Thread: One Raptor Loss at Red Flag

The worst case is that somebody's a good pilot and sneaks in low enough to evade everyone's radar, or they take off from a "less than stellar" airfield that we have no intel on.

Originally Posted by hello

So the worst case scenario is that an opponent regenerates and spawns out of nowhere?

If one of the Blue Force Tornado IDS GR-4s got lost to a Red Air F-15, it wouldn't get a thread to itself here. I wonder what would happen if one of the B-2s(or even F-117s) was lost.

That has already happened. They knew the flight path and just filled it with AA fire on a mass scale and brought down an F-117. I cant remember if it was the Balkans or the Serbs. Many things changed after that.

OK - back to the F-22. As you know I won't talk about the specifics of why, but we have "mulligans", essentially where a guy gets targeted and shot (a bad guy), and then the range training officer who's monitoring the fight makes a real time decision to let him "live", i.e. simulating that missile missed and the bad guy is still alive. This is a very realistic way to train, and has only really taken hold in more recent years. I'm a good poster child for this since on my first Mig engagment for real it took 3 missiles (see they're called "miss"iles not hittiles) to shootdown the Mig, not just one. That's very hard to simulate in training so we attempt to throw that in now and then to better train us to expect things not to work right in combat and to train us not to just blow a bad guy off until, as you would in war, you verify that aircraft is finished (fireball / crash / etc.). Unfortunately, even in training as in war, chaos rules supreme. With many guys on the radios at once, and the pace of action & communication rapidly picking up as airplanes start to get within shot range all at the same time, it's extremely easy to lose track of who's alive or dead because in training the "shot down" red guys are still really alive and flying around. Now you don't always know, as you would in combat, whether he's a live player or not. So you can infer from that how a guy people think is dead can rage around and get within range to take shots and kill blue players because everyone thinks he's dead. In the Flag there were many cases where Raptors & Eagles flew right past a guy who in war they would have known was still alive (and of course shot again until he blew up), but in the training mission they're locked onto him but think he's dead so they blow him off. Or it takes forever to figure out through radio calls who's alive and dead of all the actual aircraft flying around, NOTHING will screw up the simulated air battle faster than that - in the meantime the red guy is shooting blue guys - VERY unrealistic but there's not a good way around it under our current systems. You just have to do your best to pay attention and wade through it. There are times pilots followed a red guy around for minutes trying to figure out through the radio if he was "alive or dead", during that time the red guys often "killed" several blue players, needless to say in war after the first missile on that guy timed out with no fireball he would have been shot again, and again, etc.

The Raptor isn't invincible, just the closest we've ever been able to come to that claim. If flown poorly, if you make a big mistake, or incorrectly fly the tactics and just have a bad / unlucky day and the bandit has an exceptionally lucky day, you & it can still get shot down. It's just a hunk of metal with a human operating it - it'll never be perfect. Every once in a while those circumstances converge and a pilot gets shot down (notice I didn't say the Raptor did - it's usually not the airplanes fault its flown poorly!!). Consider most of our flag missions used X number of Raptors, and weren't allowed to re-load their missiles during the fight (red air reloads fully each time they die and regenerate into the fight), and yet sometimes we had more bad guys "regenerated" in total during the fight to attack us and the blue players we were protecting than Raptors had Amraams - that's not an easy problem to solve, now throw in a very robust surface to air missile threat targeting us simultaneously and then we lose a jet - part of me (esp. with all the new guys we had in the jet at the Flag) is surprised we didn't lose a few more - that ought to tell you how good the jet really is and how tough the scenarios are. I won't guess how many Eagles, Vipers, Hornets we'd lose in the same scenario if we attempted to use them how we used F-22's in the Flag and to the effect we did in the flag. And as mentioned these aren't easy scenarios, the red air aggressors are highly trained and extremely competent (and experienced) fighter pilots flying current model F-15s & F-16s simulating some of the most topline threats in the world. And the surface to air missile operators are probably some of the most proficient in the world since they train against our best stuff every single day, and we only come from one direction every mission, they kind of know where to look for us..... Yes Red Flag is a superb and difficult training exercise. I find it much harder than actual air combat, that was a yawn by comparision in many ways. There are numbers out there for our total results at Flag (just like they put out for northern edge in Alaska last summer), but I don't know what the position is on when that is going to be released. Suffice it to say the Raptor did as well as you'd come to expect for the problems it was given. It was a great performance considering the issues AND the fact about 8 of the guys flying in the Flag were brand new pilots in the F-22 who had just completed their mission qualification at Langley and then went to the Flag. Can you imagine what our performance would have been with that many new guys (almost half) brand new in an older jet at this Flag operating at that threat level? It wouldn't have been good!!

And I won't talk about where it took place in the exercise since I'm also waiting on official release of data, hence everything here being generic. What I will say is the learning curve was steep after day 1 where there were the normal jitters and working out the initial problems (very MUCH like a real war). For the most part it went better and better, even as they ramped up the threat - most of the pilots had never flown the Raptor in such a large force or complicated scenario (maybe only a couple of us had, in fact), so you can imagine how much learning was taking place!!

