Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor

[Matej]

Meanwhile I found it too, so I add that the plane with this test equipment and opened weapons bay was shown to general public at Edward air show 2005.

 

[quellish]

Meanwhile I found it too, so I add that the plane with this test equipment and opened weapons bay was shown to general public at Edward air show 2005.

If you guys want me to ask at the open house next week, let me know. The F-22 guys are usually pretty chatty.

 

[Ian33]

author=quellish
If you guys want me to ask at the open house next week, let me know. The F-22 guys are usually pretty chatty.

Ah that would be brilliant if you wouldn't mind! and maybe add some of your pics !!

 

[quellish]

author=quellish
If you guys want me to ask at the open house next week, let me know. The F-22 guys are usually pretty chatty.

Ah that would be brilliant if you wouldn't mind! and maybe add some of your pics !!

The big red box was installed but not visible, check the RF-22 thread for photos.

 

[bobbymike]

http://www.sldinfo.com/?p=325

Michael Wynne has been hailed as a voice of reason in the F-22 debate and someone who is just out to hurt Gates' for making him resign. Regardless the evidence that "political" meddling far outweighs contractor production problems continues to be food for thought especially now that the whispers about cutting F-35 production has already begun.

 

[mz]

Well, a lot boils down to industrial and workforce capability.
Overviewing, since USA won the cold war, a large portion of people should go working on something that is useful to civilians now instead.
Otherwise it ends up like the Soviet Union where a large part of the GDP was spent on the military while other countries advanced their civil sector, private sector and infrastructure, raising overall productivity, prosperity, stability, happiness.
On the other hand, it's of course good to be prepared at least at some level so not all military spending should be stopped.

But this picture will change.

 

[Colonial-Marine]

Well, a lot boils down to industrial and workforce capability.
Overviewing, since USA won the cold war, a large portion of people should go working on something that is useful to civilians now instead.
Otherwise it ends up like the Soviet Union where a large part of the GDP was spent on the military while other countries advanced their civil sector, private sector and infrastructure, raising overall productivity, prosperity, stability, happiness.
On the other hand, it's of course good to be prepared at least at some level so not all military spending should be stopped.

But this picture will change.

Did you miss the whole 1990s? There were plenty of cuts since the end of the Cold War. In my personal opinion we should be modernizing the military across the board, without slicing numbers. Yet at the current rate I wouldn't be surprised if the future USAF consists of grenades being tossed out of Cessna 172s.

I'm just waiting until one decrees the USAF and USN can't fly any more demonstrations at air shows and etc.

[edited by flateric]

 

[mz]

No, I didn't, but there will probably be even more cuts.

 

[sferrin]

The problem with your chart is that it doesn't factor in what a dollar buys in each country. Do you think a Chinese soldier makes as much as an American one? Do you think it costs as much to pay a machinist to say, mill a piece of landing gear, in China as the US? Now apply that all up and down the supply chain. If they did that we'd see a much different picture.

 

[Abraham Gubler]

The problem with your chart is that it doesn't factor in what a dollar buys in each country. Do you think a Chinese soldier makes as much as an American one? Do you think it costs as much to pay a machinist to say, mill a piece of landing gear, in China as the US? Now apply that all up and down the supply chain. If they did that we'd see a much different picture.

If the numbers of machinists and individual rifleman determined military capability then purchase parity arguments would make sense. But they haven’t since the early days of the American Civil War when industrial technology started to become a primary determinant of military power. Military capability is highly driven by quality and dollars buys quality be it in defence industry and military personnel.

Purchase parity only applies when you can quality benchmark an item like the amount of calories needed to keep a human alive. Say for example the cost of a day’s unprepared food in China compared to a few meals in restaurants in New York. While it may be cheaper for the Chinese to cover labour costs associated in building a J-10 fighter this weapon system is nowhere near the capability of an F-35.

Further because of the high ease of highly productive individual migration in this world the Chinese are increasingly having to pay more and more to keep their engineers in country. To benchmark purchase parity by equivalent minimum wages is no way going to get an actual expenditure on workforce between China and the US.

 

[Abraham Gubler]

But this picture will change.

This is the wrong graph. It just shows national defence budgets. It doesn't show in what countries the proportion of that money going to weapons is spent. Such a graph would have something around 75% of global defence equipment acquisition expenditure spent in the USA and around 95% spent in NATO or NATO aligned countries (including Israel, Japan, RoK, Australia). When one set of inter-related national defence industries is consuming over 90% of the global spend it makes a mockery of any rivals attempt to challenge them.

 

[bobbymike]

It is all about percentage of national wealth - GDP - no other measure matters. Not including Iraq and A-stan the US spending is near post WWII lows. The US can easily spend two or three times as much on defense as it does now and not even put a strain on the economy, assuming cuts elsewhere. Recently the Cato Institute added up all "welfare" programs. They amount to close to $900 billion per year. How is that war on poverty coming?

