Iran's new Qaher-313 fighter-bomber

[aerofan]

.... Soon Carmen, Manitoba's aircraft plant will be churning out 1,000 examples of the Defender. Cue the National Anthem!

ALF

Oooh! Oooh! I can't wait for Hobbycraft to make an inaccurate 1/32, 1/48 and 1/72 scale model of Bob Diemert's Defender that makes it look more not like a caricature kit like the CF-105 HC-1392 kit does for the Arrow. That anthem wouldn't happen to sound like "Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo!".

I really liked those old Italeri / Testors what if F-19 and Mig-37 stealth a/c kits. The Iranian fighter bomber seems to have a hint of F-19 in it when look at the front half but those wings look out of place on it. I wonder if they built those Testors models and put it thru a wind tunnel test :unsure: .

[MarcDuhon]

Has anybody noticed the warning stenciling on the nose? It is written in english, and that language on an iranian jet doesn't make any sense to me.

I also think that the pilot's helmet will touch the canopy once it is closed.

English Stenciling on Iranian aircraft is not at all farfetched....several other aircraft have had this in the IRIAF ..... but moral of the story.,.. this is just a really bad publicity stunt.... they shouldve at least gotten a model builder to add some realism to this model LOL I would put more detail into a 72 scale build than this supposed prototype... Heck Quadafi wouldve had done a better job unveiling a fake figther .... at least he wouldve had a snazzy outfit and sexy bodyguard harem squad present LOL

[Stratospheremodels]

A quick dip in Future and they're all set. Add some Tamiya Smoke to the Future and the radar-evading aspect is covered as well. :woot.gif:/>/>/>

:rofl:/>/>

Apart from the fact it`s a mock-up, if ever they flew that thing, one have to wonder why they used the all faceted design harking back to the days of Have Blue and the F-117 (which were built that way because the Cray 1 computer Lockheed used back then only had enough computing power to work on each individual facets radar return). Maybe it`s a sign the sanctions are working and they can't obtain powerful enough computers to design stealth aircrafts with smooth curves, but i would not bet on it given that the Chinese and the Russians have super-computers of their own that they could no doubt sell to the Iranians. However that might not even be necessary, given that many of today`s commercial desk tops and laptops exceed the computing power of a Cray-1 from the 1980`s era. Weird anyway... Even more strange the fuselage fairings that look like they forgot to add inlets in there and decided to switch to over-wing inlets as a after-thought but decided to let the fuselage stay that way with the 'blanked off' previous inlets perhaps because they ran out of budget...? (or to carry missiles internally ?). Anyway, not an aerodynamic wonder, and given the thickness of the wings i`d say low subsonic (like someone suggested, this might lead to just a small size testbed which would fly no faster than the Bird of Prey). If this was a flying technology demonstrator i`d say they probably vacformed the skin panels :D/>/> !!!

More seriously, someone in the aerospace development branch of their military was probably looking for a new posh position and a better salary and tried to impress the boss.

Edited February 10, 2013 by Stratospheremodels

[Tony Stark]

It has "flown." Details at the link.

[GreyGhost]

Yup, looks legit to me ...

-Gregg

[graves_09]

It reminds me of their missile test a few years ago where 3 of 4 missiles actually fired but they photoshopped the fourth.

[KursadA]

Just when you thought this could not get any weirder, they have announced a new air-to-air missile called "Fakour" a couple days ago.

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/02/10/288204/iran-testfires-latest-airtoair-missile/

Edited February 13, 2013 by KursadA

[Raymond]

It reminds me of their missile test a few years ago where 3 of 4 missiles actually fired but they photoshopped the fourth.

This one? :D

[erik_g]

The seat is so small because it's for the monkey :)/>/>

It really is!

What Iran has not yet made official is that the F-313 is the first ever space-fighter, and that it was used by their elite monkey astronaut on his first space mission. I have managed, through the use of shady intelligence contacts in the field of cyber warfare to get hold of the photographic evidence of this:

The dekadent imperialistic world of US-supported infidels must tremble in their fear of the mighty Iranian fleet of space-fighters piloted by an elite force of space monkeys!

Help us Obi Wan Kenobi, you are our only hope!

[Johnopfor]

Just when you thought this could not get any weirder, they have announced a new air-to-air missile called "Fakour" a couple days ago.

