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

The F-22! Your methed out pilots will be 5x as effective as a methed out pilot in an F-15 or Mig-29!

For all the money, the R and D time and reduction in aquired airframes, this plane better felate the pilot. My dissappointment in this and the tribulations of Navy development and procurement is fathomless.

The whole military procurement system is FUBAR and getting worse.

Low rates of production, limited number of airframes and high per unit costs are not the fault of the aircraft.

Those are political decisions.

The main problem is they don't pick a design of proven tech and lock it in. They try and shoehorn every piece of tech on some research board into it and then constantly change the specs. No one can work that way on a budget or fir a realistic price.

The F-35 is the same thing and now is the most expensive aircraft program ever.

In what way was the F-22 considered a piece of shit?

Also, Obama didn't cut them. He "completed the program", remember?

He terminated production at 187 units (2 of which are already gone). No way 185 planes is going to replace in excess of 650 F-15's.

Tyndall is the last base I was stationed at. Perhaps its because that area is a known druggie area and they test for that stuff on the base a lot and the other bases don't.

Unions in the North West need to be busted and build aircraft for a decent wage.

Agreed.

Remember the Saturn V rocket? Was freaking awesome.

But does anyone remember that NASA approved and locked in the design BEFORE they even figured out which mission plan they would use to get to the moon?

The Earth Orbit Rendevous Plan initially called for TWO Saturn Vs for each lunar mission.

The point is by locking the design early NASA helped their mandate of getting a manned mission to the moon by 1970.

No doubt. Which is why the "completed the program" line was such a dishonest load of bullshit for the administration to throw out there.

Well, it looks like it's trying to fuck them, anyway!

It was Gates' recommendation/decision, and he was Bush's SecDef too. It ain't a partisan fuckup, it's just a fuckup.

The designers should take heed from Apple or other privately owned manufacturing companies that know what the fuck they are doing. Its nearly the end of 2011, these kind of rookie mistakes shouldn't be tolerated. Whether other countries, friends or enemies, have air superiority or not, American Military should be 10-15 steps ahead of the already ahead-steps that they are compared to other countries. Military training or hardware, we should be No.1.

Either we DON'T have engineers with enough passion for the job, or we need to roll some heads at the Lockheed/Boeing tops. When the F-22 was first announced and revealed, it looked like it was filled with tech 20 years in the future. Now, it just seems like a heap of crap.

Start watching at 18:20


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ06RKGcPBI&feature=youtube_gdata_player (on my iPhone)

No company could make a reliable product when they are constantly told to use cutting edge technology that is not ready or developed enough for use and when the specs for the product are constantly changing up until actual production starts and often even after that.


If the military would choose advanced, but proven tech and lock the contract as soon as they were ready to bid it out, you'd see reliable affordable equipment.

Don't blame the companies for the FUBAR military procurement is. These same companies make (or made) civvy plabes that work without fail 99.99999 % of the time (barring human error).