The US military has massively downsized since 1990/91 (I was critical of Bush 41 then too) especially the nuclear mission (don't get me started) to say the disarmament should continue due to some affordability issue is just plain nonsense.

 

[sferrin]

The problem with your chart is that it doesn't factor in what a dollar buys in each country. Do you think a Chinese soldier makes as much as an American one? Do you think it costs as much to pay a machinist to say, mill a piece of landing gear, in China as the US? Now apply that all up and down the supply chain. If they did that we'd see a much different picture.

If the numbers of machinists and individual rifleman determined military capability then purchase parity arguments would make sense.

If it costs $300k to make a set of landing gear in the US and $50k to make it in China then yeah, it's going to make a difference. Which is why it matters how much the machinist makes and how much a soldier makes and so on. If it costs $3 a day to feed a Chinese soldier vs $15 in the US then it's going to make a difference how far your budget stretches. Now apply that to every link in the chain.

 

[mz]

There's some GDP related numbers here.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html

IIRC USA is around 5 % of GDP nowadays.
I don't know how much of that is stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan, how much technology and industry and how much other things...
It's somewhat above most other rich western countries...

Of course, many military technology programs yield directly useful stuff for civilians (I mean of course beside the basic job of the military), for example in aeronautics and space technology. Some similar programs in other countries could be under a different label.

 

[Hammer Birchgrove]

It is all about percentage of national wealth - GDP - no other measure matters. Not including Iraq and A-stan the US spending is near post WWII lows. The US can easily spend two or three times as much on defense as it does now and not even put a strain on the economy, assuming cuts elsewhere. Recently the Cato Institute added up all "welfare" programs. They amount to close to $900 billion per year. How is that war on poverty coming?

The US military has massively downsized since 1990/91 (I was critical of Bush 41 then too) especially the nuclear mission (don't get me started) to say the disarmament should continue due to some affordability issue is just plain nonsense.

You can spend a decent amount of money on welfare and still have a respectable defence force - look at Sweden during the Cold War, at least until the 1980's. Even past the 80's, we still had a great air force, and we still make our own fighter aircrafts, except for the engines and some of the weapons.

As for the Cato Institute - they find Ayn Rand attractive, so I must question the very sanity of everything they say or write...

 

[bobbymike]

Well if I had to decide between Maoists and Marxists in the White House (that silly philosophy that murdered/killed about 100 million people) and a think tank that espouses some of the libertarian ideas of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.....well I wouldn't be questioning anyones or groups, like Cato's, sanity. On a side note I always find it curious why the entire depth and breadth of a well respected libertarian organizations research can be put in doubt by some nebulous "affiliation" with Ayn Rand but as I said above a prominent White House official can say the biggest mass murderer in the history of the planet is their favorite political philosopher and no one bats an eye! ???

Also, I was not subjectively debating the level of guns or butter spending I was simple pointing out the obvious; and that is defense spending cannot reasonably be said to be at unaffordable levels with the federal government spending $3.6 trillion with only about $600 billion being for defense out of a $14 trillion economy.

 

[Hammer Birchgrove]

Well if I had to decide between Maoists and Marxists in the White House (that silly philosophy that murdered/killed about 100 million people) and a think tank that espouses some of the libertarian ideas of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.....well I wouldn't be questioning anyones or groups, like Cato's, sanity. On a side note I always find it curious why the entire depth and breadth of a well respected libertarian organizations research can be put in doubt by some nebulous "affiliation" with Ayn Rand but as I said above a prominent White House official can say the biggest mass murderer in the history of the planet is their favorite political philosopher and no one bats an eye! ???

I too was less than pleased by whassisname or whasshername who said he/she liked Mao (I saw only a short article about it here). Mao is as bad as Stalin.

I know I'm entering the area of bad rhetoric (argumentum ad hominem, guilt by association), but fact is that Cato Institute are big fans of not just Rand (a deplorable person in many ways, who were wrong in many issues, dishonest and a hypocrite), but also Milton Friedman (he too was wrong and also a pal with a mass murderer/state terrorist/dictator, yay freedom : ) and Friedrich von Hayek (the saner of the lot, then again he was a pal with Pinochet too...). Finally, if we indulge ourselves with an argument of authority, Alan Greenspan, a libertarian and a monetarist (based on Friedman's systems and ideas) has said he has been wrong about de-regulation, again placing doubt on whether we should believe the libertarian Cato Institute. Or, perhaps more constructive, be aware that most if not all of their research is influenced by their bias, and take whatever they're saying with a grain of salt. IMO.

Also, I was not subjectively debating the level of guns or butter spending I was simple pointing out the obvious; and that is defense spending cannot reasonably be said to be at unaffordable levels with the federal government spending $3.6 trillion with only about $600 billion being for defense out of a $14 trillion economy.