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/02/10/288204/iran-testfires-latest-airtoair-missile/

They are currently working on an extended range version known as the "Mother Fakour".......

[Tony Stark]

Just when you thought this could not get any weirder, they have announced a new air-to-air missile called "Fakour" a couple days ago.

[Shawn C.]

They are currently working on an extended range version known as the "Mother Fakour".......

Ha! Nice one!

[Aggressor01]

Did the use injection molding to do the canopy? Worst canopy I've ever laid my eyes on. It's cloudy and has distortion everywhere. Tow it to the boneyard.

[Stratospheremodels]

i saw an interesting analysis of the Qaher F-313 on this blog, http://aviationintel.com . I may not agree with the way the author expresses himself and he would need to seriously polish his writing style, but for the general idea, i would dare to say that many things he said make a lot of sense, myself i thought about the 'swarm' theory for a moment when i first paused to try to figure out what this 'mock-up` does represent when i first saw it. There is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke or another sci-fi author which is famous in engineering circles where a fictive nation literally progressed so much technologically that it progressively built military aircrafts that became so cost prohibitive that it ended up building a one-aircraft air force. There was a clear parallel with the F-22 in that story (which was written decades ago) because the F-22 is so expensive and so complex that the USAF can only afford one or two hundred of them, while during the 1950's there were thousands of front-line F-86 fighter jets. Even Canada had hundreds of jet fighters back then. These days they cannot even afford the 68 or so F-35 they were planning to purchase, and prior to that, during the fighter `deal of the century` of the 1980's, they got only double that quantity for what was back then the relatively affordable twin engine F-18. Each new generation of jet fighters that we see with its added level of technological complexity is procured in ever shrinking number as governments cannot keep up with the ever ballooning prices.

So the idea of a small size (which further helps to lower RCS), low cost, most likely built from composites, semi-stealth (compared to highly LO designs like the F-117, B-2 and F-22) Iranian fighter aircraft (easy to build, using only off-the-shelf avionics and sub-systems (wasn`t it the way the F-117 was built after all...? Ironic isn't it ?) and potentially made from materials that relatively non-skilled workers could use (composites), a bit the equivalent of the Mosquito of WWII, or Mig-3, or the Heinkel He-163, which were all built out of necessity, they didn't need much skilled labor to build those, and that was the whole point, plus they were cheap to build and they were in good part the result of a shortage of strategic materials (in the UK, following the very high attrition rate of British merchant shipping by the U-Boots campaign in the first part of the war. In the case of the Soviet Union, by the advance of the German army and loss of territory (and factories), which forced the Soviet authorities to install in a hurry new aviation and armament factories always further back East. With human and material losses forcing them to rethink the way aircrafts should be built to continue the fight and use whatever human and material resource were available. A bit the same way with Iran, which is feeling the effect of the sanctions and embargo (for exemple, since the past decade or more, all types of electronic equipment cannot be imported in Iran in any other way than through the black market, merchants selling consumer electronics for exemple are forced to go through an elaborate black-market route to bring consumer products into Iran so that they can continue to have something to sell). It makes a lot of sense that they would use easy to obtain civilian aviation avionics for sports planes for their future stealth fighter proof of concept mock-up (and for the actual test aircraft itself) since it is what they can find, and also use reverse-engineered J-85 engines (after all, the compressor blades for that low cost engines are made of plastic, you don't need to master high tech turbine blade alloy technology to make these) and given what the mission of this asymetric warfare fighter could be, they wouldn't need high-end cutting edge AESA radar and avionics on par with that of the F-35 and F-22 to get the job done, as the guy who wrote the blog on the link above remarked, with just a pair of IR missiles (or anti-ship missiles and with the F-14's serving as AWAC) and by flying at subsonic speed and low altitude, even a small quantity of LO airplanes based on this design could still cause damage (just think how much destruction a few dozens of outdated and almost kamikaze Argentinian A-4 fighter bombers and a handful of more modern Super Etendard with Exocet did bring to a British frigate and an aircraft carrier in the 1970's... I'm not even sure that these stealth Iranian fighters would be meant to carry more than a single mission, it might be the whole point. Desperate times often generate desperate measures, as was seen during WWII on both the European and the Pacific front. Many German aircraft designs from the end of the war were also meant to fly only one time. This was seen again in the war in Sri-Lanka.

