F-22 Fighter Loses $79 Billion Advantage in Dogfights: Report

ABC News/Yahoo News ^ | 30 July 2012 | Lee Ferran

[rlmorel]

I met a pilot who has flown every fighter aircraft in the US inventory except the F-22. When asked, he said he had flown against them.

I asked him what that was like to fly against an F-22, and his exact words were: “It was like being a baby seal.”

[A.A. Cunningham]

This ain't news. The F-22 has been overhyped since before it became a CAD file. Zoomie kool aid loses its taste pretty fast in the real world. You might try posting some contemporary photos as well.

[Yo-Yo]

Let's include a Typhoon with an F/A-18 kill.

As this Air Force Colonel explained, if the F-22 pilot gets too aggressive in post-stall maneuvering, he is a sitting duck. I can see how a Raptor pilot could get in that situation with the tight-turning canard-equipped Typhoon.

No, the Raptor isn't invincible, and without even the modern basics like a Helmet Mounted Cueing and Sighting System, it is even more crippled in the WVR dogfight.

[rmlew]

There were other issues. The Tiger tanks, and worse King Tiger tanks, were too heavy for their transmissions. The Germans over-engineered the Panthers with an aluminum aircraft-type engine, which was hard to build or maintain. Worse (for them), they used slave labor to build these. The slave labor kept sabotaging them.

The T-35 with the 85mm cannon was a great tank. I believe that they were actually in combat in the 1980s in Africa.

[Little Ray]

The T-34/85 was a great tank and is, I think, still in service some cessppit third world nations who think of tanks as a means of “crown control.” The Soviets also took scads of them to the Soviet/Chinese border and buried up to their turret rings in concrete and dirt to create pillboxes.

[PapaBear3625]

The AESA AN/APG-77 radar on the F-22 is very powerful and advanced. Should give it the advantage in BVR combat.

The F4 Phantom was designed to shoot down enemy planes at extreme range. Then in Vietnam, LBJ set the rules of engagement so that they had to visually identify the target, which meant they had to get to within dog-fighting range. And the designers never gave the F4 a gun.

[PapaBear3625]

My understanding is that the F-22 flights use a tactic of flying in pairs, with one well behind the second. The tail-end guy is a radar emitter, i.e. he can be found if they can track the F22 radar. The plane in front gets a telemetry feed of the radar image from the back-end plane and shoots his missiles. The aggressor never knows where the missiles came from!

It would be neat if we could have an expendable UAV, with just a radar emitter to paint targets for our planes.