Pentagon tests: F-22 has maintenance shortcomings

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cobb/stories/2009/07/10/F_22_maintenance_marietta.html

If the above article is true, then I am glad that I'm not going into the Air Force to be a Fighter pilot right now.

30 hours of servicing for 1 hour of flying time? What the Hell?

 

So it's essentially the stealth coating doing that? Sounds like a lawsuit against Lockheed to me.

Still a beautiful plane, though.

 

So the thing is multimillion dollar Defense budget sink hole? No surprises there.

Meh, the F-14s and the F-15s still have it in the looks dept. as far as I'm concerned. The F-14, especially, just screams "I'm here to fuck you up", IMO.

 

qft.


i love the turkey!

 

Well I guess that's another way in which the Raptor outdoes the F-15 (well some of them

just as a matter of interest I found the following thread on airliners.net which gives from mh/fh figures/

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/military/read.main/103605/

 

I had no idea it commonly took so long to service military planes.

Also, I too miss the venerable F-14. That plane still flies circles around most of the newer aircraft out there.

 

This just goes to show what a good job commercial airline companies do. There are thousands of planes in the air every day and what is there, maybe 1 or 2 major crashes a year that cause loss of life?

The F-22 is a beautiful plane but it is just too expensive for what we are getting. It would be better if the US Airforce started buying a version of the Navy F-18 to fill in for older fighters that are retired. From what I understand you can buy 4 or 5 F-18's for one F-22. Is stealth that important when your firing missiles from beyond visual range? Couldn't electronic countermeasures be a cost effective solution?

As for the technology in the F-22, I remember seeing a F-15 test plane with the vector thrust nozzles so existing planes could be modified to use the engines and vectored thrust system that the F-22 has possibly at a lower cost.

Just my 2 credits

 

Why not simply stop using planes all together? That whole war thing is quite unproductive anyway. Better to pour that money into better education and welfare.

 

I'd prefer that they just buy some more F-15 and F-16 planes with updated controls, ECM, Avionics, et al.

Also, the vectored engines on the F-22 are there to aid in making the plane stealthy. That wouldn't have much of an effect on the F-15 with all of it's sharp edges.

This will never happen. Also, war can be quite productive when the goal is protecting Freedom or liberating the oppressed.

 

Doesn't vectoring also have an big impact on the manouverability though?

While the F-15 is still a good air craft it's debatable whether it could match with the latest designs even with updated avionics. A good fighter is a combination of avionics, manouverability, stealthiness, performance.

And truth be known I'm not sure the American phsyche could handle U.S.A.F being second fiddle still flying the Eagles against the likes of the Eurofighter and some of the lastest MIG and Sukhoi designs

 

Sorry, USAF is already second fiddle to the US Navy.

 

\

Okay okay

I should of said second fiddle to non-U.S millitary forces.

 

comes with optional "highway to the danger zone" tape

yes I know it wasn't the plane in movie

 

Spoken like a man who has never seen what an F-15 can do...

Vectoring does help with manuevering, among other things.

Also, those MiG, Sukhoi and Eurofighter planes are being flown by second fiddle pilots. You can have as many super planes as you want. If the pilot is shit, so's the plane. The Europeans have already seen this back in WW2 when the Luftwaffe had no choice but to use shit pilots in their primitive jet fighters. The prop-driven P-47 & P-51 fighters annihilated them.

 

Yes it was.

 

Not if there are no opressed to be liberated nor threats to freedom. But of course it'll never happen. One can still dream, though.

 

Jetscream is an F-22 (in the movie- unsure about before then), Megatron is WTF he is, and I didn't notice any F-14 transformers ever.

The leader of the G-Bots was an F-15, the only F-14 in Si-Fi I can think of is the Valkyrie or the Javlin (from spubspace->continum).

 

Tell you what.

There's various information around with simulations, war games etc etc that look at how different combat aircraft go head to head.

See if you can find out just how well the F-15's go against the latest generations in fighters. The basic fact is you're flynig a 37 year old design and there's only so much that can be done with.

 

Meh... EVERY new fighter or bomber has shortcomings and things that need to get fixed.

Anytime you build anything that bleeding-edge there is a learning curve.

How many common CARS are recalled every year???

 

Yeah, but if you use war the right way, like taking over rich and defenseless countries, you can make a lot of money in war. You know, plunder and all that stuff we don't do anymore because we're so nice?