Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor

​F-22 Restart Not So Unthinkable

—John A. Tirpak

5/27/2016

Restarting production of the F-22 isn’t “a wild idea,” Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said Thursday. Answering questions at an AFA-sponsored, Air Force breakfast, Welsh said the F-22 has proven itself to be “everything everyone hoped it would be,” and in light of the recent Air Dominance 2030 study, more F-22s might be a better option than starting a “sixth generation fighter” program within the needed timeframe. Congress has asked for costs and “pros and cons” of an F-22 restart, and the service is updating its numbers accordingly, but doesn’t have answers yet, Welsh said. However, any major add will have “ripple effects” on the whole USAF program, he said. “We think it’s cost-prohibitive,” to restart the F-22 line, Welsh asserted, but there “needs to be this discussion” about how USAF will address its looming fighter shortage. The solution “isn’t always going to be an airplane,” he said. The service is looking at autonomous armed fighter escorts, arsenal planes, and swarming UAVs as other ways to address the fighter shortage. Welsh said the 2030 study did a good job of assessing the situation and offering options. (See also: With the Raptors Over Syria from the February 2015 issue of Air Force Magazine.)
 
USAF warms to F-22 Raptor revival proposal

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-warms-to-f-22-raptor-revival-proposal-425794/
 
Flyaway said:
USAF warms to F-22 Raptor revival proposal

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-warms-to-f-22-raptor-revival-proposal-425794/
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If Gen 6 is a roughly 2030 airplane, why wouldn't you want the F-22 in production within a couple of years from today? Are 183 Raptors going to be in service & flying in 2030? No way in hell. Can the F-22 double in brass and serve as a bomber like a F-35? Yeah. Is every F-35 mission going to involve 2 2000lb GBUs that the F-22 can't carry? Again, no way.
 
Airplane said:
Flyaway said:
USAF warms to F-22 Raptor revival proposal

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-warms-to-f-22-raptor-revival-proposal-425794/
Click to expand...

If Gen 6 is a roughly 2030 airplane, why wouldn't you want the F-22 in production within a couple of years from today? Are 183 Raptors going to be in service & flying in 2030? No way in hell. Can the F-22 double in brass and serve as a bomber like a F-35? Yeah. Is every F-35 mission going to involve 2 2000lb GBUs that the F-22 can't carry? Again, no way.
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It does now look the most logical option if they are going to go slow on the 6th gen.
 
Flyaway said:
Airplane said:
Flyaway said:
USAF warms to F-22 Raptor revival proposal

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-warms-to-f-22-raptor-revival-proposal-425794/
Click to expand...

If Gen 6 is a roughly 2030 airplane, why wouldn't you want the F-22 in production within a couple of years from today? Are 183 Raptors going to be in service & flying in 2030? No way in hell. Can the F-22 double in brass and serve as a bomber like a F-35? Yeah. Is every F-35 mission going to involve 2 2000lb GBUs that the F-22 can't carry? Again, no way.
Click to expand...

It does now look the most logical option if they are going to go slow on the 6th gen.
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You'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now. If they "go slow" on 6th gen most of those who worked on the design of the F-22 will be retired and we'll be looking at another 20 year development cycle.
 
If Gen 6 is a roughly 2030 airplane, why wouldn't you want the F-22 in production within a couple of years from today?
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Within a couple of years? You can't even place an order for an F-35, that has an established supply chain and get a guaranteed delivery in 2 years without looking at the backlog. It will be a minimum of 5 years before they have the workforce trained, supply chain back online and long lead parts prepped for the first few aircraft to roll off the line. And given they haven't done anything in the FY17 budget, the earliest they can start is FY18-19 which means you'll end up absorbing 100-150 aircraft well into the 2030's.

