I would like to hear from someone who knows about the F 22 and what they think.
@ . (whoever this might be): If you studied the history of the F22 you’d see that THIS administration is not the opponent of the F22…. The F22 has had it’s detractors in the Republican party of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Warner, and McCain.
The air force and current administration has realised the mistakes they’ve made with the F-22 project.
- Curtailing and shutting down the production of the aircraft has resulted in the air forrce not having a war capable frontline fighter. This is because at any given point, the F22 maintains ~50% combat readiness. So around 75 aircraft in total. That, coupled with the high maintainance and turnaround timeframe means it’s almost impossible to use the F22 in a sustained engagement that is closely fought (SU35, J20 etc.).
- Preventing the export of the F22 to close allies means the US bears all of the considerable costs to build the aircraft, and numbers of super capable aircraft in NATO are restricted onlyt to the US.
They’ve realised that they can’t restart the factories to build the aircraft because it’s too expensive. The new fighter program will only START to introduce the aircraft in mid 2030s, so combat ready capability in 2040s.
China has emerged as a proper threat, and they wish they had the F22 at the numbers they’d originally envisioned to replace the F15 instead of supporting it (They’ve ordered a new version of the F15 because they can’t get the F22 numbers up).
All in all, they’ve spent 15 years messing this program up, and now that it’s in the shape that they wanted in 2008, they now realise they massively need the plane, and they’re trying everything to get as much as they can out of it.
Don’t forget we just spent a butt-ton of money on upgrading the F-15 another very old airframe. F-22 were going to be the thing just a few years ago. We better have something much better hidden among the stacks of dollar bills.
Thanks for relevant information instead of emotional blabbing.
Do you mean 75 aircraft NET of unserviceabilities at any time? Russ says 186 of which 33 are proposed for scrapping.
What are the prospects for improving serviceable rate of the F-22s?
What does it do that the F-15 cannot?
A couple of things.
The F-22 is more maintenance intensive than the F-35, partly because its “stealthy skin” requires more attention.
But the biggest reason the Pentagon want to “move it along” is the same reason its been trying to get rid of the A-10 for 30 years.
It doesn’t have the networking capability with, well, pretty much everything that the F-35 does.
Moreover, the core operating software is interwoven with the the systems software, so it’s combat software can’t easily upgraded without re-doing everything. The F-35 has the parts separated so software updates to its subsystems can be done “modularly” , hopefully for the next 50 years.
Of course, its stealth and vectored thrust set the F-22 apart from the F-15.
You have to remember it’s been 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and after that event it seemed hard to find a reason for the F-22. China and North Korea weren’t even a second thought.
Then 9/11 came and we spent the next 20 years chasing guys with AK-47’s.
It was only in the late Obama administation that we ever-so-slowly started to move toward facing across the Pacific and then, Russia was still not even an asterisk.
What a difference a couple of years, or a couple of months makes.
Thanks.
What does the F-15 do that the F-22 cannot?
(The F-22 does have high-bandwidth datalink, a motivation for Canada to buy the F-35. Being able to exchange radar data reduces the number of fighters each country has to scramble for an incursion, as each country’s fighter backs the others up, giving broader coverage when both are in the air.
Thanks.
Sounds like an example of not thinking ahead on software architecture.
But it seems there are failures of physical components, which USAF hopes to cannibalize from scrapping older airplanes.
I am advised by CAF people that the F-22 has significant datalink capability.
All the money and weapons sent to… Ukraine.
50% of the current F22 aircraft are not immediately available for combat missions. This is standard that not all aircraft arre ready, but for the F22 it’s quite high - reasons explained by others in this thread. Prospects for improving the serviceable rates are not high unfortunately.
The main thing the F15 can do that the F22 cannot is to be built for affordable pricing.
The guys at Skunworks did think ahead, but the rate of advancement in technology means that some things are not foreseeable. There is plenty of room in the plane for more add-ons for example. But the core software and systems are not old and can only integrate with the F35 to a certain extent.
At the end of the day, the F22 was the right plane at the wrong time.