F-22. Dear Lord, What's WRONG With Today's Engineers???

Remember the times when American Ingenuity actually WORKED??

MORE HERE..

Wasn't this plane supposed to be the "next big thing" for the Air Force?? What the fuck is going on here??

Jesus! ALSS in tactical aircraft isn't anything new- those should be fucking CLOSED SYSTEMS that nothing can get into! WTF?!

Gawd, sux to be those guys!

It's that damn Chinese paint!!!

But damn that's just fucked up....

I thought it was known for awhile they were overpriced pieces of shit, and that's why Obama wanted 'em cut.

But WF cried, because while they're overpriced pieces of shit, they were SEXY overpriced pieces of shit.

If I'm not mistaken the cuts in the number of them took place under Bush.

Second most of us were upset because costs could have been brought down by making lots of them and we were upset that by having so few we have nothing to replace them as we lose them.

What makes this even worse is the USN seems to have had this problem in it's F-18's and solved it 20 years ago.

that's what happens when every freaking piece of something is manufactured by a different campaign contributer

"Oh, I thought you said design a life sport system.....my bad!"

Virtually every major U.S. weapons systems goes through growing pains before all the problems are worked out.

Except as I pointed out above, the USN worked those bugs out 20 years ago in the same systems. The USAF should have asked.

Dayton air systems in fighter aren't exactly new technology. The USAF should have had this licked from the start.

Technically, shouldn't that have been "Lockheed Martin should've licked this from the start."?

That said, the F-22 was never a revolutionary aircraft. It was always basically a "stealthy F-15".

As costs zoomed (mainly due to reasons of a very low production rate that have nothing to do with the plane itself) the F-22s advocates overpromoted it as a "do anything superjet".

^ Dayton, you have no idea WTF you're talking about. This is often the case when it comes to military tech. The F-22 is NOT a stealthy F-15 and indeed shares almost nothing (if anything) with the F-15.

I didn't say it shared anything.

But.

It is effectively the same mass as an F-15C with drop tanks and missiles loaded.

It is a twin tail, twin engined, single seat air superiority platform with expandable potential to the air to ground role.

Basically, it is an F-15 type platform with an airframe built to carry all fuel and weapons internally for stealth. Naturally its engines are more advanced for supercruise capability and some thrust vectoring capability for better low speed manueverability.

No. Just because a plane has the same basic configuration and a similar mission profile does not mean they are related or have anything in the common. The P-58 was a twin engine fighter, but no one would say the F-15 is a modified P-38.

Dayton is saying they serve the same role, I think.

That would be somewhat true at least. That is not what he said. Even within that, the F-15 is also a ground attack aircraft in some versions. The F-22 is not.

He commenter that it was expandable to a ground attack role. I have read the same thing.

Excuse me.

Why was the Air Force adding the "A" designation to F-22s at one point?

You do realize that "A" stands for "attack".

Yes, but the equipment for the role was never fitted. It cannot perform ground attack.

I thought for sure they were putting SDB's and forward ground radar on F-22's.

AFAIK that was scrapped. With only 185 there are not enough for their primary role of air superiority. Cost too was a major factor.

Tell that to the 412th Test Wing's Increment 3.1 Modification Test Team, and the pilots of the 149 Raptors that are were fit with the Block 3.1 software.

I wonder if the Air Force's pilot corps ultimately wouldn't have been happier with Gen 4.5 Eagles and Falcons. There were a lot of very cool and 'sensible stealth' upgrades planned for newer versions of those airframes in the same way Grumman was working on the next generation of Tomcat before the whole program got the axe.

They could have pulled generally the same scam the Navy pulled with the SuperBug and gotten a shitload of spiffy new airframes (with supercruise and vectored thrust) for probably a fraction of the cost of the whole F-22 program.

Might not congress have plagued such a program with the same maladies under discussion here?

It would appear the procurement process is beyond repair.

Where the US REALLY needs is an upgrade is in our missile technology, both A/A and ASUW/ land attack. Our missile tech is firmly rooted in the 80's with the Harpoon and TLAM systems. We need our own Sunburn and Sizzler equivalents.

It's possible. The procurement process itself is the root of the problem for ALL the services, not just in terms of airplane-buying. It is broke dick so hard that the Navy is now in deep, deep shit in terms of shipbuilding.

Cool, wasn't aware of that upgrade. It still can only deploy JDAM's and has no FLIR and no laser target designator.

Yes it can. The weapons bay is fitted for Small Diameter Bombs, and the software has ground attack modes.

The age of specialist airplanes is over.

And it's absurd that they're finding developmental things wrong with an aircraft that is fielded and out of production.

The development of this fighter is a textbook of congressional, Pentagon and SecDef fuckups.