With end strength at a low and readiness at shockingly low levels as well, it would be better to get a commitment from the Congress on ensuring the current USAF new fighter jet additions are finalized before we go into some financial wizardry of actually making an F-22 re-start appear to be financially possible. A lot of these decisions would be made by the next POTUS and we really need to get out of the BCA and BBA mess before we actually have a coherent plan to fund readiness and modernization in a consistent way. In the absence of that we'll keep getting mixed signals.
 
sferrin said:
You'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now. If they "go slow" on 6th gen most of those who worked on the design of the F-22 will be retired and we'll be looking at another 20 year development cycle.
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There's no new engineers graduation? No new engineers being hired? Knowledge in companies goes away with the people? I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
 
bring_it_on said:
If Gen 6 is a roughly 2030 airplane, why wouldn't you want the F-22 in production within a couple of years from today?
Click to expand...

Within a couple of years? You can't even place an order for an F-35, that has an established supply chain and get a guaranteed delivery in 2 years without looking at the backlog. It will be a minimum of 5 years before they have the workforce trained, supply chain back online and long lead parts prepped for the first few aircraft to roll off the line. And given they haven't done anything in the FY17 budget, the earliest they can start is FY18-19 which means you'll end up absorbing 100-150 aircraft well into the 2030's.

With end strength at a low and readiness at shockingly low levels as well, it would be better to get a commitment from the Congress on ensuring the current USAF new fighter jet additions are finalized before we go into some financial wizardry of actually making an F-22 re-start appear to be financially possible. A lot of these decisions would be made by the next POTUS and we really need to get out of the BCA and BBA mess before we actually have a coherent plan to fund readiness and modernization in a consistent way. In the absence of that we'll keep getting mixed signals.
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There is no definition of Gen 6. So it takes 4-5 years because of Washington's way of doing business to set up a new production line. If Washington wanted to produce the F-22 again and continue studying Gen 6, it could do both items at the same time (yeah, yeah money). Hell Gen 6 might be F-22s controlling super cruising missilier drones.
 
Arian said:
I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
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Recently not that well, by all accounts (in particular, outsourcing proved to be a major disaster, to put it mildly).
 
Grey Havoc said:
Arian said:
I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
Click to expand...

Recently not that well, by all accounts (in particular, outsourcing proved to be a major disaster, to put it mildly).
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Which is why they've brought that work back in house.
 
Grey Havoc said:
Arian said:
I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
Click to expand...

Recently not that well, by all accounts (in particular, outsourcing proved to be a major disaster, to put it mildly).
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And the issues with the 777 have been what exactly?
 
Well given they've been building 777s for years that's a bit of a red herring. Even still, given all the variants of 737,747,757,767,777, and 787 Boeing has introduced over the years they've got about as smooth development cycle as can be reasonably be expected, with tribal knowledge smoothly handed off from one to the next. The same cannot be said of fighter aircraft. Not by a long shot.
 
Arian said:
sferrin said:
You'd think they'd have learned their lesson by now. If they "go slow" on 6th gen most of those who worked on the design of the F-22 will be retired and we'll be looking at another 20 year development cycle.
Click to expand...

There's no new engineers graduation? No new engineers being hired? Knowledge in companies goes away with the people? I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
Click to expand...
Boeing built two new designs and refreshed a third in the time between the 747 and 777. In the general sense, that's what you want to do--you want to have people being involved in at least two or three program development cycles over their careers (and preferably throw them into the support side for a while, too). In doing so, a lot of that knowledge gets passed along to the new guys from the old graybeards--stuff like "yeah, we tried that before, and it didn't work, and here's why". Anyone can look at a drawing and see what was done on the old airplanes; having the old guys around tells you why it was done that way. This goes all the way up the chain, from the guy bucking rivets on the production line to the design engineers to the VPs managing the program.

Today, new programs are spread much further apart than they used to be, and often those new programs are more or less just derivatives of existing ones. An engineer entering the field today may be lucky to work on one whole new clean-sheet program from early design through service and support in the field.
 
Arian said:
There's no new engineers graduation? No new engineers being hired? Knowledge in companies goes away with the people? I wonder how Boeing manages to make 777s now that everyone who worked on 747 retired?
Click to expand...

