.
What I have heard from the Russians (and not only from Russians) is that they don't intend or expect to be detected, tracked, engaged and killed by the F-35 before they ever see it. The fundamental problem with stealth in A2A is that BVR is a game played with a
ing big searchlight, and making that searchlight simultaneously functional and undetectable is not
ing easy. Since we started into addressing this problem (about the time the USAF decided to bet hard on LO for ATF, in 1985), the radar-shiny side of the combat equation has (1) gotten less shiny by an order of magnitude, (2) become much, much better at detecting signals, (3) become much, much better at jamming, and (4) incorporated ways to detect a missile launch.
At the same time, F-35 is shooting weapons that, excellent as they are, are designed to fit an F-16 tip rail. Quoted max range figures are often based on co-altitude against a non-maneuvering target. Anything other than that chops the range down. Fanboy nonsense? No, it's why Meteor exists.
The Russians accordingly don't believe that the battle will be decided before the merge. Also, remember that a flying display may demonstrate capability, without necessarily using real maneuvers. The game is energy and controllability.
I was at Farnborough in 1992 when one of the early super-Sukhois was showing off. A very well known retired fighter general was dismissive: "
-all use in combat." Except his view was not shared with the USAF and USN, who went into panic mode developing HMDs and the AIM-9X. One wonders what has changed today.