Aeralis Modular Trainer Concept

Lookin' more like a Hawk every day . . .

cheers,
Robin.
 
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Seems like a lot of wetted area for a small trainer; much like the Buckeye, sitting on top of the engine(s) adds a lot of bulk.

But at least it's nearly looking like a Hawk now.
 
I think Aeralis is realising its their last chance hence all the recent promos

Seems to have morphed into an L-39NG / Aermacchi 345 /S.211 with slightly more swept wings. Although the engine intake area looks tiny compared to these aircraft.
 
red admiral said:
I think Aeralis is realising its their last chance hence all the recent promos

Seems to have morphed into an L-39NG / Aermacchi 345 /S.211 with slightly more swept wings. Although the engine intake area looks tiny compared to these aircraft.
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Kiltonge said:
Seems like a lot of wetted area for a small trainer; much like the Buckeye, sitting on top of the engine(s) adds a lot of bulk.

But at least it's nearly looking like a Hawk now.
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Until recently they had a former BAe Kingston aerodynamicist working on the wing design.

The Hawk was originally meant to replace the Jet Provost, Gnat, Hunter and partly the Jaguar T2. It had a wing design to cover a wide speed range.

It's a shame Aeralis did not focus on 'a better Hawk' sooner, rather than the concept of modularity.
 
Mike Pryce said:
It's a shame Aeralis did not focus on 'a better Hawk' sooner, rather than the concept of modularity.
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Quite. A "cheaper" Hawk is very achievable with low risk and gives something adequate to deliver a fast jet syllabus at much lower cost than the pseudo-fighters like T-50.

Rather than focus on high risk modularity, or recently they've refocused on "digital". At the same point it took them over 10 years to get to a wind tunnel after which they then significantly changed the configuration design.
 
red admiral said:
Quite. A "cheaper" Hawk is very achievable with low risk and gives something adequate to deliver a fast jet syllabus at much lower cost than the pseudo-fighters like T-50.
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I'm not sure how much of the fast jet syllabus you can do without radar and at least simulated missile capability, though.

Plus, a LIFT psuedo-fighter can give you a lot more sales than a pure trainer, since any country with air policing needs can buy a LIFT and use it.
 
red admiral said:
Quite. A "cheaper" Hawk is very achievable with low risk and gives something adequate to deliver a fast jet syllabus at much lower cost than the pseudo-fighters like T-50.

Rather than focus on high risk modularity, or recently they've refocused on "digital". At the same point it took them over 10 years to get to a wind tunnel after which they then significantly changed the configuration design.
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I think they were going for a flawed premise. Right around the time Aeralis and its modularity concept was conceived, it looked like outsourcing of air training for many of the western air forces looked like a way to go. For private training and leasing companies, modularity concept does have certain merit. The problem was that such trends, althoigh very much a thing still, hasn't become as mainstream as perhaps Aeralis thought it would be.

Also, by the time you have the money to buy multiple modules, might as well buy a complete aircraft since I can't imagine these modules being that much cheaper. Even if their "modularity" was ala common platforms found in automotive world or rail rolling stocks, so not meant for swapping of modules between exusting airframes, but for efficient production of several different models with common design, that also didn't made sense since for an aircraft that needs to be highly tailored to its mission profile, you either jeopardise the flight characteristics/performance of certain models for your mainstream model, or you design an airframe that could cater to all flight profiles but by doing so suboptimal for every one of them.

Then again, when it comes to "better hawk", there already were M345 and L39NG so they thought they were in need to find a new market, which actually didn't exist.
Scott Kenny said:
I'm not sure how much of the fast jet syllabus you can do without radar and at least simulated missile capability, though.

Plus, a LIFT psuedo-fighter can give you a lot more sales than a pure trainer, since any country with air policing needs can buy a LIFT and use it.
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Exactly. If you could afford a modular fighter with different modules, might as well just buy a jet that could do all of what Aeralis could do from the get-go.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I'm not sure how much of the fast jet syllabus you can do without radar and at least simulated missile capability, though.

Plus, a LIFT psuedo-fighter can give you a lot more sales than a pure trainer, since any country with air policing needs can buy a LIFT and use it.
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You can do all of it as Hawk is currently doing for UK and many other countries

Hawk has orders of magnitude higher sales than any LIFT pseudo-fighter. These are bought in very small numbers by very small numbers of countries, if they are bought at all.

1,000 Hawks built with around 50 of those being "fighters"
 
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If BAE and HAL hadn't fallen out over the Hawk-i then it's possible that they could have just moved the production to India lock, stock and barrel and kept cranking them out, perhaps at lower cost.