Because the engineers on the first 747 trained the engineers on the 757, who trained the engineers on the 767, who trained the engineers on the 777 . (A bit of oversimplification, but you get the picture.) No gaps, lots of overlap in the design office. The bigger gap to the 787, plus the decision to outsource engineering to firms without complete large aircraft experience, were a major source of delays and problems on the 787.

My 6 years in aerospace engineering university (B.Sc and M.Sc.) didn't make me a competent engineer. It got me ready to go learn all that stuff on the job, from older experienced engineers.
 
And by the way, the experience only translates so far if you work on different types. Having worked on say, a commercial airliner is not going to help you as much on a carrier-based stealthy UCAV program. Douglas was hugely successful in selling carrier attack planes to the navy because they had a group of designers that worked on the type for nigh thirty years uninterruptedly (SBD, A-1D, A-2D, A-3D, A-4D, F-3D, F-4D).

I remember hearing of some guy at Boeing whom was simply known as 'the Carrier God'. Essentially he was the go-to guy if you had a carrier program. I doubt even large organizations have more than a couple of these people with relevant experience. Once they retire, that knowledge is gone; there just isn't a mechanism to transfer the knowledge other than every day work alongside a mentor.

This is the reason aerospace companies will often bring subject matter experts back from retirement as consultants.
This reminds me of the story of the consultant engineer

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all mechanical things. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later his company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day he marked a small X in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, 'This is where your problem is!' The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again.

The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his services. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly:

One chalk mark .. ..... ..... $1

Knowing where to put it ..... $49,999
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Apparently it's based on something that really happened, with Charles Steinmetz and Henry Ford as the protagonists. I read a fascinating summary of Steinmetz's life here.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/?no-ist.

Happy Memorial Day weekend (or just happy Sunday if you're not in the US!) ;)
 
AeroFranz said:
And by the way, the experience only translates so far if you work on different types. Having worked on say, a commercial airliner is not going to help you as much on a carrier-based stealthy UCAV program. Douglas was hugely successful in selling carrier attack planes to the navy because they had a group of designers that worked on the type for nigh thirty years uninterruptedly (SBD, A-1D, A-2D, A-3D, A-4D, F-3D, F-4D).
Click to expand...

Yep, same with Grumman. It's also why Lockheed and Northrop had such an advantage on the ATF after stealth was added to the mix. All of a sudden the fact that it'd been decades since either had built a fighter didn't matter as much.
 
sferrin said:
Yep, same with Grumman. It's also why Lockheed and Northrop had such an advantage on the ATF after stealth was added to the mix. All of a sudden the fact that it'd been decades since either had built a fighter didn't matter as much.
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Lets not forget Boeing was working on a Stealth Jet way before Lockheed or Northrop. I cant remember if Boeing passed on XST or wasn't invited. They may have been working on a follow on platform for another service or agency.
 
sublight is back said:
sferrin said:
Yep, same with Grumman. It's also why Lockheed and Northrop had such an advantage on the ATF after stealth was added to the mix. All of a sudden the fact that it'd been decades since either had built a fighter didn't matter as much.
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Lets not forget Boeing was working on a Stealth Jet way before Lockheed or Northrop. I cant remember if Boeing passed on XST or wasn't invited. They may have been working on a follow on platform for another service or agency.
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"Working on" and being successful at aren't necessarily the same things. General Dynamics (Convair) obviously worked on them too, with Kingfish, but that only got them 3rd place in the rankings just ahead of Boeing. Also, with Boeing, it'd been even longer since they'd built a fighter than either Northrop or Lockheed.

If Boeing was invited to XST they lost, behind Lockheed and Northrop. I seem to recall that just about everybody EXCEPT Lockheed was invited to that.
 
Bill Walker said:
My 6 years in aerospace engineering university (B.Sc and M.Sc.) didn't make me a competent engineer. It got me ready to go learn all that stuff on the job, from older experienced engineers.
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And Lockheed is short of projects and experienced engineers?

Recently not that well, by all accounts (in particular, outsourcing proved to be a major disaster, to put it mildly).
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Recently, they've upped output per month of 777 considerably over the past years. Outsourcing of 787 components had to do with Boeing actually being unable to rely on the old-school ingrained people it has inherited over the decades. How many new people has Boeing had to hire to get the 787 program rolling? Lots.

