Salute!
Good admission,
LO. I salute you.
there are incoherent and unqualified people on both sides of the debate, and people like myself who may have limited formal qualifications but have nonetheless tracked the relevant issues for many years.
So we get
expert opinion from someone doing a lotta "literature research/review" as most of us here did that have an advbanced degree when getting ready for our thesis whether we ever flew a Piper Cub or F-16 or F-18 or Typhoon or Rafale or Mig 29 or..... Hell. What do they know?
I would rather value an opinion from someone who has yanked and banked in more than one fighter, and has actually been shot at, shot up and shot down.
Make no mistake. My opinion of the Sukhoi lineage is high. As with the French, those Russians know how to build and fly very pretty planes. Ditto for those from the Mig Bureau over the years, and I have many friends/students that encountered the 17, 19 and 21 varieties in combat - some U.S., some Israeli, some from...... Not going to get into the user qualifications of some nations flying the various planes, but look at the Mig-29 Fulcrum kills in the Storm versus the F-15 and F-18 and F-16 losses.
I would always consider the combination of pilot skill, system knowledge and aircraft performance before trashing one plane over the other. And then there's the supporting cast as we had in a few combat scenarios over the last 40 years.
Anyway, I wanna see one of those uber Sukhoi jets over here in the U.S. at an airshow.
Lastly, I am trying to find the hundreds of orders for the Su 35 and 57 by nations all over the world. Ditto for the Typhoon and Gripen and Rafale and Mirage 2000 a decade or so ago. Hmmmm...
Gotta cook dinner now.
Gums sends...