I'm not sure that the sub-Hawk/L39/M346 market is any less a chimera than LIFTs to be honest. The M345 hasn't sold outside of Italy. I'm hard pushed to think of anything in that bracket that has sold well since the 1980s. The turboprops - especially the PC21 - have hoovered up this sector of the market.
 
Hood said:
If BAE and HAL hadn't fallen out over the Hawk-i then it's possible that they could have just moved the production to India lock, stock and barrel and kept cranking them out, perhaps at lower cost.

I'm not sure that the sub-Hawk/L39/M346 market is any less a chimera than LIFTs to be honest. The M345 hasn't sold outside of Italy. I'm hard pushed to think of anything in that bracket that has sold well since the 1980s. The turboprops - especially the PC21 - have hoovered up this sector of the market.
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Exactly. We're at the stage of aviation development that we don't need any jets for basic training anymore, and where they could even do more advanced training. I think I've talked about this a few pages ago on this thread.

It's basically LIFT or/and prop these days
 
Not sure. As an example, the old Tucano aircraft French used for training took 20min to get to level 200. That's 20 min with an IP that fly numerous time a day and a pilot that has a short flying time at his disposal to become a professional.
Idem for G and alpha maneuvering. Being limited to 6g and well below 20 degree (like the French Alphajet today) and having do do so loosing altitude in a downward spiral (like the 346 that Aermacchi sell) is not the most efficient way to spend tax payer money.

Propeller trainer aircraft are only relevant if you sideline operational realities and look very broadly at the result of the syllabus. At the end, it's always more hours on Frontline airplane at a strategic cost for a nation to pay dearly.
Let's not forget 50 years of a charge for really effective training since Vietnam.
 
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Aeralis aiming at the basic trainer market never seemed to make any sense. Cheaper to use an already existing turboprop. Or it's a relatively simple aircraft and many countries want to develop their own rather than buy in. And if this market doesn't exist then that eliminates the main need for modularity.

So you're left with a heavy advanced trainer / LIFT airframe that you could put refuelling pods on. But given the size class then you'll have near zero useful fuel offload - need multiple tankers to fill up even one fast jet!

Hood said:
If BAE and HAL hadn't fallen out over the Hawk-i then it's possible that they could have just moved the production to India lock, stock and barrel and kept cranking them out, perhaps at lower cost.
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I think it needed a significant redesign of the air vehicle to reduce costs - it's sort of like a giant Meccano set now. And then a cheaper, more fuel efficient engine than Adour that'll be in production for longer. All very doable at low risk, but still multiple hundreds of £m engineering effort.
 
red admiral said:
I think it needed a significant redesign of the air vehicle to reduce costs - it's sort of like a giant Meccano set now. And then a cheaper, more fuel efficient engine than Adour that'll be in production for longer. All very doable at low risk, but still multiple hundreds of £m engineering effort.
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Yes, it makes no economic sense now, there was a window when it might have, but that boat has long sailed.
 
This talk is by Peter Curtis, who led the Aeralis wing redesign work. It gives an overview of the design rationale although at the time he could not show the new layout.

Peter started at BAe Kingston on the P1216, so is clearly a great engineer, and also happened to be one of the three people who fixed the F-35B so that it could work properly in jet-borne flight. He is now at QinetiQ.

View: https://youtu.be/K1_fXe_CdVs?si=bgMOt4p0Su-ykYii
 
Scott Kenny said:
I'm not sure how much of the fast jet syllabus you can do without radar and at least simulated missile capability, though.
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With adequate data-linking to simulate radar, there's no reason you can't do all of it.
 
red admiral said:
I think that not changing the airframe for T2/Mk128 was the issue. By which I largely mean changing how the airframe is built rather than the external lines.
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T Mk 2 was the last opportunity to do a Hawk NG refresh, but that should really have been immediately after the T-45 debacle to clean-up the years of accumulated cruft like vortex generators and smurfs.

The Hawk always trailed behind the Alpha Jet for purity of aero and handling but as the weight piled on it became a hodge-podge of hacks - and then along came the clean-sheet LIFTs.
 
Maro.Kyo said:
Then again, when it comes to "better hawk", there already were M345 and L39NG so they thought they were in need to find a new market, which actually didn't exist.
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The M345 and L-39 are in the intermediate trainer category though. Not suitable for Phase IV training, which the Hawk or its successor is supposed to be.

