| Lockheed
Martin F-22 Air Superiority Fighter |
Unofficial Site by Ryan Kirk |
The F-22 represents the greatest advance in fighter capability in 50 years. There are several advantages the F-22 has over other fighters: supercruise capability (supersonic cruise without use of afterburner); extreme maneuverability thanks in part to an advanced thrust vectoring system; stealthiness from all directions, including from infrared systems; a "first-look/first-kill" capability; and avionics that are a generation ahead of anything else in the world, equal in power to seven Cray supercomputers. Although about the same size as the F-15, which it will replace, the similarities stop there. Almost every part of the F-22 is designed with new advanced technology to meet new requirements. |
The F-22 design you see today first flew as a prototype on September 29, 1990 during a competition between Lockheed's YF-22 and Northrop's YF-23. On April 23, 1991, Lockheed's design was decided to be superior; and Lockheed, partnered with Boeing, began a long, meticulous engineering and manufacturing development program that would eventually produce the most advanced fighter in the Air Force's inventory, a plane that Popular Science has dubbed "Bambi-meets-Godzilla."
Using advanced flight controls integrated with thrust vectoring, the
YF-22 demonstrated positive control at very high angles of attack.
Why the F-15 Needs to be Replaced
The F-15 began service in 1972, making it already a
25-year-old design. Earlier in this decade, it was basically still the world's
best fighter, but there are other aircraft that are practically equal to
it, such as the Su-27, MIG-29, and other planes that are available to any
country with enough money to buy them. Now, however, the Su-37 is available
for export, while its agility and maneuverability have been shown off at
air shows around the world. The Su-37, which is seen as the F-22's "big rivalry,"
can flip left, right, or backwards, while standing on its tail at a speed
of almost zero. Why didn't the F-22 incorporate this kind of technology?
It did, to a point. But some U.S. fighter commanders say that those kind
of aerobatics are
(
) in air combat. And with the Su-37 and F-22, their
respective governments were faced with two basically incompatible options:
stealth or extreme maneuverability. The Air Force obviously believes stealth
is the better tradeoff by making it a requirement for the F-22. By
next-generation standards, the F-15 has neither stealth nor maneuverability.
The F-22, however, seems to take the best of both worlds. While attaining
the same stealth invisibility of the F-117A Stealth Fighter; the F-22, by
using thrust-vectoring, is able to fly at extreme angles of attack while
changing directions at high speeds. The thrust-vectoring system deflects
the engines' full thrust up to 20 degrees within a second. This combination
makes the F-22 not only extremely hard to detect, but also able to out- maneuver
most missiles and planes (depending on the circumstances, of course). Case
in point: Lockheed pilots pulled the nose up to 60 degrees, while going slowly,
and could still perform a 360-degree roll. Doing the same thing in an F-15
or F-16 would cause the plane to fly out of control, which is why onboard
computers impose certain limits that hinder the maneuverability of these
aircraft.
Compared to the F-15c, the F-22 provides a 100% increase in combat rate, a 50% increase in sortie-generation rate, a 30% decrease in combat turn time, a 50% reduction in direct maintenance manhours per flight hour, and a 65% decrease in mobility airlift.
Lockheed YF-22 successfully fires an AIM-9 Sidewinder
missile during flight testing.
That's not to say the F-15 is a bad airplane. "The F-15 is a great airplane, a magnificent airplane. But it lacks stealth. And we're not going to send our pilots and crews into combat with an unstealthy airplane if we can avoid it. We learned that lesson well in the Gulf War," says General John Michael Loh, commander of Air Combat Command. "Air superiority is not an optional mission."
The following is a scenario played out in a Lockheed simulator in Marietta, Ga:
Cruising at Mach 1.5 over a virtual landscape, a simulated F-22 fighter spots a flight of four Su-27 "Flankers." Beyond them lies the target--a command-and-control bunker--further defended by several batteries of surface-to-air missile sites.Inside the cockpit, a color display shows the SAM sites as small red circles. Their diameter represents their approximate detection range against the F22. The Flankers are small red triangles, now off to the right. So far, none of the defenders seems aware of the intruder.
As the target comes into range, a small ellipse appears in front of the F-22 on the pilot's display. As the ellipse overtakes the bunker, the pilot presses a button on his sidestick controller, and two Joint Direct Attack Munitions fall through cyberspace toward earth. Still undetected, the F-22 begins a gentle turn away, making for a path between the circles. It looks like a clean getaway.
The spell is broken as the instructor leans into the cockpit. "OK, now toggle the switch and see what happens if you're an F-15," he directs.
The pilot fingers a sliding switch on the side controller which turns the simulated F-22, with all its stealth capabilities, into a nonstealthy, simulated F-15.
Suddenly, the displays all go red. The small circles have ballooned and overlapped, with the F-15 in the middle.
There is a piercing tone. "Multiple missile launch," says an insistent female voice in the headset. Red arrows are rising toward the F-15 icon. Off to the right, the Flankers have turned, and red arcs representing the detection range of their radars wash over the F-15. They fire missiles as well.
"Now," says the instructor, "do you still want to be an F-15, or do you want to live?"
