But you realize despite this older engine F-16XL turned out a much more dangerous product then the main line items, right?^^^^ People you are only looking at dry thrust & wet thrust of the engine that is the reason you are looking at F110 instead of F414. The correct metric you should be looking at for picking an engine should be thrust to weight ratio.
for F110 it is ~7.25-8 where as for F414 it is ~9-10.
Adding a lower TTW engine(even though it final wet thrust is way higher) will not make a plane super cruise because the Engine + Fuselage + support structures for housing & holding the same engine will increase ending up with high empty weight fighter which will not even do transonic cruise forget about super cruise
Yes, multi-role is, as of today linked to twin-engined.@Yumdoot , Sir, thank you for the elaborate reply.
One thing I needed to clarify, is the twin engine capability , sought out by IAF had something to do with multi role capability ? Like flight envelope of "twin engine aircraft" be able to support more role than single engine variant .
Also, if possible , please guide me to an article , where I can read about developmental history of F16's , so that different roles of such aircraft can be studied.
Thank you .
P.S : Is "multi role" capability possible ?
But only as of today and not because there is an natural science operating against having single-engined-multi-roles. In fact Gripen and LCA and F-16 and F-16XL all beat that presumption convincingly. My personal favourite is the F-16XL and I would love to see an LCA Mk-!? which is designed to work like that.
Unfortunately as I said, the Chinese can do that easily to us while our vaunted IAF leadership will sure as hell, instead sell us lemons.
I dread the day the J-17 mutates into one such product in its later version while we fly planes 5 times as costly with a piss poor many-on-many survivability. If this many-on-many survivability was not important then why the hell did they pit 3 Mig-21 bison against 1 F-15C in their exercises. What happened to those lessons? Batti bana ke rakh liya us learning ka kya?
IAF leadership is OTOH furthering the cowboy culture by salivating for twin-engined type individualist survivability and OTOtherH they are sinking money into more and more networking which works better with team-work.
I don't know man. Feel like violated/molested