JCSVT

I was browsing fencecheck.com and found "Dozer"(pilot in the Langley videos and Raptor squadron commander) posting things about the Raptor. I found them very interesting.

First one.

"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/Sukhoi 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 Sukhoi'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. "

JCSVT

Second one.

"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 Flanker 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 MiG OVT / 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."

JCSVT

Last one.

"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) :D , 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.

Anon

Awesome. I'm pirating all this for my board.

ashkon

There are two rumours i've heard about the Raptor which hopefully can be cleared up,
firstly: the tactical datalink system on the Raptor can only recieve data not send it.
secondly:the raptor doesn't have helmet mounted sights..yet(is this for a future upgrade?)
And things like IRST and a maritime strike capability be incorporated in future upgrades

gunnut

Sigh, there's the beancounters in the Congress for you. Hopefully the only reason we aren't buying more is politics. If we really wanted to, we can probably crank up the volume and buy a few hundred.

I guess it's always the upfront cost vs. risk. Do we buy the best and most expensive insurance there is to offer in our daily lives? No. We weigh the possible risks and cut back where we can. Hopefully the "incidences" that come up can be taken care of by our existing buys of F-22/F-35 combo.

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Anon

So far as i know the F-22 can send/recieve data. The JHMCS is not yet integrated, but it's planned(money is already allocated i think...but im not sure), the SDB and JDAM both have moving target capability- and that includes ships.

JCSVT

Here's a good article.

Air and Space Raptor article

Yaw rates in excess of 30 degrees??!!!

Geez...now what about that 3D vectoring? Those huge rudders must have something to do with it.

jgetti

I will 100% guarantee that those aren't both flyaway costs.

highsea

That sentence was a little wierd. "I had to sign for it"?

Ding-dong. Fedex here, you wanna sign for this airplane??

There was an invoice with the plane? Lol.

The Air Force doesn't pick them up from the factory, they are delivered. Then about two months of checking out, flight tests, back to the factory to touch up all the dings, etc...Then final acceptance.

What's a squadron commander from Langley doing delivering airplanes? They always go to Edwards first, AFAIK.

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ashkon

so with the new generation SDB's and JDAM's coming online, does that mean that the Raptor doesn't have to rely on stand off cruise missiles like the Harpoon,etc?
Also are there stand off missiles made specifically for the F-22?

YellowFever

Nevermind all that!!

I'm still pissed you think I'm a bad driver

Anon

SDB IS the raptors stand off cruise missile.