Fair enough.

IMHO I would rather spend/invest on tactical weapon systems like the F-22, F-35, stealth ships etc. than on strategic nukes. Nukes are useless against insurgents and terrorists and if you want to protect, lets say Georgia from Russia, a force of F-22's and F-35's are much better since you would actually be prepared to use them. A "tactical deterrent" of you will.

 

[Hammer Birchgrove]

To be fair, I hate all think tanks with the same gusto.

 

[Steve Pace]

It's a computer to gather flight-test data.

 

[Steve Pace]

CLICK HERE! <http://www.militarytimes.com/multimedia/video/index_da.swf?fa=armytimes&wa=armytimes&wd=575&ht=324&cp=21772&bw=&state=vid&em=false&fn=/flv/20080714_rc_f22>

 

[Sundog]

Here's the link

I enjoyed the narration on this one, it wasn't full of a ton of BS like most demo announcers spew at airshows.

 

[blackkite]

Wow!!
We really want to get this super fighter.

 

[sferrin]

Kinda dry. I like it with the music better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em5STCwbwo0

Now if I could just identify the music. :-\

 

[Machdiamond]

The music sounds very much like the Transformers soundtrack.

 

[sferrin]

The music sounds very much like the Transformers soundtrack.

There's a part in The Dark Knight sound track that resembles it but not quite. Ah well. I'll have to give the Transformers soundtrack a listen.

 

[blackkite]

We can see interlock between the elevator motion and the thrust vectoring nozzles motion through these videos. (taken from back side of the plane after landing)

 

[Machdiamond]

Speaking of Farnborough air display, I want to go on record to make a prediction:
Ten years from now (16 tops), we will see an air display at Farnborough of an Air Superiority UCAV pulling 20-25g's turns that will make the F-22 show look like kindergarten entertainment.

 

[blackkite]

Oh! Air superiority UCAV will be stronger than F-22?

 

[Steve Pace]

The first Block 8 Raptor flew recently... I've compiled a production list that of course is not complete and may not be 100% accurate. But I thought I'd share what I have so far. Also included is the latest pdf re F-22 Mission Brief (Oct 09).

 

[Steve Pace]

F-22A (03-079) of 1st FW, 94th FS shows open weapons bays; delivered 10/13/06

 

[Stargazer]

Though I'm not a great fan of the F-22 (the production version a little better than the prototype, but still...) I have to admit this is a superb shot! Thanks for sharing.

 

[JazzTime]

Sorry, Stargazer2006... perhaps, because you are the artist... this plane is deprived some "graceful ease", inherent in the previous generations...
I's known, that the beautiful plane flies beautifully...

 

[quellish]

Though I'm not a great fan of the F-22 (the production version a little better than the prototype, but still...) I have to admit this is a superb shot! Thanks for sharing.

Even if you are not a fan, see it perform at an airshow if you can. Video really does not do their routine justice at all.

 

[JazzTime]

OK!!! But... my opinion - F-22 - the victory of the forces (engines) over the beauty of (aerodynamics) ...

 

[flateric]

Where did Metz said this? Interview? Published media or TV? What interview and when?
Can anyone dig into memory?

Thanks!

 

[Trident]

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showpost.php?p=1483179&postcount=727

An interview for a History/Discovery Channel aviation documentary, according to sferrin

 

[flateric]

well, if I could find specific title...

 

[flateric]

I bet I was reading explanation somewhere (Sweetman's book? article in WAP or IAPR? don't remember) why Lockheed decided to cut a part of trailng edge and move stabilator forward. Does someone remember the reason they have done this (please no theories, just facts)? Thanks!

 

[sferrin]

I bet I was reading explanation somewhere (Sweetman's book? article in WAP or IAPR? don't remember) why Lockheed decided to cut a part of trailng edge and move stabilator forward. Does someone remember the reason they have done this (please no theories, just facts)? Thanks!

If you go find one of those "before/after" shots comparing the YF-22 to F-22A planform you can see what they did. There is an issue of Code One (and probably elsewhere) that describes why they made each of the changes. They clipped the end of the wing trailing edge to mount sensors related to the ALR-94 IIRC. They clipped the inside edge of the horizontal stab. for edge alignment, and they reduced the size of the vertical tails because they'd intentionally oversized them on the YF-22 to make sure they would have enough stabilty. The production vertical tails are more optimized to the aircraft.

 

[lantinian]

Clipping the end of horizontal stabs made no difference to their performance but it did add to the planform alignment of the aircraft edges.

Clipping the wingtips, was not done so the the ALR-94 can be installed but to improve its coverage.

As for clipping the flaps edge and moving the stabs forward....

The big root chord, though, moved the tails back. Eventually we even had to notch the wing for the front of the tails. If the tails moved farther back, they would fall off the airplane."

from http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1998/articles/oct_98/oct2a_98.html