BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese businessman who bought a Russian fighter jet online wants his money back after finding it could not be shipped to China, state media reported on Tuesday.

Hilarious :D

LOL... well he DID state it was only supposed to be on display as advertisement, but still... Bleh!

Hehe i read about this when he first bought the plane. :D I'd love to have the money to go around buying jet planes becasue i wanted to lighten the office up a bit. But i still cant see why it cant be shipped to china.

because it's clasified as military plane. and the customs didnt' get any clearence form the government.

AFAIK it was stripped of military hardware, so it shoul dbe classified as civilian plane. but they probably didnt' do this so customs denied it's entry.

also i believe in South Africa there is a collector of old war planes. If i remember correctly he also has some early Jet fighters as well as some more recent ones. offcourse not the latest.

yah would be cool to buy the fast Eurofigther or the "invisible" Raptor. :w00t:

I want a harrier!

That's it?! He bought it for less than $25,000?! And it's in the US right now? <Calls wife> Honey, do you mind if I do a little landscaping in the front yard? It'll look great when I'm done, honest...

If I had my choice of MiGs, though, I'd want a MiG-3.

I don't want a mig. I want a Harrier :(

None on the surplus civilian market yet :cry:

But in the US atleast you can buy a bunch of different military fighters if you have the money Migs, even western planes. There was a F-18 on Ebay not too long ago $9 million ready too fly.

link

Ofcourse they have all the weapons demilled and the advanced weapon systems and avionics are all stripped out.

Now where's the fun in that? :eeeeeh:
I really would want an F-22 Raptor. It's the best damned plane around. :ph34r:

But i want some weapons, only a few. :cry:

I would want a A-10 but with a demilled 20 foot gun whats the point :cry: That was the coolest part, a gun that ripps tanks apart like a hot knife through butter. :twisted:

Just steal one and replace it with a museum one. They'll only notice when the gun dont fire... ^_^

I want a Harrier! :unsure:

Great idea,
lets see the "shopping list":

1 Mig-3 for Fruit Pie Jones.
1 F-22 Raptor for troop18546.
1 A-10 but with a demilled 20 foot gun for ShadowXXI.
4 harriers, for Playbahnosh, Maikel, Stebbi and myself.



I will be hard to fund all these stuff at the same base. The Mig 3 we can take it from some ex-comunist country like Angola, Poland or Laos. It doesnt look hard coz the third world air forces are both corrupt and inefficient. Anyway it will be expensive to found it, stole it and bring it to buyers coz it is too far away of my home
A-10, i know of some of them in the south of Argentina so its an isloate and unprepared air base. With 10 people we can take over the base or with 2 can steal the plane. We can get lost easly if we carry our own fuel to the plane and go to somewhere secure.
The harriers, there are some of them in a spanish carrier but it should be guarded since it is the flagship of the fleet. Anyway if we take over it in port we can use it to pick up the other planes with 20 decided people and some luck it could be done.
Someone to look for the F-22 will be usefull.

BTW, how many are you willing to pay for the planes(free of tax)?

Now where's the fun in that? :eeeeeh:
I really would want an F-22 Raptor. It's the best damned plane around. :ph34r: [/b][/quote]
Nah, there are too many problems with the raptor. For the average joe that actually wants to fly his ex-military jet, the A-10 is about as modern as you would want, if you insist on flying an american craft. For performance, you would want an F-4, as maintaining the engines is not beyond the skills of an automotive enthusiast (Art Alphonse, creator of the Green Monster landspeed record challenger from the 1960's, built his car around a J79 turbojet [from an F-4] that the airforce had deemed no longer airworthy).

For high performance jets, ex-soviet aircraft are the way to go. American aircraft are designed around the premises of absolute performance and a full team of maintenance specialists. Thus the american aircraft are always at the very margin of serviceability and require long hours of specialised technicians to maintain if they do anything besides gather dust. The russians acknowledged that they would never have the skilled technicians in sufficient numbers to match the USAF ground crews, so they designed their aircraft to be maintained by semiliterate peasants who knew the ins and outs of turbocharged diesel tractors and their associated hydraulic systems. Quite simply, the MiG will not break down as often, nor will it be as difficult to fix. Also, as the russians never throw anything away, there are lots of aircraft available, at an affordable price.

ok then a russian plane would do fine.

or yeah a harrier! that way i could land almoust wherever i wanted. theoretically...

aaand one more Harrier to the shopping list :D Hmm, I think we strongly need that carrier ship now, coz we can't put all these Harriers in our pocket or in our back yard. Let's have a U.S.S. Abandonia :D

I'll get on the carrier!

Oh, btw, I know a girl who makes aircraft models, so we could hire her to help us plan out the attacks by making little models to stick on our battle plans ^^

Plus I want a model of the UIFAS (United Internet Forummers of Abandonia's Ship) Abandonia in a glass case with lots of models on it in my cabin.

