>Be Russian Airforce
>Have hundreds of older Mig-29's and SU-27's in your inventory
>Do frick all with them in Ukraine
So what gives? Are they not combat-worthy? Do they not have enough semi-competent/sober combat pilots to crew them all? Obviously Russia has more modern combat aircraft. But given how the ground forces are perfectly happy to ride into battle in ancient armored death traps, why does so much of the VKS get a pass to sit the war out?
>Be Russian Airforce
Okay
>Have hundreds of older Mig-29's and SU-27's in your inventory
No they don't, at least not functional
>Do frick all with them in Ukraine
So what gives?
>Are they not combat-worthy?
No
>Do they not have enough semi-competent/sober combat pilots to crew them all?
No
>Obviously Russia has more modern combat aircraft.
No they don't
>But given how the ground forces are perfectly happy to ride into battle in ancient armored death traps, why does so much of the VKS get a pass to sit the war out?
Because it doesn't exist
Next slide thread
>No they don't
Yes, they do.
>Radar signature the size of a post office
Mig-29 is sex
In OPs livery you really can see that it is the bastard son of a little gayot
>Mig-29 is sex
Honestly I think the naval variant is pretty cute. Shame the only ones that exist are cursed to serve on the Kuznetsov or in the Indian Navy.
Isn't there a sweet and sour equivalent of those?
is that a poop deck?
every deck is the poop deck
My guess is that their pilots don't get enough training hours.
But that doesn't really make sense, Russia is a petrostate, surely they don't have fuel-problems?
>But that doesn't really make sense, Russia is a petrostate, surely they don't have fuel-problems?
Satan blessed this post.
But my guess it's that the Russian military was both under budget for everything it was trying to do and suffered from a lot of corruption. So a lot of resources get embezzled or tossed into vanity project (hyper sonics, strategic bombers, vaporwear Stealth fighters), and more basic things like "spare parts and sufficient training time on the Funny Fulcrums" goes by the way side.
>Isn't there a sweet and sour equivalent of those?
Do you mean the Mig-35?
I was thinking about some chinese knock-offs..
they use Sukhois for their carriers, not MiGs
False. They only made enough Su-33s for the Admiral Kuznetsov with zero extras, so when they inveitably crashed a few they had no way to replace them and had to throw in MiG-29Ks instead.
Su-33 is even older plane. It was supposed tpo be replaced with Mig-29K
The MIG-29K was developed for the Indian navy. Russia originally had no plans to use them to replace the Su-33 until those started crashing. They may have even bought back a few MIG-29Ks from India to replace lost Su-33s.
So what's the better plane?
Su33 is huge and MiG29K has shit range.
MiG-29K is more modern, it has Gefest for some ground attack capabilities with dumb bombs, but both are very dated and not upgradable because they don't have enough power for modern radars, and nobody is going to spend money on RnD for upgrading a dozen of fleet fighters.
Learn to read. He said "sweet and sour Sukhois". That means Chinese carriers, not Kuznetsov.
J-15s, but the J-35 (naval version of the J-31) is supposed to eventually replace it.
It's not just fuel, training hours also translate to airframe/parts wear.
However it wouldn't surprise me if they also had issues with jet fuel. I looked into and it seems that by the mid 2000s most of their refineries were unable to produce jet fuel. In 2009 a partnership with a French company allowed them to pull gas condensate from a field in Termokarstovoye and refine kerosene in a Gazprom plant near Omsk. When asked about it, the French company TotalEnergies said that the kerosene was not certified to be sold as jet fuel.
>source: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/stop-russian-oil/total-russian-jet-fuel/
Basically while able to refine jet fuel, the quantity wouldn't be that plentiful so it was seen as worthwhile to export it for commercial use instead of hogging it for air force training. And now it seems they may be using I-can't-believe-it's-not-jet-fuel to support the war effort. Maybe it burns a little dirty, maybe it doesn't allow high altitude flying as it congeals due to lack of additives, maybe it's mixed with certified jet fuel to supplies supplies.
That's the funny thing. Petrostates tend to specialize in extracting oil, but generally aren't very good at actually refining it, especially at the higher grades necessary for jet fuel.
Soviets spend lots of effort in AA that is good at shooting their own rust buckets down. Ukraine inherited a lot of that. Russian airforce is still the same rustbuckets.
The Russian air force divested from the MiG-29 because the whole "short range low end fighter" doesn't work if you don't continuously upgrade them like the F-16 was.
According to Wikipedia the active MiG-29s in VVS use are 70 MiG-29/MiG-29UB, 15 MiG-29SMT and 2 MiG-29UBT. That's 17 upgraded MiGs and 70 basic/training MiGs.
Aircraft are a lot harder to store and maintain than armored vehicles. And pilots are less common and take longer to train than mobiks. You can't apply the same strategy to airpower. To try would just give some Ukranian Patriot crews stupid high kill tallies.
