About this blog.
Dear readers,
Many of you might be familiar with the Best Fighter For Canada blog. As you may know, the Belgian Airforce is also looking for a replacement for its F-16 AM/BM Fighting Falcon fighters.
Belgium currently operates about 48 F-16's, both single seat and double seats versions. The current government wants to replace them with 34 new fighters. The final decision will be taken in 2018. Five candidates have been presented:
*F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from Lockheed Martin
*Rafale from Dassault
*Eurofighter Typhoon from a consortium of several European manufacturers
*Gripen NG from Saab
*F/A-18 Super Hornet from Boeing
Sounds familiar? These are indeed the same jets that have been offered to Canada.
My intent is to make a similar analysis of these competitors in more or less the same way as Doug Allen did for Canada. Bear in mind that Belgium is not Canada. Canada is a very large and lightly populated country. It is a direct neighbour to the USA. The Canadian Airforce is currently flying the CF-18 (related to the Hornet family from Boeing). Belgium is small densely populated in the heart of Europe. It is surrounded by France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Some of the analysis about the characteristics of each plane will of course be identical. The suitability to country-specific requirements may be very different.
I intent to add articles on a regular basis. You might be asking why I am writing this in English and not in Dutch, French or German (Yes, we have three official languages.) Much information is only available in English. So it is easier if I don't have to translate technical terms from English. Secondly I wanted to make this blog easily accessible to visitors from other countries. I hope that you won't mind some occasional spelling mistakes.
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