Sure you would need more than a few dozens of these small things to even think about being able to put a nuclear aircraft carrier out of commission, but properly employed they would still constitute a serious wild card in any complex modern warfare situation. Not a game changer, but enough to possibly momentarily stop part of an ennemy force and send them back to lick their wounds for a few days and rethink their tactics (or at least to slow down and diminish the impact of a Task Force`s attack for a few hourss or days), giving the Regime more time to try to survive.

Like someone remarked, why don't they get themselves some Sukhoi 30 (which are given as having superior performance to the F-15's and F-16's) or some J-10's ? Well... maybe politics, but also Iran's regime have always prefered (from a nationalist and pride point of view) to develop it`s own domestic military industry, to be independant from other sources and to try to reach the same level as military superpowers (and also for historical nostalgia for an era going back thousands of years). This is why they succeeded at developing their own ballistic missile program (albeit with large help from North-Korea, but at least in that process they turned out to be more successful than N.-K., because they did succeed at putting their own satellite in orbit before the N.-Koreans who sold them their own missile technology did. So that`s something that should be taken seriously, in the sense : don't under-estimate their capabilities. If they put the same kind of efforts into developing LO aircrafts (and they are certainly developing a lot of drones as well) as they did for their ballistic missile and space program and now with their nuclear program, i would say what we see here should be taken seriously.

Now that said, after reading all of this, i had to had to take a more serious look at that mock-up, and i have to admit that for a mock-up, it sure have a lot of characteristics that look realistic (apart from the undersized cockpit and over-sized canopy)(: There are control surfaces for everything. Even the canards have control surfaces (unlike what some early observers remarked), they are not just fully mobile canards like the Rafale or the Saab fighter jet, but rather partly articulated canard surfaces. There are even a whole series of access panels with screws on the fins... Kind of odd for something which is supposed to be a mock-up... I would say this 'could' be their sub-scale technology demonstrator (at least in part, using the same tooling for several of the parts, but not fitted with it`s engine yet). The copies of the photos i have are not too high resolution, so it's hard to see if the main landing gear could retract, but at least on one of the pictures i can see the outlines of what seems to be additional wheel well panels in front of the landing gear. As for the bizarre canopy and the lack of locking latches for it, i cannot answer, but i have seen canopies made by a team of employees of Northop Grumman that were of no better quality than this one in a Youtube video where said Northrop Grumman team build from scratch a non-flying replica of the WWII Horten 229 'stealth' fighter jet to put it on a radar pole and see how stealthy it really was (they had a hard time to come up with decent vacformed canopies. First, they were using a very poor technique and the wrong equipment to heat and form the canopies, resulting in many improperly formed parts (they tried shaping the part by pulling it manually over a male mold, without any support frame or clamps for the plastic sheet, and without vacuum assist). Vacforming is notoriously difficult to master for some types of plastics, such as transparent plastics and acrylic (Perspex) if you are not using the right equipment and know-how. There are many different types of mold systems and techniques that exist to vacform difficult or thick material. I have been doing vacuum-forming since 18 years, so i can tell the people who made the canopy for the Qaher mock-up were obviously still not mastering the vacuum-forming of large transparent parts. Doesn't mean they will not master it later on, eventually. More practice and a better tooling and equipment is only what it takes.

The fins and wings all look like they were built very professionally, their surfaces are smooth and regular and include articulated control surfaces. For some reason there are some parts of the fuselage that are rough, as if the job was somehow rushed to complete it at the last minute (perhaps so the unveiling could coincide with the State of the Union speech...? There seems to be a lot of people who were eager to unveil things really near that speech this year: One new stealth fighter, one stealth fighter mock-up, and one nuclear test... A real record.

As for why the cockpit for that thing is so small and cramped if this was 'more' than a mock-up, i don't know, but the ejection seat looks legit to me. Might be a case of the pilot actually being too tall for the cockpit... (someone, please, show me a photo of the pilot standing next to Ahmadinejad so we can take measurements (tongue-in-cheek mode off). Maybe it's just a 3/4 scale after all... or they ran out of budget to make the P.O.C.bigger. Whichever way, it still looked stupid on camera to put someone in the seat and to bring out their chief of state and army chiefs for a photo op, that's the point that sank the whole thing (and a big propaganda flop, at least internationally, because domestically it seems to be working...). Despite the obvious domestic propaganda effort of the whole exercise, i still think there is probably a legitimate development effort behind this. As to wether they will keep funding it is another story.

