The problem with the old Soviet planes is that they're old. The USSR collapsed in 1991; they're now 23+ years old. The design life of a civil airliner is 30 years, after which it's effectively a beater flying air freight in the developing world. For a warplane, it may be shorter -- either it flies regularly, racking up airframe hours in a very demanding environment, or the pilots are so undertrained it's useless as an asset.
So my guess is that the supply of ex-USSR planes is going to gradually dry up over the next decade, leaving only refurbs and aircraft that have been stuck at the back of a hangar. The price will climb -- after all, Russia is still exporting newer, better versions -- and sooner or later the lowering cost curve of the largely-COTS-based Scorpion will overlap with the rising cost curve of keeping the old Soviet kit airworthy.
(India ... is not a good comparison. India builds nuclear reactors and sent a home-built probe to Mars on a home-built space launcher. India is developing its own supersonic strike fighter. Upgrading old Soviet kit is something they've got a lot of experience at. I expect Scorpion to sell to the sort of governments who don't have much of an aerospace industry. Argentina, for example, who've bought no new warplanes since the kicking they took in 1982. Or Iran, if a decade hence they come off the US government's shit list and turn into the west's BFF against wahhabism.)
The F-15 is 42 years old, and yet its still being built, still being upgraded, still being sold and still kicking ass. Same with the Mig-29 and Su-27 which are still the mainstay of the Russian forces until the PAK-FA moves into mass production, same situation than the F-15 if you consider the state of the F-22 and F-35 programs right now.
Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth, and many would-be buyers of the F-35 like South Korea are now considering that 42 year old plane over the brand new model.
The countries you name actually DO have an aerospace industry, you should've googled that before. Iran in particular had to create one after the embargo.
If you buy a new MiG-29 or Su-27 from Russia, that's not an ex-USSR plane; it's new-build. Ditto buying a new F15-K, as opposed to a 30 year old beater.
New planes of these types are not exactly bargain basement items; an F15-K will cost you around $100M, an Su-27 around $32M, an Su-35 about $65M.
The Scorpion, at $20M new, is therefore rather cheaper than an F15 or Su-27, unless you hit the second-hand market ... in which case you have the maintenance issues I alluded to.
(As for Iran's ability to build jet fighters, the Azarakhsh and Saeqeh look to be partial clones of the old Northrop F-5, and may or may not live up to promises; numbers built of each type are in single digits. The Argentinian military aerospace sector makes the Iranian one look like a front-rank power.)
Yep, if Iran had an indigenous production capability worth a damn they wouldn't have been desperate to refit all those old Iraqi Su-22s. More generally, if they had the technical capability to run production-scale assembly of their indigenous designs, they probably would have also done a better job keeping their existing airframes mission-capable, rather than have them aging out into spare parts and scrap.
Returning to the article, the Scorpion is an interesting example of sophisticated mil-tech becoming a commodity game. A brand-new, $20m multi-role fighter that can be maintained using COTS parts, with a per-hour cost at half of a MiG-21? It's an indication that, in time, any company or state with a reasonable level of sophistication and access to the international tech market could develop, from a purely technical sense, near-peer status to the world's top-line militaries. Iran may be too isolated to make that play, but I could see an Argentina being there within ten years.
Even then you can upgrade the older Mig-29s. Same with the F-15, even a brand new one shares a lot of technology with the original model from 3 or 4 decades ago. And BTW a brand-new Mig-29K is $30MM, far more bang for your buck than this Scorpion.
As for the aerospace industry of those countries again you are missing the point: they would rather invest the billions it would take to buy a decent amount of modern jets in their own companies to grow the local sector than to essentially subsidize foreign conglomerates.
Case in point until 1994 Brazil had no domestic-built planes. Now Embraer is an international player in the aerospace industry with exports to many other countries.
> Case in point until 1994 Brazil had no domestic-built planes. Now Embraer is an international player in the aerospace industry with exports to many other countries.
Embraer has been building planes for the Brazilian Air Force, both self-designed and licensed-production, since the early 70s.
The company debuted with the EMB 110 Bandeirante in their product line, which was a 100% Embraer design sold both to domestic air carriers and the Brazilian Air Force.
Using a lot of foreign parts and designed by a French engineer brought over just for this project, all bankrolled by the Brazilian state which the next decade suffered a massive inflationary crisis due in part to these forced industrialization strategies.
The reality is before the privatization Embraer was pretty much a nobody in the aerospace industry, unlike now.
>The F-15 is 42 years old, and yet its still being built, still being upgraded, still being sold and still kicking ass.
The problem isn't that the designs are old. It's that the physical airframes are old.
The entire F-15C fleet has been grounded multiple times in the past decade due to failures related to the sheer age and wear on the airframes in inventory. One of those failures included a plane literally breaking apart in midair during training.
>Boeing is even building an upgraded F-15 with stealth
Boeing put together a demonstrator with some stealth enhancements. To date there have been no buyers and they've been shopping it around for several years.
So my guess is that the supply of ex-USSR planes is going to gradually dry up over the next decade, leaving only refurbs and aircraft that have been stuck at the back of a hangar. The price will climb -- after all, Russia is still exporting newer, better versions -- and sooner or later the lowering cost curve of the largely-COTS-based Scorpion will overlap with the rising cost curve of keeping the old Soviet kit airworthy.
(India ... is not a good comparison. India builds nuclear reactors and sent a home-built probe to Mars on a home-built space launcher. India is developing its own supersonic strike fighter. Upgrading old Soviet kit is something they've got a lot of experience at. I expect Scorpion to sell to the sort of governments who don't have much of an aerospace industry. Argentina, for example, who've bought no new warplanes since the kicking they took in 1982. Or Iran, if a decade hence they come off the US government's shit list and turn into the west's BFF against wahhabism.)