The F-22 is waste of resources on many levels.
It’s 6X as expensive as Russian/Chinese 4.5 Gen Fighters.
It requires 70 HOURS of maintenance for every 1 hour of flight. Russian/Chinese fighters require 10 hrs for 1 hour of flight.
SU-35s/J-11Bs are already coming off the production line with reduced RCS, AESA radars, and updated Infrared and Visual range missile targeting systems.
We simply cannot win the attrition game with such a platform. It would be a better allocation of resources to build effective delivery systems which would destroy enemy air bases and complement that effort with updating the entire fighter fleet to 4.5 Gen technology. And money left over really should be plowed into unmanned, autonomous fighter development.
Take the computing technology of the smallest cell phone, put it in a fast small missile and a plane like the f 22 cannot live on the battle field. Heat seeking missiles are a thing of the past. The new ones knows what your plane looks like and it coming after you.
Just a few years ago the B-1 bomber was taking huge criticism for only being able to deliver 51 percent MC rate. The fact of the matter was that the pauper USAF was only funding 49 percent of the aircraft systems required maintenance plan to keep it healthy. Dedicated maintenance personnel squeezed out an additional 2 percent through just plain hard work.
Looking at recent history of the F-22 shows a different story than that painted by the Post. Around the 2005-6, the F-22 upgrade schedule was on track. This effort was thrown into disarray when the needs of the Afghanistan and Iraq war—at over $10-13 billion per month— pulled scheduled funds from the F-22 program.
The F-22 reached initial operating capability (IOC) in 2005. In the years 2006-2008, maintenance metrics from real live USAF squadrons came in. This is where real life at the squadron level validates (or disproves) the optimistic planning from previous years of aircraft development. What was shown is that the aircraft was spending a lot of time at the unit level in the low observable (L.O.) maintenance hanger. Consider that the aircraft was designed to be maintenance friendly where only 5 percent of maintenance actions required refurbishment of the low observable components on the F-22. In the end it wasn’t any kind of disaster but a learning curve. It took a while for airmen and NCO’s —the enlisted maintenance force that makes or breaks a flying unit—to get maintenance experience on this new kind of aircraft That process includes everything from training, keeping methods that work, throwing out ones that don’t and filtering all of that into a reliable form of tribal knowledge.
Fast forward to where in one deployment, an F-22 unit put up all of their scheduled missions (350 sorties) for a stunning 100 percent MC rate. This means that the F-22 community has risen to the challenge and put up MC rates that match or exceed current “legacy” aircraft in deployments. Of course none of this was mentioned in the Washington Post article.
More? Maintenance Supers (the lead maintenance NCO in a unit) will tell you a lot of things that are hassle-free with the jet. For example the Pratt and Whitney F-119 motors don’t require a lot of extra work. Still More? The F-22 community has won sustainment awards for its maintenance processes. Of interest is that the methods of logistics and sustainment used in the program are a baseline for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. While the F-35 has a long way to go to prove itself, it is designed so that only 1-2 percent of maintenance processes require L.O. refurbishment. No matter. When the F-22 is out of production, guess what the yellow journalism crowd will pick on next?
http://www.f-16.net/news_article3621.html
As opposed 2 giving Acorn 5 times that much money?
Whats a billion or 2 here or there when your mortgaging trillions...eh?
The F22 & F35 are designed for different roles & are not interchangeable.
To win any conflict outright, air supremacy must be achieved. That is the F22 role, bottom line.
I’ve heard otherwise in re maintenance.
Do u really think a gaggle of Lib/Dems are gonna plow that money back into the military budget?
Hell no!!
Its gonna be used to buy more Dem votes, simple as that.
tahDeetz
It’s not an attrition game with the F-22. I have spoken to F-15 pilots who have taken them on in exercises. The score generally runs: Raptor kills everything flying and the F-15 never sees them coming. That’s not attrition, that’s total air superiority.