Now circa to a real war - when the first cruise missiles / JSOWS / JASSMS / HARMS / JDAMS start impacting all over the place, we start jamming the heck out of their C3, all of a sudden their combat patrol aircraft that are airborne blow up (THAT's Raptors), and a whole lot of other bad things start happening to them plus the normal fear / fog and friction of war begin taking place - how many guys are really going to calmly sit in the trailer trying to find us with their systems and fight back like the Nellis range operators do? Not many!! Most will be in the full sprint to the ditch / bomb shelter until the attack is over, if they're still alive. The Nellis guys don't even spill their coffee because real bombs aren't going to kill them and they know it! And there isn't a country on the planet that can generate enough airborne alert aircraft to overwhelm a strike package of the types & numbers usually put forth in a coalition / modern day type air attack. The real war won't be even close to the numbers of bandits like are regenerated at a Red Flag type exercise, but it makes it a hard problem to solve and forces learning (wouldn't get much from 40 blue air vs. a 4 ship of bandits who die at the first push). There are so many facets to this I could go on for hours (I can't because of where that would lead us of course), but my point is you can't let what is written in aviation week or anywhere else be your guide or information source because its NEVER the full story. Point in fact - how much am I not telling you? You don't know and hopefully (like our adversaries), never will, (that's a good thing for operational security and protecting our capabilities), and there's the bottom line.

OK Viper vs. Eagle discussion. You always need to qualify the argument, why do Vipers generally lose to Eagles? Its simple, Eagle guys train for nothing but air-air for a living, they become master of one trade. Ask a Viper guy how many tasks he's responsible to learn & stay proficient in and you start to see why its harder for them, like a Hornet or F-15E pilot, they have to be jacks of all trades and therefore get to be master of none, if they flew twice a day everyday of the year it'd still be tough, but they only fly a few times a week on average, plus the additional jobs / duties we're all forced to do, and now split your brain power, attention and limited training opportunities between air to air skills and a dozen other mission types - its just not possible to stay on top of your game in everything. Let me give you a good example, and caveat that there aren't many Viper drivers around the world better than the guys in the F-16 division of the weapons school. They don't do 4 v 12's like the Eagle division regularly does (I've flown as high as a 4 v 18 when I was an IP there). The Vipers normally fought against equal numbers for the most part. I think they sometimes fly a slightly outnumbered scenario, but you never see the F-16 guys going against 3 to 1 odds (or more). Why? Its simply not in their job description to do that or spend the resources it would require to achieve that level of skill in the air to air arena. Eagles do because that's their job. In a 4 v 4 where the Eagles are red, if the Vipers do a good job they should kill all the Eagles everytime (hopefully - thats how we want it to end up). Ask those same Viper drivers how they think they'd fare in a 4 v 12 (if they're honest they'll say probably not too good). Of course I can caveat that, if that 4 ship of Vipers were all experienced weapons school grads and they practiced air to air only for some time, they'd certainly have a better than average chance of doing extremely well even in a 4 v 12. It's all in the details.

One thing you have to qualify in all this talk, one side is restricted to be red air and if all goes well the red air should lose. (And as a very relevant side note - as we're starting to train to much more advanced threats that's becoming harder all the time, i.e. blue always and easily winning vs. 'red' air, we're simulating advanced a/c & weapons for 'red' air and its becoming quite a struggle where it used to be easy - yes that's a paid political annoucement for the F-22, it's still easy with the Raptor).

The only time this argument really comes down to nuts and bolts (and if you prefer, bragging rights), is when its Viper vs. Eagle (or whatever airplane you want to sub in), in a 1 v 1 high aspect BFM mission (dogfight with a neutral starting position for each player), where they have similiar weapons loads (i.e. not one guy with a 9X and helmet and the other w/o it). Then it comes down to who's airplane has an advantage (that depends since each airplane has areas its better than the other), and which pilot flies a better jet (on average, this is my experience, usually the Eagle guy simply because of his training advantage). There are a 100 caveats, for example, a young Eagle guy vs. an experienced Viper guy is likely to lose that fight. And depending on the training configuration it can have a big impact (Eagle loaded down vs. a clean Viper and vice versa, weapons load out, like one with a 9X, etc.). It's the same argument I make here all the time, a combat configured a/c doesn't perform like a non-combat configured a/c, one of the reasons the Raptor does so well even in a dogfight, it's always slick, (of course monster motors, thrust vectoring, and a really robust flight control system with huge surfaces doesn't hurt...). So make sure all the caveats are honestly brought forth before you begin to listen to a cocky pilot say how he waxes everyone all the time and his jet is the best ever. Because the bottom line is a Mig-23 which can't turn for squat can still kill you if he flies his best jet and you totally pork the fight away...

BigThug- Are the Raptors carrying underwing ACMI pods in Red Flag?

No, In fact we had No Underhang stores (fuel bags)

ACMI pods are specifically "legacy Fighter" technology and Not needed.