This is the pilot in the Langley videos. He’s now the commander of an F-22 squadron. He posted this on FenceCheck.
“Sorry it takes awhile for me to check things, I find I don’t have much time anymore that is my own, Uncle Sam keeps getting more demanding – but I still like the job…
For the question about what it can/can’t do – it’s a valid question, as is the expense. My personal opinion is almost everything we buy these days is too expensive, the Raptor included. Even the Super Hornet is way too much to pay for a 30 year old design that’s been upgraded. Boeing said they’d give us an upgraded Eagle but do you know for how much? About 80 to 90 million, the last Raptor I picked up from the factory was 106 million (I had to sign for it), just a few years ago to pick up a jet it cost well over 2 times that. By the way, we’ve already spent 42 billion developing it, now that we’re getting our money’s worth in the production phase – what do we do? We reduce the buy at the wrong time when they are as cheap as we’ll ever get them, and of course reducing the buy means the eventual price per jet skyrockets. That’s one reason the B-2’s are quoted as 2 billion apiece, we were supposed to get 100 of them, divided into a 40 billion dollar program when you buy 20 instead, you get a heinous price per jet, nice math. Obviously we would have spent more money to buy the rest of them but the return on our investment is in the production phase – its not that different from any other company – the first F150 probably cost Ford millions to develop, but they make their money in the mass production phase.
In my opinion it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that for ~20 million more over the Eagle / Hornet / etc. legacy designs I’ll take the Raptor, latest reports I’ve seen is that the JSF is also pushing 80 to 90 million per copy and it was supposed to be the cheap one. You’ll never get stealth and supercruise from our old stuff – and those are the number 1 and 2 things that make this airplane so much different than anything else (even the JSF now known as the F-35 Lightening 2, it’s pretty stealthy but doesn’t supercruise and has just about half the envelope of the F-22, that’s a big deal). It is eye watering to see what happens to bad guys in the air and on the ground when this airplane does it’s thing, it’s virtually untouchable when flown right, and I have 2000 hours of F-15C time + 3 tours over Iraq and 2 in Serbia (one being Allied Force) to back up why I know that, plus about 450 hours in the Raptor now including 3 years in the test world over the Nevada test ranges doing everything you can do with this jet – it’s a remarkable machine we’ve built, it’s truly a superfighter.
It also has the integrated sensor suite that is top notch, you COULD build that into other fighters but you’d have to totally redesign them to make it so, and you’d end up spending so much that it’s cost prohibitive – and since the sensors themselves are built into the aircraft all over the place under the skin you’d really have to make significant changes to get them even close to the Raptors sensor suite & integration performance levels. The situational awareness the jet provides is that good – it’s like sitting in the ACMI shack watching a mission where each jet has a pod on it telling you where & what each player is doing, the pilot of a Raptor has that same level of information while flying – but he’s getting it from the jets sensors alone not from anything else, it’s better than an AWACS picture, we sometimes turn it off because we see the same thing they do and with higher fidelity.
Finally, and like the Mig/Sukoui with thrust vectoring and as you guys are seeing, it also has the super maneuverability and thrust to weight ratio that matches or exceeds anything else out there currently or projected to show up anytime in the foreseeable future. You’re not, once again, going to get that from any of our current designs without extremely costly new engines with thrust vectoring (I can’t imagine how much it would cost to re-engine the Eagle or Hornet fleet with a new thrust vector motor – the Raptor motor is a shining star for performance in every category but it’s not cheap). In addition, w/o some redesign and/or flight control and/or new surfaces, you can’t make our old a/c do what these new fighters can – it’s not inherent in their design, the Raptor is a very unstable design to allow it to do what it does – we can’t fly it w/o the computer keeping it stable – imagine the cost to redesign any of our other a/c. The Sukoui added a fly by wire computer, canards, and 3D thrust vectoring to get the maneuverability. (In addition – they modify their a/c for the big shows – I’ve been told this by reliable sources, they don’t fly in the combat configuration during shows and they have a reduced fuel load + they alledgedly take out some of the avionics to save weight, when we fly the Raptor even in airshows, it’s a stock jet, full of gas, IN it’s combat configuration, you can’t imagine what a difference that truly is – I’d like to see a Super Hornet perform the same demo with 8 pylons & missiles + a fuel tank & EA pod hanging off the jet, or the Flanker or anything else). In other words – add up all the modifications, additions, changes, software, hardware, testing, etc. etc. etc., and you begin to see why the
Raptor is the answer for the next 40 years and nothing else will do. It’s not as if everyone else has been sitting on their butt for the last 25 years, they’ve been developing and working on new things to beat our benchmarks – the F-15 and F-16 – and in many ways they’ve met or have well exceeded our a/c capabilities, hence the new Sukoui’s, Super Mig’s, French Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, Chinese F-10, etc. In addition, and probably more importantly, countries have gone down the path to creating umbrella Integrated Air Defense systems (IADS) over their territory by buying and deploying advanced Surface to Air Missile systems (as good, some would argue better than, our Patriot), like the SA-10 / SA-12 / SA-20. No matter what we add to them, our legacy a/c can’t penetrate an area defended by these systems and they’re very mobile and hard to target. The F-22 can.
So what am I saying? It’s a superfighter that for the first time in history has virtually everything a fighter pilot has wanted to be the complete package, yes no expense was spared but we got the performance for that costs – there weren’t many compromises (since it stayed a USAF project and we could make it what we thought it should be) to make this jet what it is compared to every other fighter that’s ever been produced (jet age).
Do you have insurance? If so – why? Because you can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and no matter what our ivory tower experts claim the world is going to be like in 5, 10, or 20 years, they have no idea either and the world can change overnight. The F-22 is our insurance policy against things going to heck in a hand basket. It’s relevant, we need that capability to hold other countries at risk to insure our own security, I sure want to go to war in the latest technology we have as I do my children and grandchildren, I’m betting when it comes down to it everyone else does too. “
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August 9, 2006 at 7:36 pm