I am captain of the UIFAS Abandonia, afterall.

If finding an airworthy MiG-3 proves to be too difficult, I'll take one of these. Make it a single-seater, please; the two-seaters are kinda ugly.

Now we're talking! But that is just too slow. Probably called 'the Slug' by the crew of this baby:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Me_163B-0.jpg

In seconds it would have got me as far as juuuust out of reach of a safe landing. But what speed! LOL

With eight whole minutes of flight time on a full tank, you'd better be really sure of where you are. And be careful with that fuel!

No lie :[img]http://www.abandonia.com/forum/html/emoticons/laugh.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='laugh.gif' />

Why did they stop making cool aircrafts? It's a silly aircraft, yes. But cool!

I was watching a show "Future weapons" and with the JSF atleast from a flying standpoint it is really easy to fly. The put kids (with no flight training) in the real deal JSF flight simulators and said before long they were shooting down enemy planes :blink: They even said the kids were giving them advice about the button layout in the cockpit. Saying this and that button would be better over here.

I remember laughing when I was watching that with my brother, and saying thats what you get with kids that grew up with video games :D

But I assume you were talking about a maintenance standpoint for the Raptor. Which as with any stealth plane is insanely high if you want to maintain the aircraft in top condition.

Though a raptor would be fun to fly. Supercruise ability and god only knows how fast it goes with afterburners. It has a better thrust/weight ratio then any plane ever made even the SR-71. They will only say its Mach 2 class but they arent going to release the real top speed for awhile.

Damm, we got a seriuos strikeback today when trying to stole a russian helicoppter in order to complete the shopping list. I am looking for 8 people without concers about killing innocents and better with military trainig or capable of flying combat planes.

The group and I are planning an attack for tomorrow. We will attack the Taszár NATO Airbase here in Hungary. The fresh Grippens are just arrived some weeks ago, we will steel some, and then sell them to buy Harriers :D

A good eBayer would give him the money back. A $25000 aircraft can't fly anyways so it's a piece of scrap metal.

I don't believe that since the source is ChinaDaily.

Apparently there is a Mig-17F for $130,000 ready to fly. Thats a little more affordable.

http://www.flyboytrader.com/boardview.cfm?...=13&CatCode=JET

It was quite real. Ive been in a indepth talk about it on aviation forums and its was legit.

"The government officials failed to cut up the parts and render the aircraft unflyable. An aircraft collector (Ken Bryant of Air Capitol Warbirds Inc., in Wichita, Kansas) purchased the plane"

The plane has "some assembly required" about $9 million dollars worth though LOL.

The goverment did have him promise not to sell it to anyone but Americans, and to keep the F-18 in the United States. But if anyone had the cash to buy and restore it they could have had a working F-18.

Not as if that is really needed anything secret was taken out of the plane along time ago. Avionics, weapon systems, Radar etc.. was all gone.



Heres a better link
http://www.strategypage.com/gallery/...s/ebay_f18.asp

You caan buy things.... but don't be lazy and pick them up and bring home!

It was quite real. Ive been in a indepth talk about it on aviation forums and its was legit.

"The government officials failed to cut up the parts and render the aircraft unflyable. An aircraft collector (Ken Bryant of Air Capitol Warbirds Inc., in Wichita, Kansas) purchased the plane"

The plane has "some assembly required" about $9 million dollars worth though LOL.

The goverment did have him promise not to sell it to anyone but Americans, and to keep the F-18 in the United States. But if anyone had the cash to buy and restore it they could have had a working F-18.

Not as if that is really needed anything secret was taken out of the plane along time ago. Avionics, weapon systems, Radar etc.. was all gone.



Heres a better link
http://www.strategypage.com/gallery/...s/ebay_f18.asp [/b][/quote]
The aircraft still contains somewhat sensitive materials though. The engines and aiframe are still military grade. It is understanable that they don't want the aircraft exported. Russia did not allow the Tu-144LL to be sold because it had military engines.

I can't see anybody buying the aircraft to restore it though.

You might be suprized people that collect planes have millions to throw around and it really all depends if the collector likes that type of plane.

Here a guy spent $6.9 million to recover and restore a single P-38

Glacier Girl

I dont really buy the engines or aiframe as still being of any real military importance. If it was he wouldnt be able to sell it period.

That tech is pretty much over a quarter of a century old and has been exported to various countries around the world including countries like Malaysia and Kuwait. If Russia or China wanted such information they would have gotten it along time ago.


The avionics, weapons systems would be the important stuff and was long gone.

Aah, thats the one that was under the ice in Greenland! Saw a tv program on that a while back.

Yup that was Glacier Girl.

If you saw the TV show on it you would know just how messed up that thing was when they first found it. I think most people would assume nobody in their right mind would spend millions trying to restore a plane in such bad condition after seeing it.

But the guy had a real passion for that plane, and alot of disposable income. Whats the old saying? "The only difference between men and boys is the price of thier toys" :D