Posted on 08/14/2011 11:58:36 AM PDT by skeptoid
It's the most expensive fighter jet ever built. Yet the F-22 Raptor has never seen a day of combat, and its future is clouded by a government safety investigation that has grounded the jet for months. The fleet of 158 F-22s, including those in Alaska, has been sidelined since May 3 after more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, making them woozy. The malfunction is suspected of contributing to at least one fatal accident, in Alaska. At an estimated cost of $412 million each, the F-22s amount to about $65 billion sitting on the tarmac. The grounding is the latest dark chapter for an aircraft plagued by problems and whose need was called into question even before its first test flight.
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
. . .and there's this gem:
Corrosion has also been an issue with the plane's radar-evading skin, which, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said, is "difficult to manage and maintain, requiring nearly twice the number of maintenance personnel as anticipated."
The plane takes about 3,000 people to maintain, the Air Force said. The service calculated that for every hour in the air, the F-22 spends 45 hours undergoing maintenance.
The best plane possible made with parts manufactured in China. . . .. oops
We have been killing people with OBOGS for years. I knew a guy that got killed in a hornet from it. I know another guy that almost got killed by it. In order to avoid the hazards of handling liquid oxygen, it was replaced with a system that has little or no warning when it goes bad and starts pumping poison gas into the mask.
How many man-hours of maintenance go into each hour Ozero appears in front of a teleprompter?
(Also, which of the two is more valuable to national security?)
Damn I thought William Proxmire was dead. Proxmire never met a weapons system he liked. For an example he hated the F-14 Tomcat and listed all the problems he possibly could to show that it was a waste of money.
It was not a waste of money, just as the F-22 is not a waste of money.
In July 2011 the investigators began to suspect a second scenario in which the pilots were poisoned by carbon monoxide generated in the fighter's engines, while warming the plane up inside the hangars.[187] F-22 pilots have been tested and found to have also inhaled other chemicals from the OBOGS, including oil fumes and propane.[188][189]
I can’t address the rest of the statements in the article, but I can tell you flat out that the headline itself is false... The YF-22 and the YF-23 were both tested years ago in the sandbox, before the decision as to which one would “make the cut” was made. The YF-22 was chosen... I can’t say if it was a mistake or not, but the headline is indeed wrong.
You don’t show your cards until your opponent calls you. You want to see the F22 in combat, put your money on the table.
First off, 45 man-hours of maintenance per hour of flight time is pretty good. F-18's require 18-20 man-hours, and they're not useful for getting into heavily-defended airspace. Second, a fleet of 158 aircraft is definitely going to require thousands of maintenance people. This paper is definitely fishwrap at best.
Corrosion is a big issue; it wasn’t addressed properly during design. Plus the aircraft is just too dang expensive. Remember the Sherman vs. the Tiger? Mass produced cheaper weapons will win the war.
It is a little left-leaning alright, but in this instance, the story originated at the Los Angeles Times (according to the byline at the source.
I am pretty sure that is 45 maintenance man hours...
Though a lot, many of those people are working at the same time, so the availability of the plane is much better than 1/45th
Kelly Johnson ain’t here no mo!
I was thinking the 3,000-man maintainence group referred to the number of personel required at a Raptor base regardless of the number of assigned a/c.
Also, while looking for more info, I came across this:
Are those in fact HUGE ten bladed ceiling fans in the overhead?
The Sherman and the Tiger had the same range. The F-22 has superior range in the sense that it can see (on a radar screen) and hit the enemy before the enemy even knows it's there. The analogy is between having a pistol and having a knife. This is why defense establishments worldwide are spending so much money trying to catch up - being able to eliminate the enemy before he even sees you is a war winner.
Or just maybe ‘battle’ has not seen the F-22.
Be careful when you ‘google’ Big A%% Fans.....
“Plus the aircraft is just too dang expensive. Remember the Sherman vs. the Tiger? Mass produced cheaper weapons will win the war.”
Yes we should learn from history. Remember the cold war? Where we had fewer weapons but they were much better.
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