I also had to take a look at the wings with a new perspective. The fuselage is all facets and flat panels while the wings and canards are curves surfaces. That didn't seem logical at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense from an aerodynamic and practical point of view for the Iranians. What you have here is actually a flying compromise: make the fuselage LO, but make sure that what will makes this thing fly (the wings) work, i.e.: remember folks, the Have Blue was notoriously non-aerodynamic, with its faceted wings it took it forever to take off and on it's first flight even Ben Rich thought it might end up crashing into the hill at the end of the runaway. Take into account that the Qaher is NOT going to have fly-by-wire controls (too expensive to develop i would say). The F-117 got away with it because it had FBW. Without FBW it was nicknamed the Wobblin Gobblin.

The Iranians don't want a plane that behaves like a Gobblin. So they logically decided to give it normal wings with curved surfaces, however they still decided to adopt a sweep angle and down-turned wing end plate similar to that of the Bird of Prey to compensate for the LO weaknesses provided by their more conventional wing`s cross-section.

I'm no expert in LO, so this is just my personal deduction, the whole wing is maybe designed with the more modern 'stealth with curves' technology after all, but the very faceted 'old school' shape of the fuselage makes me think they actually went for the 'flying compromise' option, the one that they can develop with the money they have available.

Back to the Horten 229, for something built of wood, fabric and charcoal, it was remarkably stealthy according to the engineers who analysed the results of that pole model on Northrop Grumman`s radar range. So if Germany could obtain such good results with such simple materials in 1945, i have no doubt that something even better can be built by a nation like Iran with today's technologies, even with limited resources.

Now should anyone fear a swarming 'army' of stealthy Qaher 313 in a few years or so ? I don't think so. But if the aircraft that will replace the F-22 ends up costing 2 billion dollars a piece and the US can only afford 50 of them, then i would say start to worry, because other people elsewhere will eventually make their own low cost stealthy designs, and they might start to build many of them. The idea here is, always be prepared for the unexpected. What seems cheap and ineffective, when used the right way, can come back to bite you. I hope that didn't sound political because i am looking at this from a strategic point of view.

Now the last poster`s answer to that blogger was quite an interesting point: Did the regime of Ahmadinejad 'out' the Qaher 313 just because of the upcoming elections, the same way Lyndon Johnson did out the Lockheed A-12 in his famous 'A-11' speech ? I don't know, but i would sure like to know the name of that said infamous PhD fraud. Personally i don't believe that such a project could be the work of a single person. Iran have shown a whole series of domestically produced and reverse-engineered aircraft designs along the years. It would be a bit ludicrous to think that their aviation industry relies on a single person for projects like these. I am pretty much sure they have many people available, even if they are not necessarily the best in the world, but they certainly do not rely only on one individual who would show up and declare he can build a stealth fighter with a 2 million dollar budget... Even the Iranian regime is not that stupid, especially given how shrewd they have been with their nuclear and ballistic programs.

Edited February 16, 2013 by Stratospheremodels

[nerdling]

Sorry I am still calling it a total fake.

Nothing about that "plane" even remotely looks real to me.

[Raymond]

I'm pretty sure that's a real car stereo in the cockpit ;)

[Stratospheremodels]

A Turkish website identified all the flight instruments in the cockpit. They are all civilian aviation commercially available equipment. Anyone with catalogs for all the main brands of flight instruments could check them easily. I remember how many people were in denial on web forums when the J-20 came out (and even when the first photos of the PAK-FA came out). I just looked back in my old documentation and i found out that there were several scale models and illustrations (including one in Pakistan Air Force colors, signed by a Chinese artist) of the all new F-22-like Chinese stealth fighter that came out this year... And we had it under our noses for several years... Yet most people just assumed it was a competing design that lost to the J-20 and never got build.

So i wouldn't be too surprised to find out there is a legit program behind the F-313 mock-up. I guess time will tell.

Edited February 19, 2013 by Stratospheremodels

[Ken Cartwright]

Resurrecting this old thread for a new news article on this craft:

 

https://theaviationist.com/2017/04/15/new-photos-and-video-of-irans-homemade-f-313-qaher-stealth-jet-have-just-emerged-and-heres-a-first-analysis/

 

I am not remotely convinced that it's flyable, or will ever become so, but it's interesting to look at.  Some think they took an F-5 sub-frame with engines and built this around it.

