{"id":12330,"date":"2018-08-21T23:25:48","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T23:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=12330"},"modified":"2018-08-21T23:25:48","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T23:25:48","slug":"defense-experts-deride-irans-new-fighter-jet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=12330","title":{"rendered":"Defense experts deride\u00a0Iran\u2019s \u2018new fighter jet\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nLONDON:\u00a0Iran on Tuesday unveiled what it claimed was its first domestically built, powerful fighter jet \u2014 to widespread derision from defense and military experts.<\/p>\n

\nState TV showed President Hassan Rouhani sitting in the cockpit of the new \u201cKowsar fourth-generation fighter\u201d at the National Defense Industry exhibition in Tehran.<\/p>\n

\nThe warplane had \u201cadvanced avionics\u201d and multi-purpose radar, and was \u201c100-percent indigenously made,\u201d Iranian state media said.<\/p>\n

\nHowever, suspicions were raised when live footage of the plane taxiing along a runway ended before it actually took off. Analysts were reminded of 2013, when Iran trumpeted the \u201cdomestically built Qaher 313 fighter jet\u201d \u2014 which turned out to be a plastic model that never flew.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIran\u2019s so-called \u2018indigenous Kowsar-88\u2019 fourth-generation fighter is not fourth-generation and is not truly indigenous,\u201d security analyst Dr. Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser to Gulf State Analytics in Washington, told Arab News.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThis jet is a Frankenstein\u2019s monster for optics only. The aircraft\u2019s frame is an American Northrop F-5F Tiger II slapped together with various accoutrements.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThis Iranian production is similar to the\u00a0Qaher 313 a few years ago, another so-called fourth-generation fighter that could\u00a0overtake America’s F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAt that time, it was plainly obvious that the Qaher 313 was a slapped together mock-up for international propaganda purposes.\u00a0Now we have two optical illusions.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nJustin Bronk, a research fellow specializing in combat airpower at the Royal United Services Institute, also said the \u201cnew\u201d Iranian jet was a carbon copy of an F-5 Tiger, first produced in the US in the 1960s.
\u201cIt\u2019s a very small, lightweight fighter with very small engines,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWhile you might put in a modern radar, or modern avionics \u2014 by Iranian standards \u2014it is still going to be subject to all the limitations of the F-5 airframe.\u201d
The plane was first publicly announced on Saturday by Defense Minister Amir Hatami, who had said it would be unveiled on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\nHe gave few details of the project, focusing instead on Iran\u2019s efforts to upgrade its missile defenses.
Hatami said the defense program was motivated by memories of the missile attacks Iran suffered during its eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, and by repeated threats from Israel and the United States that \u201call options are on the table\u201d in dealing with the Islamic republic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON:\u00a0Iran on Tuesday unveiled what it claimed was its first domestically built, powerful fighter jet \u2014 to widespread derision from defense and military experts. State TV showed President Hassan Rouhani sitting in the cockpit of the new \u201cKowsar fourth-generation fighter\u201d at the National Defense Industry exhibition in Tehran. The warplane had \u201cadvanced avionics\u201d and multi-purpose…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":12331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}