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Old June 28th 04, 07:23 PM
Ford Prefect
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Charles Talleyrand wrote:
Could Canada build a complete modern jet fighter with missiles and
radar? Assume they have lots of money (10-20 billion dollars) and
seven or so years.


We did it before - in fact it was way ahead of its time. But the
chicken-**** Conservative government that was in power at the time
caved to US pressures to scrap the Arrow.

Canada is actually well positioned to build the airframe. Bombardier
has very significant experience building subsonic jets and presumably
could handle supersonic jets with time and money. The science behind
this is VERY well known. Heck even Burt Rutan can do this, surely the
nation of Canada can.

Pratt Canada builds lots of gas turbines. They specialize in smaller
jets but again given time and money could likely scale up.

Radar is a problem. Web searches make me believe that Canada only
builds radars for atmospheric research and air traffic control and one
military radar, which is used by maritime aircraft for periscope
searching.


Given that our radar satellite systems make the US nervous (didn't we
have to agree to reduce resolution on RadarSat during US fly-overs?),
I think we can manage this without much trouble. McDonald-Detwiller
certainly has the talent to do this... and the folks at several other
firms which do international military contracts certainly have
additional talent that could be tapped. And the detection systems
used on the Cougar (correct designation?) certainly attest to the
ability to develop very sophisticated detection and tracking capabilities.

Missiles are another problem. Web searches suggest that Canada builds
no missiles and more importantly no seaker heads. They might have to
start from scratch on this.


Common technology --- most countries purchase these from others. And
reverse engineering the missles already in inventory isn;t such a hard
thing to do. Simple web searches would give all the technology, or
one could start with the basics as published in Smithsonian Air &
Space a while back...

So, can Canada build a modern jet?


Hell, yes.

I am curious as to why you base your assumptions on the results of
"web searches". Nor all companies are so stupid as to place
classified, sensitive, or advanced information on the web -- Canadian
companies don't tend to use the web to hype their military knowledge
as those of some other nations do.

Just because it is not on the web doesn't mean it doesn't exist! As
the SETI folks are fond of saying: "Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence!".