Boeing built two new designs and refreshed a third in the time between the 747 and 777. In the general sense, that's what you want to do
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Stuff does get passed on. And that's my point. Knowledge doesn't disappear simply because the original people are gone.
 
AeroFranz said:
Once they retire, that knowledge is gone; there just isn't a mechanism to transfer the knowledge other than every day work alongside a mentor.

This is the reason aerospace companies will often bring subject matter experts back from retirement as consultants.
This reminds me of the story of the consultant engineer
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The knowledge is indeed gone if there is no contact with others, as you say. But that doesn't describe Lockheed here. What was useful from F-22 has been transferred to the people working on the F-35. The people working on the 6th gen fighter are going to have far more expertise at their disposal. There's already a lot of overlap and continuity between these projects.
 
Bill Walker said:
Because the engineers on the first 747 trained the engineers on the 757, who trained the engineers on the 767, who trained the engineers on the 777 . (A bit of oversimplification, but you get the picture.) No gaps, lots of overlap in the design office. The bigger gap to the 787, plus the decision to outsource engineering to firms without complete large aircraft experience, were a major source of delays and problems on the 787.

My 6 years in aerospace engineering university (B.Sc and M.Sc.) didn't make me a competent engineer. It got me ready to go learn all that stuff on the job, from older experienced engineers.
Click to expand...

As someone who's about to receive his B.Sc. in aerospace engineering at UCLA, I'm of the opinion that the curriculum here doesn't do much to prepare new graduates to be good engineers. Our classes are very heavy on the theory (which is undoubtedly very important), but practical considerations on aircraft design are rarely discussed in any of our courses. Even something simple like not routing hydraulic lines next to electrical lines (which caused the loss of a Raptor a few years back) don't even get a mention. You'd have to go into industry or some serious extracurriculars in order to pick up on those skills. Perhaps the theory-intensive curriculum will benefit in the long run once our practical experience can catch up. That seems like a rather big if though.

AeroFranz said:
Arian said:
Knowledge in companies goes away with the people?
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Yes.
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I experienced a miniature version of this in the Design/Build/Fly team. Our school's team hasn't yet established a very good system that ensures continuity and knowledge transfer from year to year, and over this past year the design leads and I were forced to relearn many things that previous graduates took with them when they left. You can only go so far using textbooks and equations in aircraft design; practical and first-hand experience can count for quite a lot.

Perhaps this should be branched to another topic?
 
sferrin said:
If Boeing was invited to XST they lost, behind Lockheed and Northrop. I seem to recall that just about everybody EXCEPT Lockheed was invited to that.
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Boeing did not lose. Boeing did not respond to the DARPA RFP for XST because they were working on something similar for somebody else.
 
sublight is back said:
sferrin said:
If Boeing was invited to XST they lost, behind Lockheed and Northrop. I seem to recall that just about everybody EXCEPT Lockheed was invited to that.
Click to expand...

Boeing did not lose. Boeing did not respond to the DARPA RFP for XST because they were working on something similar for somebody else.
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Interesting that they wouldn't want to kill two birds with one stone. (That Boeing wouldn't that is. That they were already working on something similar would seem to have given them a leg-up IMO from their POV.)
 
sferrin said:
Interesting that they wouldn't want to kill two birds with one stone. (That Boeing wouldn't that is. That they were already working on something similar would seem to have given them a leg-up IMO from their POV.)
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Sounds logical, although the security firewalls may have prevented them from doing so.
 
sublight is back said:
Boeing did not lose. Boeing did not respond to the DARPA RFP for XST because they were working on something similar for somebody else.
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Boeing was not invited to be part of the process.

https://books.google.com/books?id=rzXdGpkDa7YC&lpg=PP1&dq=have%20blue%20f-117%20fairchild&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q=fairchild&f=false