I think there is a gap in the market for a modern advanced jet trainer. Available options all use an afterburning F404 which is overkill for a pure trainer, or two engines (M346). A subsonic, single engined advanced trainer is not available.

But AERALIS' design doesn't cut it imho. Small intakes suggest sub par performance. Wing/tail layout doesn't seem suitable for high AoA.
They should team up with Scaled Composites. I like the Swift 400 :)
 
Kiltonge said:
The Hawk always trailed behind the Alpha Jet for purity of aero and handling but as the weight piled on it became a hodge-podge of hacks - and then along came the clean-sheet LIFTs.
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I'm not sure this is quite correct; the (small) aero mods to Hawk were specifically for Goshawk for carrier approach. The clean sheet LIFTs are about 30 years newer and not cheap. Extending Hawk performance to higher alpha is possible as per the slat on AJT (at cost increase) and extending usable Mach range by 0.1ish not so much - that's where the opportunity was for me. But BFM is only one part of the syllabus.

eagle said:
The M345 and L-39 are in the intermediate trainer category though. Not suitable for Phase IV training, which the Hawk or its successor is supposed to be.
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But I think you could make a broadly similar airframe that would be, e.g. higher sweep wings/tails for higher Mach performance, higher thrust COTS turbofan (e.g. PW500) for higher thrust/weight and be at a significantly lower cost point than the pseudo-fighters with F404.
 
eagle said:
The M345 and L-39 are in the intermediate trainer category though. Not suitable for Phase IV training, which the Hawk or its successor is supposed to be.
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The thing is, they were touting a module swap to make their aircraft an intermediate trainer, just as you've described. The premise of their business model was(is?) to swap modules so that a single base airframe can become basic, intermediate, advanced and LIF trainer. Hence I was talking about those two aircraft. Nowadays, cost cutting by operating a Aeralis basic-intermediate and advanced-LIFT modules in a single fleet cannot beat an advanced turboprop like PC-21.

eagle said:
But AERALIS' design doesn't cut it imho. Small intakes suggest sub par performance. Wing/tail layout doesn't seem suitable for high AoA.
They should team up with Scaled Composites. I like the Swift 400 :)
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That's why they could even swap out inlets depending on the module.
 
Honestly, wouldn't that be cheaper to include a variable swept wing instead of all those dead-end design choices?
Why the heck would you want a wing without Slat and only slotted flaps (think trim) when VG could solve all your problems. (Modern VG could come lightweight for such aircraft)
Also, instead of designing for two very different powerplants, why not simply fly with a podded solutions, like all Business jets today?

Aeralis promoted a lightweight simple design but what we see is an heavier, more intricated airframe than envisioned with design constraints and choices that would invariably impair servicability. (see for example the mention for a navalized FLG when all the airframe structure is impacted, hence why this provision? ).

We are farther than ever from a training aircraft and increasingly shown a design training project.
 
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red admiral said:
That's one of the most bizarre takes I've ever seen
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Really?

Bet you can find records showing that the UK has replaced their Hawks at least once, keeping the same total in service.

Planes have a service life. 20 years is about it, especially for a plane that gets flown by noobs. They're more likely to bend or break the plane than a high-time pilot.

A plane in production for 50 years means that the people who bought the first production planes 50 years ago replaced the 20yo planes with new planes 30 years ago, and replaced the 20yo planes with new planes again 10 years ago.

See also C130s.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Bet you can find records showing that the UK has replaced their Hawks at least once, keeping the same total in service.
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Actually not really. 175 T1s of which a minority were replaced by 28 T2s about 30 years later but most of the T1s remained in service. The main driver is the much lower numbers of pilots to train compared to the 1970s.

If we're not counting replacement aircraft in overall sales, then say for the Boeing 737 should we only count the original c. 2,000 Classics and ignore the follow on c. 10,000 NGs, MAXs etc.? Many operators now even have replacement aircraft for replacement aircraft.
 
Most Hawk buyers never replaced their originals with newer Hawks, generally they kept what they bought in service.

The RAF's slice of the production run was only 20%; with 80% exports that is one of the biggest British aviation industry success stories.

Scott Kenny said:
Planes have a service life. 20 years is about it, especially for a plane that gets flown by noobs. They're more likely to bend or break the plane than a high-time pilot.
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Estimated wastage is built into the order, the RAF always liked to have some cushion of airframes over - say - a 15 or 20 year period. If wastage was lower than estimated then you had a bonus, if higher then you needed to do some head scratching to have enough serviceable airframes. Never was a problem for the Hawk T.1.
 

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