[niart17]

I remember when my brother and I built our first go-cart. Looks like they went with a Briggs and Straton, I think I would have sprung for a Kabota engine but I guess they are on a tight budget. I wonder if the "pilot" drives around saying "pew...pew pew....pew."

[TaiidanTomcat]

On 2/15/2013 at 5:39 PM, Stratospheremodels said:

i saw an interesting analysis of the Qaher F-313 on this blog, http://aviationintel.com . I may not agree with the way the author expresses himself and he would need to seriously polish his writing style, but for the general idea, i would dare to say that many things he said make a lot of sense, myself i thought about the 'swarm' theory for a moment when i first paused to try to figure out what this 'mock-up` does represent when i first saw it. There is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke or another sci-fi author which is famous in engineering circles where a fictive nation literally progressed so much technologically that it progressively built military aircrafts that became so cost prohibitive that it ended up building a one-aircraft air force. There was a clear parallel with the F-22 in that story (which was written decades ago) because the F-22 is so expensive and so complex that the USAF can only afford one or two hundred of them, while during the 1950's there were thousands of front-line F-86 fighter jets. Even Canada had hundreds of jet fighters back then. These days they cannot even afford the 68 or so F-35 they were planning to purchase, and prior to that, during the fighter `deal of the century` of the 1980's, they got only double that quantity for what was back then the relatively affordable twin engine F-18. Each new generation of jet fighters that we see with its added level of technological complexity is procured in ever shrinking number as governments cannot keep up with the ever ballooning prices.

So the idea of a small size (which further helps to lower RCS), low cost, most likely built from composites, semi-stealth (compared to highly LO designs like the F-117, B-2 and F-22) Iranian fighter aircraft (easy to build, using only off-the-shelf avionics and sub-systems (wasn`t it the way the F-117 was built after all...? Ironic isn't it ?) and potentially made from materials that relatively non-skilled workers could use (composites), a bit the equivalent of the Mosquito of WWII, or Mig-3, or the Heinkel He-163, which were all built out of necessity, they didn't need much skilled labor to build those, and that was the whole point, plus they were cheap to build and they were in good part the result of a shortage of strategic materials (in the UK, following the very high attrition rate of British merchant shipping by the U-Boots campaign in the first part of the war. In the case of the Soviet Union, by the advance of the German army and loss of territory (and factories), which forced the Soviet authorities to install in a hurry new aviation and armament factories always further back East. With human and material losses forcing them to rethink the way aircrafts should be built to continue the fight and use whatever human and material resource were available. A bit the same way with Iran, which is feeling the effect of the sanctions and embargo (for exemple, since the past decade or more, all types of electronic equipment cannot be imported in Iran in any other way than through the black market, merchants selling consumer electronics for exemple are forced to go through an elaborate black-market route to bring consumer products into Iran so that they can continue to have something to sell). It makes a lot of sense that they would use easy to obtain civilian aviation avionics for sports planes for their future stealth fighter proof of concept mock-up (and for the actual test aircraft itself) since it is what they can find, and also use reverse-engineered J-85 engines (after all, the compressor blades for that low cost engines are made of plastic, you don't need to master high tech turbine blade alloy technology to make these) and given what the mission of this asymetric warfare fighter could be, they wouldn't need high-end cutting edge AESA radar and avionics on par with that of the F-35 and F-22 to get the job done, as the guy who wrote the blog on the link above remarked, with just a pair of IR missiles (or anti-ship missiles and with the F-14's serving as AWAC) and by flying at subsonic speed and low altitude, even a small quantity of LO airplanes based on this design could still cause damage (just think how much destruction a few dozens of outdated and almost kamikaze Argentinian A-4 fighter bombers and a handful of more modern Super Etendard with Exocet did bring to a British frigate and an aircraft carrier in the 1970's... I'm not even sure that these stealth Iranian fighters would be meant to carry more than a single mission, it might be the whole point. Desperate times often generate desperate measures, as was seen during WWII on both the European and the Pacific front. Many German aircraft designs from the end of the war were also meant to fly only one time. This was seen again in the war in Sri-Lanka.

