I agree, unless you make it very clear which facet of the aircraft’s capabilities you’re talking about. But how many of these JSF/F22 vs Typhoon/Rafale threads are we going to get? It’s damn boring now.

I just needed to see what you guys thought. 😀

This just keeps getting better and better. Dozer tells about what he evisions for the Raptor airshow demo.

“The demo (at least what I’ve put together and my vision for it), is NOT what you’ve seen from previous a/c. It’s mostly slower speed and lots of alpha & power – the two things you can demo on this jet that are not the big selling points of stealth and supercruise (I was told by several people with stars (many) on their shoulders that it would NOT be a super Eagle or Viper demo), and it’s kinda hard to demo supercruise, stealth and integrated avionics.

It should have a combination of high alpha loops / J-turns (basically a hammerhead) / Helicopters (yaw turns that kind of look like a flat spin) 😀 , that’s what I call them anyhow, slow speed high alpha passes (probably in the 42 to 44 alpha region, mil to min AB power, around 75 to 80 knots or so / high speed high alpha loops / the Raptor version of the cobra (we can do it too) / tail slide / maybe a high (or lower) speed max power turn / of course the now std Dozer takeoff / we have investigated some negative g & alpha but not sure on that one. And the goal is to keep the demo in front of the crowd as opposed to left and right as it has been previous demos, also to keep it loud. I’m sure it’s going to morph through changes as senior leadership gets ahold of it but my great hope is that it will survive and be something that will thrill the crowds and take the bragging rights away from our European brothers who really do put on phenomenal demos.”

This seems to confirm what a lot of people were thinking in that we haven’t seen all that the F-22 can do. That sharp pull-up seen in the Langley video was probably just that, a sharp pull-up. I don’t think we’ve seen the Cobra yet. The high-alpha loops will be fun to watch too. Can’t wait until 2008. 😎

He also mentioned that Raptor will probably be coming to Europe in 2007, most likely at RIAT.

More stories about the Raptor. A person asked if he could acclerated from zero when vertical.

“Sorry to bust the bubble on that one – but actually it can’t, kind of depends on fuel weight/altitude/speed, I’ll try to explain correctly & quickly (I’m not an engineer – if there’s a pratt&whitney rep that views this please feel free to correct me…). At slower speeds the engines are not putting out maximum thrust, the more air flow there is through the motors the more thrust you’re getting, so, for example, I did a takeoff where I was at about 570 knots at Edwards, I was prior to the end of the runway, not used to being that fast so I pulled up to 90 degrees nose high (single ship with my own tanker and first chance to try this with a Raptor so I decided to see what she’d do), and the mass flow at that point is close to producing max possible thrust, the a/c continued to accelerate in the climb to .99 mach passing about 20 thousand feet and then slowly began to decelerate – (unofficially according to the engineers I would have ended up around 65+ thousand feet on that day and broke every time to climb record we could think of for category & weight class — and oh by the way, that wasn’t a streak Eagle or Mig 25 stripped down bare with weight removed, no external stores for combat configuration, etc., that was in a stock, off the line F-22, full of gas, combat configured with the internal weapons bay full – as an Eagle guy previous I was absolutely astonished, I hope someday we go after the official records because this jet will likely crush most of them. One last interesting point is that I did that going straight up after takeoff (that day I ended up blasting past my assigned altitude at Edwards of 29 thousand after takeoff, ended up at 31.5 AFTER a 5g pull to level out which at that weight and altitude should bleed energy fast but when I rolled out I was still at 330knots KCAS!!), but normally to get those altitudes they use a specific climb profile like the streak Eagle did (I forget what it’s called) climb at .9m to the mid 30 thousands, push over to accelerate to supersonic and then finish the climb profile to bust the records from there).

So to finish the explanation, the thing we came up with for the takeoff was better for an airshow, by pulling straight up after lift off speed you keep the a/c slower, it climbs slower (initially it still acclerates just a bit and then starts slowing down), and the crowd gets a face & earful of Raptor. But since it’s not producing max thrust it will slow down (every a/c I’m aware of will that doesn’t have rocket power – fighter wise that is), but, because it does have so much thrust + the vectoring nozzles to maintain control, I can keep that nose pointed uphill as long as I want, I could actually just about hold that attitude right back into the ground if I wanted to (but I won’t….) but it will start to descend (because of the high alpha it can hold – it would essentially turn into a tail slide with the nose not falling down much), and with such a high thrust to weight ratio but not greater than 1 to 1 at that point it begins to slow down to virtually zero knots and that takes a while so it “looks like it’s hovering” which it in reality nearly is. I will caveat that with this, that’s at full fuel at takeoff, when I do this at lighter fuel weights I’m sometimes in mil vs. AB power because now I am greater than 1 to 1 and it won’t decelerate, I’ve been light enough on some to have to go sub-mil power to get it to slow down enough to do the pushover at the top w/o being too high. We came up with the pushover because it demonstrates the ability, even at no airspeed, of the airplane to hold any nose attitude or position (i.e. the nose doesn’t fall off) and then accelerate rapidly. I usually don’t unload all of the alpha (as at Atlantic City) to keep, once again, the noise level high for the crowd. If I unloaded the alpha the jet will get fast real fast and it gets too small for the crowd. I’d like to see any other jet (including the Super Mig / Flanker), try that in a fully fueled and combat loaded configuration.

So after that long & rambling dissertation I hope I’ve answered your question. Depending on the situation (speed, weight, altitude) it may be more than 1 to 1 thrust / weight, it may not be. But not everything is as it seems and some stuff is done for show, that’s not necessarily how the a/c would fly, or be flown, in combat.”