I thought the whole reason they made this prototype flight-worthy is to gather data in flight to have a more rigorous CDR phase to achieve design freeze faster later?
Didn't they do just that? I mean without final design how much more useful data can they obtain?
There must be many system identification tests to bring the simulation software as close as possible to the real thing, so that most of the future tests can be done in simulation environment to shorten the development time.
well why would they just fly it once? if they want to gather data, they will want to gather it in a myriad of conditions, in transonic, supersonic regimes, with and without afterburners, stall and post-stall maneuvers, different environmental conditions, and in general flight envelope expansion and even maybe test stores separation.
This airframe was not even meant to fly at first. That it managed to do first flight is amazing, but I doubt pushing it into those circumstances is gonna be too wise. I'd imagine they would take the data here and do necessary modifications for flight of the second prototype that was the first one actually meant to fly and improve from there rather than continue work on this one, but that's just my guess
If load and durability tests on the ground are done already, or after they've been finished the prototype is of no other use anyway so just better get out of it what you can instead of it gathering dust.
One thing I find curious: the maiden flight lasted 13 minutes. To my memory, this is unusually short. It makes me wonder whether
Well, I think on that we can only speculate. No. 2 & 3 seems to be out of the question considering the stability of the flight and landing; and the list you provide doesn't exhaust options. The feeling I get from listening to Temel Kotil is that they have tried to fly it before a couple of times and it may have flown but probably due to pr aspect they didn't want to show off those cases which may have been far from pristine (only a guess obviously). They probably wanted to show an "official" maiden flight to be able to take off that load and continue with the testing procedures which seems they are taking very seriously. This we can infer also from the speed and urgency with which this project has been advancing and the frequency with which projects like TB3 and Hurjet are doing flight tests (43 flight tests for the latter), belying much political interference in any of these projects for pr purposes beyond showing off a maiden flight or completion of prototypes here and there. A very tight timetable from the armed forces seems to be more dominant in setting the agenda.
10 to 15 minutes is expected for the maiden flight. And I hope we can put behind the irrational "election" narrative after being disproven a gazillion times.
defencehub.live
First flight duration of recent 4.5/5th gen prototypes:
Apologies. My mistake. I think I have confused airliner maiden flight durations with fast jet maiden flight durations.
After I added Kaan today to the comparison table of 5th generation fighters in wikepedia
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Fifth-generation fighter - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I don't know it will start a fight even from Turkish IPs trying to remove it I don't know why
(it was a too many edits so I made an AI to summarize the fight from the edit history for me)
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finally they seemed to have failed anyway
but unfortunately they removed the flag from here finally (wasn't my edit but inspired me to make mine)