Sure you would need more than a few dozens of these small things to even think about being able to put a nuclear aircraft carrier out of commission, but properly employed they would still constitute a serious wild card in any complex modern warfare situation. Not a game changer, but enough to possibly momentarily stop part of an ennemy force and send them back to lick their wounds for a few days and rethink their tactics (or at least to slow down and diminish the impact of a Task Force`s attack for a few hourss or days), giving the Regime more time to try to survive.

Like someone remarked, why don't they get themselves some Sukhoi 30 (which are given as having superior performance to the F-15's and F-16's) or some J-10's ? Well... maybe politics, but also Iran's regime have always prefered (from a nationalist and pride point of view) to develop it`s own domestic military industry, to be independant from other sources and to try to reach the same level as military superpowers (and also for historical nostalgia for an era going back thousands of years). This is why they succeeded at developing their own ballistic missile program (albeit with large help from North-Korea, but at least in that process they turned out to be more successful than N.-K., because they did succeed at putting their own satellite in orbit before the N.-Koreans who sold them their own missile technology did. So that`s something that should be taken seriously, in the sense : don't under-estimate their capabilities. If they put the same kind of efforts into developing LO aircrafts (and they are certainly developing a lot of drones as well) as they did for their ballistic missile and space program and now with their nuclear program, i would say what we see here should be taken seriously.

Now that said, after reading all of this, i had to had to take a more serious look at that mock-up, and i have to admit that for a mock-up, it sure have a lot of characteristics that look realistic (apart from the undersized cockpit and over-sized canopy)(: There are control surfaces for everything. Even the canards have control surfaces (unlike what some early observers remarked), they are not just fully mobile canards like the Rafale or the Saab fighter jet, but rather partly articulated canard surfaces. There are even a whole series of access panels with screws on the fins... Kind of odd for something which is supposed to be a mock-up... I would say this 'could' be their sub-scale technology demonstrator (at least in part, using the same tooling for several of the parts, but not fitted with it`s engine yet). The copies of the photos i have are not too high resolution, so it's hard to see if the main landing gear could retract, but at least on one of the pictures i can see the outlines of what seems to be additional wheel well panels in front of the landing gear. As for the bizarre canopy and the lack of locking latches for it, i cannot answer, but i have seen canopies made by a team of employees of Northop Grumman that were of no better quality than this one in a Youtube video where said Northrop Grumman team build from scratch a non-flying replica of the WWII Horten 229 'stealth' fighter jet to put it on a radar pole and see how stealthy it really was (they had a hard time to come up with decent vacformed canopies. First, they were using a very poor technique and the wrong equipment to heat and form the canopies, resulting in many improperly formed parts (they tried shaping the part by pulling it manually over a male mold, without any support frame or clamps for the plastic sheet, and without vacuum assist). Vacforming is notoriously difficult to master for some types of plastics, such as transparent plastics and acrylic (Perspex) if you are not using the right equipment and know-how. There are many different types of mold systems and techniques that exist to vacform difficult or thick material. I have been doing vacuum-forming since 18 years, so i can tell the people who made the canopy for the Qaher mock-up were obviously still not mastering the vacuum-forming of large transparent parts. Doesn't mean they will not master it later on, eventually. More practice and a better tooling and equipment is only what it takes.

The fins and wings all look like they were built very professionally, their surfaces are smooth and regular and include articulated control surfaces. For some reason there are some parts of the fuselage that are rough, as if the job was somehow rushed to complete it at the last minute (perhaps so the unveiling could coincide with the State of the Union speech...? There seems to be a lot of people who were eager to unveil things really near that speech this year: One new stealth fighter, one stealth fighter mock-up, and one nuclear test... A real record.

As for why the cockpit for that thing is so small and cramped if this was 'more' than a mock-up, i don't know, but the ejection seat looks legit to me. Might be a case of the pilot actually being too tall for the cockpit... (someone, please, show me a photo of the pilot standing next to Ahmadinejad so we can take measurements (tongue-in-cheek mode off). Maybe it's just a 3/4 scale after all... or they ran out of budget to make the P.O.C.bigger. Whichever way, it still looked stupid on camera to put someone in the seat and to bring out their chief of state and army chiefs for a photo op, that's the point that sank the whole thing (and a big propaganda flop, at least internationally, because domestically it seems to be working...). Despite the obvious domestic propaganda effort of the whole exercise, i still think there is probably a legitimate development effort behind this. As to wether they will keep funding it is another story.

