| Vaporware? Responding to yesterday’s announcement. Photos of the thing can be seen at the link. |
Iran unveiled the fighter jet at a defense show in Tehran on Tuesday, calling the Kowsar a "fourth-generation" fighter, with "advanced avionics" and multi-purpose radar, the Iranian news agency Tasnim said, adding that it was "100-percent indigenously made."
But analysts quickly noted similarities between the plane and the F-5 fighter jet, made by Northrop-Grumman in the 1950s.
The F-5 was sold to Iran in the 1960s and first entered operation in the Iranian Imperial Air Force in 1965. In the West the F-5 line of jets is largely used for training purposes.
Iran has already used the F-5 platform ‐ and, some observers suggest, actual parts from its aging fleet of non-flying F-5s ‐ to develop its newer jets.
The Saeqeh, first flown in 2004, was one such plane.
The suspicions follow the much-derided unveiling in 2013 of an apparently fake previous "first" domestic fighter jet, the Qaher F-313, which was determined by numerous Western experts to have been a plastic model of a plane too small to fly.
State TV said the Kowsar had already been through successful testing and showed it waiting on a runway for its first public display flight, though live footage of the flight stopped before the plane took off.