>Aircraft are a lot harder to store and maintain than armored vehicles.
There's that. And I suppose there's much more severe consequences to a Jet breaking down mid-use than a tank.
>try would just give some Ukranian Patriot crews stupid high kill tallies.
Honest I wasn't thinking anything quite as ambitious as bombing Kyiv, and more rocket tossing at the frontline. Though I suppose pic related and what this anon
notes shows why even that could be a problem.
They have inferior range and avionics but are almost as expensive in maintenance as Su because they have two engines, so they are getting mothballed. Also they don't have land attack capability except useless Gefest on a handful of them and Ukraine does not have airforce.
F-16 are still useful because they have one engine.
>and Ukraine does not have airforce.
Some keeps launching HARM missiles and JDAMs into Russian forces, Shoigu also reports shooting down 5 aircrafts per day
Migs cant use modern long range missiles anyway, and there's more than enough Su-35 and Su-30 to keep what left of ukrainian aieforce on the distance
Su-30 is the current low-cost fighter which kind of replaced Mig-29.
The Sukhoi fighters have done jack shit so far when it comes to fighting the Ukrainian air force.
Literally the only aircraft that has done anything noteworthy in that aspect is the MiG-31. Ukraine reports that MiG-31's regularly suppress their aircraft with old R-33 missiles without any way to counter them
The only thing MiG-31s do is launching Kinjals. Everything else is Su-25,30,35 and 34
No. They also have the R-37M which is sort of like the Phoenix.
Mig-31 uses older R-37. R-37M is a modification of R-37 for Su-35. There's no room for MiG-31 on this theater of operations, it is not a fighter, the only thing he has is speed. It si for intercepting things in Siberia and the North where it is not possible to cover everything with air defence and radars.
Yet it has proven surprisingly good at keeping the Ukrainian air force on edge.
Despite how shit the MiG-31 is at everything else, it can just keep on spamming R-33's and 37's while staying far away from air defences. Meanwhile Ukraine cannot do anything due to only having access to R-27's. Unless Ukraine suddenly manages to make their MiGs AMRAAM capable, they will have to constantly watch out for Russian long range AAM's shot by the MiG-31
>Unless Ukraine suddenly manages to make their MiGs AMRAAM capable, they will have to constantly watch out for Russian long range AAM's shot by the MiG-31
R-37 isn't very agile but it really outranges AMRAAM. If you wanted to counter those specifically the Ukies would probably need Gripen's and Meteor (or F-16's modded to fire Meteor).
>Shoigu also reports shooting down 5 aircrafts per day
I bet they're all broken, and Putler is going to end up buying Mig15s and Mig17s from Best Korea and using mobiks to kamakaze them.
why would they need more aircrafts on the air?
those 4th gens are just worse than what they have at everything the problem for the vks is to penetrate AD and 100 more plane still won't allow them to do it
Why don’t they just try it though? Just send every helicopter and plane in at once and overwhelm any defence
i mean at the start of the war they did that and it did work because AD net was kind of already spotted by intelligence via bribes / sats. if they tried now they might be able to get complete air superiority for 5-6 days but after that the vks would stop existing. Russian needs NATO tier sead to do something like that
>Have hundreds of older Mig-29's
those are very maintenance heavy - for every f16 engine those burn trough SIX - so in all probability all those hundreds of planes were cannibalized over the years to keep few dozen airworthy...
They are using their air fleet to a degree but they lack a large stockpile of PGM's, especially those with stand-off range. Dumb bomb runs are hardly effective and only work if you have a ton of air frames and are not squeamish about taking hundreds if not thousands of losses, see US in Vietnam, even then the effectiveness is mixed.
In todays environment, those hundreds of Russian fighters would disappear year one and not accomplish much. If you can't stay 50km behind the front line and hit your target with relative accuracy you are useless. That is why JDAM-ER and Storm Shadow are so effective. Russia of course has been using it's own glide bombs and cruise missiles so they are doing something, just not at a rate that is having a massive impact.
Also the lack of pilots, training, spare parts, incompetence and just plain lying about their numbers that everyone else is talking about. There are a lot of ingredients to this failure pie.
Does anyone here have the polish engines comparison,in which 6 RD-33s lasted as long as one F100/F110?Because that explains exactly why Russia doesn't field them.
Archaeotech + no pilots/inexperienced pilots
>So what gives?
why is it so hard to understand that Russia is not the USSR?
the USSR had 2x the population and 5x the military budget of current Russia.
Do you think the US could maintain its army if the budget dropped to 150B?
They aren't airworthy.
Possibly: The Russian VVS is keeping the majority of their aircraft in reserve in case NATO attacks them directly. They also have so many long range stand off missiles that they do not need to feel the need to operate over Ukraine generally.
But wow, I would be really mad at the government if I was Russian and believed that to be the case.
they are unironically worried that their pilots will defect if they are allowed to operate in Ukrainian airspace