I also had to take a look at the wings with a new perspective. The fuselage is all facets and flat panels while the wings and canards are curves surfaces. That didn't seem logical at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense from an aerodynamic and practical point of view for the Iranians. What you have here is actually a flying compromise: make the fuselage LO, but make sure that what will makes this thing fly (the wings) work, i.e.: remember folks, the Have Blue was notoriously non-aerodynamic, with its faceted wings it took it forever to take off and on it's first flight even Ben Rich thought it might end up crashing into the hill at the end of the runaway. Take into account that the Qaher is NOT going to have fly-by-wire controls (too expensive to develop i would say). The F-117 got away with it because it had FBW. Without FBW it was nicknamed the Wobblin Gobblin.

The Iranians don't want a plane that behaves like a Gobblin. So they logically decided to give it normal wings with curved surfaces, however they still decided to adopt a sweep angle and down-turned wing end plate similar to that of the Bird of Prey to compensate for the LO weaknesses provided by their more conventional wing`s cross-section.

I'm no expert in LO, so this is just my personal deduction, the whole wing is maybe designed with the more modern 'stealth with curves' technology after all, but the very faceted 'old school' shape of the fuselage makes me think they actually went for the 'flying compromise' option, the one that they can develop with the money they have available.

Back to the Horten 229, for something built of wood, fabric and charcoal, it was remarkably stealthy according to the engineers who analysed the results of that pole model on Northrop Grumman`s radar range. So if Germany could obtain such good results with such simple materials in 1945, i have no doubt that something even better can be built by a nation like Iran with today's technologies, even with limited resources.

Now should anyone fear a swarming 'army' of stealthy Qaher 313 in a few years or so ? I don't think so. But if the aircraft that will replace the F-22 ends up costing 2 billion dollars a piece and the US can only afford 50 of them, then i would say start to worry, because other people elsewhere will eventually make their own low cost stealthy designs, and they might start to build many of them. The idea here is, always be prepared for the unexpected. What seems cheap and ineffective, when used the right way, can come back to bite you. I hope that didn't sound political because i am looking at this from a strategic point of view.

Now the last poster`s answer to that blogger was quite an interesting point: Did the regime of Ahmadinejad 'out' the Qaher 313 just because of the upcoming elections, the same way Lyndon Johnson did out the Lockheed A-12 in his famous 'A-11' speech ? I don't know, but i would sure like to know the name of that said infamous PhD fraud. Personally i don't believe that such a project could be the work of a single person. Iran have shown a whole series of domestically produced and reverse-engineered aircraft designs along the years. It would be a bit ludicrous to think that their aviation industry relies on a single person for projects like these. I am pretty much sure they have many people available, even if they are not necessarily the best in the world, but they certainly do not rely only on one individual who would show up and declare he can build a stealth fighter with a 2 million dollar budget... Even the Iranian regime is not that stupid, especially given how shrewd they have been with their nuclear and ballistic programs.

 This thing does not rate this kind of analysis... you're overthinking this to the extreme. The Us also still has thousands of other fighters. It's really hard to "overwhelm" the US because we have quality and quantity. They tried out "swarm" the Iraqis and it was a miserable blood bath.

[murad]

well i'm still awaiting italeri's half assed attempt of this in scale model.

[KursadA]

9 minutes ago, murad said:

well i'm still awaiting italeri's half assed attempt of this in scale model.

 

Considering that the aircraft itself is a half-assed attempt, any kit of it would be best termed as "quarter-assed" ;-)

Edited April 18, 2017 by KursadA

[Vince Maddux]

I could actually build a model of this plane and it would be more realistic then the actual plane!

[habu2]

One can only imagine what that inlet design does at high AoA.

 

Then there's the matter of the canard vortex impinging on the main wing right at the bend....

[Gordon Shumway]

The new jet (???) used for taxi trials, probably is built from any existing F-5's Iran still has. I bet is has the same jet engines from these F-5's. The plane is built sturdy enough to taxi around in, but me thinks it wont be flying or maybe capable of  quality flight. Blind fold it and tie its wings up like hands and toss it off a  tall building and we will see what Iran does very well.

 

 I do not doubt Iran trying to cobble some sort of stealthy looking  combat jet. But even if they will one day, the US and its allies have not only stealth, but full systems integration along with air/land/sea and space situational awareness.