Perko requested White Papers from five companies - Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Fairchild, and Grumman - addressing two topics. First, what were the signature thresholds that an air vehicle would have to achieve to be essentially undetectable at an operationally useful range? Second, what were the capabilities of each company to design and build and aircraft with the necessary low signatures? Fairchild and Grumman did not express any interest in participating. The General Dynamics response emphasized countermeasures and had little substansive technical content regarding signature reduction. McDonnell Douglas and Northrop responded indicating a good understanding of the problem and at least some technical capability for developing a reduced-signature air vehicle. In late 1974 these two companies were awarded contracts of approximately $100,000 each to conduct further studies.
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The urgency was a result of the tight DARPA competition schedule. In the spring of 1975 Lockheed, Northrop, and McDonnell Doughlas were the three participants in the program of which Lockheed was the newcomer.
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quellish said:
The urgency was a result of the tight DARPA competition schedule. In the spring of 1975 Lockheed, Northrop, and McDonnell Douglas were the three participants in the program of which Lockheed was the newcomer.
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Has the McDonnell Douglas design ever been revealed from this competition? Was it based off of their Model 226 design work?
 
quellish said:
Boeing was not invited to be part of the process.
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Boeing was not magically "skipped over". Lockheed was not invited to the program because they hadn't made a fighter design in 10 years. Boeing on the other hand had just competed in the LWF competition two years earlier with the Model 908-909, and was currently engaged with the Air Force on the AGM-69 SRAM, Advanced Airborne Command Post, and the AMST program. They were an extremely relevant player at that time.

They declined the invitation.
 
Why did Boeing decline given they were already working on a similar project for another customer?
 
sferrin said:
Why did Boeing decline given they were already working on a similar project for another customer?
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The customers compartment controls would not allow it.
 
sublight is back said:
Boeing was not magically "skipped over".
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If you talk to the people involved on the DARPA side that is not the story you hear.
 
quellish said:
sublight is back said:
Boeing was not magically "skipped over".
Click to expand...

If you talk to the people involved on the DARPA side that is not the story you hear.
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Well of course not, especially if the customer caught wind of the initial engagement and demanded it cease immediately.
 
sublight is back said:
Well of course not, especially if the customer caught wind of the initial engagement and demanded it cease immediately.
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Huh? No, Boeing was not involved at all. There was no engagement, initial or otherwise. Boeing and McD had done work for USN on the Quiet Attack Aircraft a few years prior but that was not related, ongoing, or in conflict with the requests from DARPA.
 
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/07/secaf-james-is-cool-on-f-22-restart/
 
http://www.popsci.com/best-air-superiority-fighter-in-history-grounded-by-bees
 
Newly released video of the Raptor. I'll never tire, although some here at SPF my tire of me writing it, we should still be building this aircraft what a conventional deterrent it would have made at 500-700 air frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uGyGJofKkQ
 
Was watching the Typhoon and F22 mock dog fighting over Cape Wrath, and it's a sight I'll never, ever forget. Typhoon and F22 were in a tight turn, streaming trails, when the F22 just rolled over, and flopped backwards to be pointing towards the part of the sky the Typhoon was turning into.

Utterly flummoxed me, I would of doubted it was even possible had I not seeneed it with my own eyes.
 
Ian33 said:
when the F22 just rolled over, and flopped backwards to be pointing towards the part of the sky the Typhoon was turning into.

Utterly flummoxed me,
Click to expand...

I imagine you weren't the only one. ;D
 
Ian33 said:
Was watching the Typhoon and F22 mock dog fighting over Cape Wrath, and it's a sight I'll never, ever forget. Typhoon and F22 were in a tight turn, streaming trails, when the F22 just rolled over, and flopped backwards to be pointing towards the part of the sky the Typhoon was turning into.

Utterly flummoxed me, I would of doubted it was even possible had I not seeneed it with my own eyes.
Click to expand...

Excess thrust + TV + wing loading. All that the 35 doesn't have. But, hey, maneuvering fights are dead or don't ya' know about the aim9x? Probably the only other fighter to match the F-22 turning would or could have been the super tomcat with it's TV nozzles and swing wings.
 

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