The F-22 will be "extremely important to the viability of surface forces in the twenty-first century," says Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman. "It will deny the other guy the opportunity to operate in your airspace. More importantly, because of its stealth capabilities, it will allow us to penetrate deeply into that guy's airspace and take on fighter aircraft [and] cruise missile launchers and to negate the effect of relatively cheap but increasingly lethal surface-to-air missile launchers."
Lockheed YF-22 successfully fires an AIM-120 AMRAAM
missile during flight testing.
Without control of the air, "nothing else works," insists Lt. Gen. Richard E. Hawley principal deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. "You can't get your forces in place, you can't deploy them in combat, they can't fight effectively because they are suffering from attack, and you can't gain the knowledge of the battlefield you need to fight the war."
The F-22 Itself
The F-22 has a delta wing that is blended into its broad, flat body, which helps keep drag to a minimum, and also provides for immense internal space: the F-22 carries 22,000 pounds of fuel (that is twice as much as the F-15 carries). This blended shape makes room for six radar-guided AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missiles), and two AIM-9X Advanced Sidewinders. If needed, the fuselage bays can each hold a 1,000 lb. bomb instead of two of the AMRAAMs. The design team decided that using aft-mounted horizontal tails for pitch control would be a superior (easier?) design over the usual nose-mounted canards, party because a canard large enough to enable the airplane to recover quickly from extreme nose-up altitudes would not be stealthy. Twin vertical tails are mounted well forward to maintain control at high angles of attack.
Above Mach 1, the Pratt & Whitney F119 engines develop twice as much thrust as the F100 engine in the F-15. Together, the F119 engines provide the plane with 78,000 lbs. of thrust! This is a major discrepancy I noticed right away: the SR-71's engines are rated at only 65,000 lbs. of thrust (I double-checked this at the NASA web site). They want us to believe that the F-22's engines are over 15% more powerful than the SR-71's, while the SR-71 flies almost 30% faster (assuming the F-22 flies at Mach 2.5) and weighs dozens of tons more? Go figure.
Stealth for the F-22 is directly evolved from the F-117's. The F-22 uses the F-117's flattened sides and the SR-71's sharp chine on the forward part of the fuselage. But most of the sharp-edged facets used on the F-117 have been blended into curves for the F-22. The F-22 is not candy-coated with radar-absorbent material like the F-117; instead, the material is applied to radar hot spots such as the air intakes and the edges of the wings and tail. The 30+ antennas carried by the F-22 used for communications, navigation, and electronic warfare, are carefully buried under the fighter's skin. Also, the M61A2 Gatling gun's muzzle is covered by a door when it is not in use.
Lockheed YF-22 undergoes aerial refueling during flight
test program.
There are also several unusual aspects of the new F-22. For instance, there will be no two-seater F-22B. That plane was canceled last year due to budget constraints. This has brought some concern over whether or not these new complex planes overwhelm the pilot with raw data, compounded by the fact that greater speed makes attackers, as well as targets, appear more quickly. The solution to this is a totally new avionics system based on a central processing computer that is as powerful as seven Cray supercomputers. In it, computer software takes input from radar, radar-detectors, and other various information from AWACS or other aircraft, decides which is the most important data, and combines it with information from the plane's own database to create a readable display, rather than confusing blips. The engineers call this "sensor fusion." SAM site radar ranges and the F-22's own missile ranges are constantly being recalculated, thus improving the pilot's overall situation awareness. The Air Force believes that this, combined with the F-22's excellent handling, make it safe for a single pilot to handle.
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Yeah, yeah, maybe some day I'll find a picture to put here. |
Here are a few more pictures:
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General Hawley has stated that 25% of the Air Force needs to be decicated to Air Superiority. The fact remains that when production of the F-22 slows and finally rolls to a stop in 2008, the F-22 program will have begun over 20 years earlier. I was two years old when the F-22 program began and will be almost thirty when it comes to a close. This is not an efficient way to build air-dominance fighters; especially when most countries can develop a completely new plane in under ten years. Much of the problem, I am sure, is due to the bureaucracy and red tape of the Air Force. Approximately 350 Air Force personnel are dedicated to the F-22 program. Doing what, I don't know. I do not profess to be an expert on aerospace engineering, but what are the blue-suiters doing? Does it take that many people to administrate one program? Maybe so, considering someone has to handle the paperwork for the other 5,400 individuals involved in the design and building of the F-22. And that number doesn't even include all the people working on the plane through subcontracting. To name a few: Boeing (they are actually not subcontracting but are Lockheed's main partner in the design and construction), Northrop Grumman, Texas Instruments, Digital Equipment Corporation, Lear, and Motorola. All of these companies have an important part in the design of the F-22. Such an incredible amount of man-hours are involved in the creation of something as advanced and technologically amazing as the F-22 that it is impossible to understand and appreciate the time and labor that brings it all together. And, just like every other product for sale, designers have to be paid; R&D has to be justified. The F-22 comes with a very hefty price tag: $71 million a plane.
"The more expensive a system is, the more you have to fight for it, naturally," General Loh says. "We have to get up every morning and fight for the F-22. I don't mind. That's the nature of this business. Taxpayer dollars are scarce. We want to spend them in a responsible way. And so we have to make our case."
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Last Updated June 30, 1997 1:19 am
