Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor

sferrin said:
Sprey is fairly biased when it comes to large fighters of any sort. He and the "fighter Mafia" went to great lengths to discredit the F-15 and both him and Ricionni have contiued to carry the torch with the F-22.
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It’s amazing how their views never changed & how they’re frequently misinterpreted by even their ardent followers.
To build in peace time an Air Force to fight a conventional World War.
No one of course asks how much that would cost and where all the personnel would come from. Ideally they’d want an Air Force of 100,000 F-5s.
 
Abraham Gubler said:
I think you're being unfair to Ricionni about the F-22, he wrote the ATF specification so he's hardly an anti F-22 person. Probably just very upset that the aircraft didn't emerge as the Fast Transient aircraft that Boyd had envisaged.

The criticism about the F-22A's weights is fair. The YF-22 was bid as carrying 24,000 lbs of fuel and the F-22A emerged with 18,000 lbs (a 1/4 cut) which resulted in the supercruise endurance reduced to about 10 minutes in a 500 NM radius mission. Wether this performance is worth the cost of the F-22A with all its reduction in C4ISR and weapons load capability compared to the F-35A is the item of debate that the F-22A and all its supporters have thoroughly lost in the past years. Not that you would realise it reading much of the public commentary which is ill informed, biased and generally as wrong as it’s always been.
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Updating old posts can be interesting. If Riccioni & Sprey hated the F-22, they would love the f-35!
Link to Riccioni writing the ATF specs please?
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Pretty sure they didn’t like Maverick either. The hope was to refight WW2 but with jets.
He said in the 80s that NATO should go with antitank guns over ATGMs.
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I'm suddenly thinking of Barrett Tillman's novel Warriors, which posits a war between Israel and Saudi Arabia with the Saudi Air Force flying mostly radarless F-20s and beating up on IAF F-15s and F-16s.
 
TomS said:
I'm suddenly thinking of Barrett Tillman's novel Warriors, which posits a war between Israel and Saudi Arabia with the Saudi Air Force flying mostly radarless F-20s and beating up on IAF F-15s and F-16s.
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Does anyone know if this book has been translated into French ?
 
The data probe/pitot/Electrode (?) like thing with soot all along its its forward facing part is interesting.
The airfoil shaped cut at the stern is also intriguing. Could that pod be leading edge mounted also?

iu
 
Josh_TN said:
That material does not look very IR transparent. Is there a post that explicitly describes it as an IRST?
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It is an unusual aperture. In photos of the pods mounted on CTF F-22s the aperture is more obvious, but only from certain angles.

The pod mounted to N33TR is a boilerplate/breadboard pod. The configuration seen in thee photos is not representative of an operational configuration.
 
Hydroman said:
Looks like a BAE Systems Saberliner, we had two of those at Flight Systems in Mojave for general flight testing support. This seems to be the only group left from the old BAE Flight Systems.
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It’s owned by Airborne Imaging of Texas. A few companies own similarly modified Sabreliners for flight testing, including Sunshine Aero
 
You know that is a photo of the YF119 engine and nozzle for the YF-22? It was designed with the architecture to accommodate the original thrust reverser requirement of the ATF program. The two circular panels on each side were the pivot points of the convergent nozzle segments that could pivot to bring the aft edges all the way to together to shut off the exhaust flow and divert it to reverse doors on the top and bottom of the nozzle structure. The actual reverser hardware was not included in the YF119 flight test engines when the requirement was deleted.

The production F119 nozzle is a masterpiece of multifunctional engineering with fault tolerant control, optimized divergent flow area, +/- 20 degree vectoring with high slew rates, multi-spectrum low observability, and full overhaul part durability. But is is significantly different than the YF119 design.
 
totoro said:
Is there info as to how much would F119 weigh with a regular nozzle instead?
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Fixed that for you.

As to its' weight I don't know but it's probably lighter than the YF119 as the thrust-reverser hardware isn't present.
 
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sferrin said:
I wouldn't expect Congress to care about this. Somebody else's problem.
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Pointing out how much more it would cost has been known to stop stupid Congressional requirements.

Best done by someone who is planning on retiring and so doesn't need to worry about making a congressman look stupid on the record.


F.L. said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1798947001826156550
View: https://x.com/UnwantedBlog/status/1798947001826156550?t=-uv0tonibxDZANLd0SHC8Q&s=19
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Is it just me, or are there 8x AMRAAMs on those external pylons in the head-on image?
 
Scott Kenny said:
Is it just me, or are there 8x AMRAAMs on those external pylons in the head-on image?
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It's a ferry configuration. Those AMRAAM were not fireable; if you look closely they have no fins, because those are stowed in the Sidewinder bays.

The idea is that a deploying F-22 could bring a couple of extra loads of missiles with it to ease the demand for supporting airlift.
 
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TomS said:
It's a ferry configuration. Those AMRAAM were not fireable; if you look closely they have no fins, because those are stowed in the Sidewinder bays.

The idea is that a deploying F-22 could bring a couple of extra loads of missiles with it to ease the demand for supporting airlift.
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On that model they appear to keep their fins, although the lack of clearance with the external fuel tanks means they probably still couldn't be fired.

Some of these early plans certainly changed during the aircraft's development. I'm almost certain the real deal has no ability to carry two Sidewinders in the main weapons bay like that. In that case they must have realized it wasn't worth the effort to design a system for the main bay that would allow the seeker to acquire the target and the missile to launch cleanly. If you really needed more than two Sidewinders for something the external pylons could have allowed for that.
 
TomS said:
It's a ferry configuration. Those AMRAAM were not fireable; if you look closely they have no fins, because those are stowed in the Sidewinder bays.

The idea is that a deploying F-22 could bring a couple of extra loads of missiles with it to ease the demand for supporting airlift.
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Ah, gotcha! Thanks!
 

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