Iran's Navy Has a Fake Fighter Jet Problem

Sebastien Roblin

Technology, Middle East

It is unnecessary and embarrassing.

Key Point: Tehran has good fighters, but every "new" one just makes Iran look weaker.

In February 2017 I published an article on the Iranian Saeqeh (“Thunderbolt”) fighter. Billed as Iran’s first domestically-built jet fighter to enter operational service, the Saeqeh.

Fast forward and we are again greeted with headlines for yet another “100% indigenously made” fighter jet, this time a “state of the art” two-seater called the Kowsar. And yet it appears identical to an F-5F Tiger II two-seater jet.

If anything, it is far less original than the Saeqeh, which has airframe modifications including enlarged strakes and twin vertical tail stabilizers. The Kowsar doesn’t appear to have any external changes from the F-5F. How was this jet even worthy of the photo-op with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the instructor’s seat for Iranian Defense Industry Day?

It happens there really is a program to build a combat-capable Kowsar advanced jet trainer. It simply wasn’t the aircraft on display this summer.

According to Iranian aviation expert Babak Taghvaee, the Kowsar may merely be an avionics testbed—a regular F-5F fitted with new avionics (rumored to be of Chinese origin) eventually intended for use in the Saeqeh fighter, spruced up with a fresh coat of gleaming paint for the photo-op. The test-bed used may date all the way back to Iran's first attempt to reverse-engineer the F-5 in the 1990s, the Azaraksh. This was because the real Kowsar-88 wasn't ready yet.

Iran had announced back in 2013 it was developing a Kowsar-88 trainer which could also serve in the light attack role. In 2017, footage of a prototype undergoing taxi trials was unveiled which you can see here.