Who is the designer of F-22 Raptor?

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hsinchong

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Hello,

I've been trying to find out who was the actual designer of the F-22 Raptor. I'm not sure if Skunkworks Director Ben Rich or Vincent Devino designed it or not?
 
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No one can truly claim to be the chief designer of the F-22, gone are the days when it was "Kelly" Johnson that designed the U-2 and the Blackbird family. It is done by huge teams of designers using CAD/CAM computers now.
 
My recollection is that Bart Osborne was originally the head of the design team on the ATF. I think Sherm Mullin replaced him during the prototype phase. You should read Mullin's long form interview with Peter Westwick at the Huntington Library website.

CONTENTdm

hdl.huntington.org hdl.huntington.org
 
As FighterJock said: complex aircraft are designed by teams. There will be a project manager, who will coordinate the teams involved in everything.

"What [single] person designed the...?" is a question that's frequently wrong. One person may do something akin to a napkin sketch, but no one person can design an entire modern aircraft.
 
I doubt even "Kelly" Johnson did everything.
 
"Kelly" Johnson had more of a say in the look of the design than todays Project Managers. Take a look at the SR-71 and the U-2 programs. His successor Ben Rich (F-117A) was the start of the modern era.
 
kmrumble said:
My recollection is that Bart Osborne was originally the head of the design team on the ATF. I think Sherm Mullin replaced him during the prototype phase. You should read Mullin's long form interview with Peter Westwick at the Huntington Library website.

CONTENTdm

hdl.huntington.org hdl.huntington.org
Click to expand...
Program Managers
  • From the initial Air Force RFI release in May 1981 through the AF RFP release for the Concept Development Investigation (CDI) phase in May 1983, ADP (aka Lockheed Skunk Works) had a relatively small interdisciplinary team led by their advanced design group, headed by Bart Osborne.
  • In spring 1983, ADP assigned Bruce Wright as PM for the growing ATF activity.
  • Wright was replaced in June 1984. The Lockheed Corp. CEO considered ATF a must win, and in anticipation of a neck down from the 7 ATF contractors in the CDI phase, he assigned the new Lockheed-California Co. president, Dick Heppe, as the PM.
  • In January 1985 Sherm Mullin came over from the F-117 program to 'help' Heppe, which became his full-time job in September 1985 with the release of the Dem/Val RFP. He chronicles these changes in his terrific oral history and the Mitchell Institute paper, except Wright's name is notable by its absence. Mullin led the 3-company team until full-scale development was transferred to Georgia in 1991.
Chief Engineers
  • Bart Osborne was ADP's first Chief Engineer, from early 1981 to July 1987. In addition, he pulled double-duty as acting PM for the 1981 RFI response until Wright came on board in 1983.
  • From July 1987 until 1989 or so, Dick Heppe (also company president) and Dick Cantrell were the co-Chief Engineers. At this point, the design process had become a truly collaborative effort with GD-Fort Worth and Boeing-Seattle. The vehicle design underwent many iterations, and GDFW in particular had a significant influence on the net outcome. The YF-22 demonstrator design was frozen in 1989 (note: it was essentially a flight sciences demonstrator vehicle, more properly it was the XF-22.)
  • Don Herring of Lockheed's Georgia division led the Preferred System Concept design from 1988 into 1990 while on-site in Burbank. Mullin acknowledges Herring's role in the Mitchell Institute paper. The PSC not only refined the rather crude YF-22 configuration, but the PSC also involved the integration of all avionics/sensors, weapons, propulsion, utilities & subsystems and LO technology in a weight-compliant, producible aircraft.
  • Herring continued in the role of Chief Engineer until 1998, but with a more politically correct title: VP and Air Vehicle Integrated Product Team (IPT) Manager.
The configuration evolution from 1985 to 1987 is illustrated here:
www.codeonemagazine.com

<title>F-22 Milestones - Part 1 | Code One Magazine</title>

October 1985: The Lockheed proposal design configuration is frozen. The associated design, called Model 090P, had a streamlined nose, trapezoidal wing planform with positive sweep on both the leading and trailing edges, and four tail surfaces (two horizontal and two vertical). The large vertical...
www.codeonemagazine.com

edit: a few dates for PMs
 

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hsinchong said:
I've been trying to find out who was the actual designer of the F-22 Raptor. I'm not sure if Skunkworks Director Ben Rich or Vincent Devino designed it or not?
Click to expand...
By the summer of 1987 the design team in Burbank was facing a tremendous workload and numerous challenges, not the least of which was the need to interface with (i.e., play nice with) the engineering teams in Fort Worth and Seattle. Mullin, Heppe and Cantrell had no choice but to create an intermediate management layer, an anathema to the traditional Skunk Works modus operandi.

Some of these mid-level folks are mentioned in the Mitchell Institute paper, but others are not. All these folks had Chief Engineer titles, largely to justify their salary grade to Human Resources. Those that made the move to Marietta, GA in 1991 are denoted with an asterick.
Ben Averett* chief engineer, systems engineering requirements & operations analysis
Lou Bangert* chief engineer, propulsion integration
Rudy Burch chief engineer, avionics integration (succeeded by Dave Larsen*)
Lew Byars* chief engineer, vehicle integration
Vin Devino* chief engineer, airframe and cockpit design
Ed Glasgow* chief engineer, flight sciences
John Hammond* chief engineer, structures

As Mullin states, Gary Ervin was the ATF LO technology manager, and was as influential as any of the aforementioned folks. Ervin did not move to Georgia, and was replaced by Bob Magnus, a former LO engineer on the A-12 at GD-Fort Worth.

In layman's terms, the external arrangement was the responsibility of Ed Glasgow and Lou Bangert (for the world's first supersonic-efficient caret inlet). The internal arrangement, including the crew station and equipment installations, was the responsibility of Vin Devino. The Lockheed guys that drove the CATIA scopes and created the loft lines and build-to drawings for the PSC worked for Devino. Of course, Heppe, Cantrell and later Herring had the final say on various trade-offs and risk mitigation steps.

edit: overlooked a name
 
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Engineering is a team sport. An individual's satisfaction must be self-generated, from the design and analysis work itself and its contribution to the product. Otherwise you're in the wrong career. In the special access world, it's likely your work will forever remain anonymous, sometimes even to your spouse.

In this vein, three F-22 design factoids:
  1. ADP designed and validated (via wind tunnel and RCS range) the world's first supersonically efficient LO caret inlet about 10 years before the F/A-18 Hornet 2000 aka Super Hornet adopted same. In this case, I happen to know the names ... L. Dean Miller and Don Santman. This was a true breakthrough, and a key advantage for Lockheed in the ATF competition.
  2. Published accounts by Bart Osborne and Sherm Mullin mention that early ATF configurations retained a faceted nose because "we didn't know yet how to make a curved radome". ADP accomplished this goal in the 1984-85 timeframe, due to the RF design effort of Dave Young. https://sierrawave.net/david-young-...leaves-behind-an-afterglow-of-accomplishment/
  3. During the Dem/Val phase, a wind-tunnel 'fly off' was conducted among the 3 companies. Given the same set of performance requirements (3 critical points: transonic maneuver; supersonic cruise; supersonic maneuver) and design constraints (same planform, same wing root and tip thickness), each company defined their optimized aerodynamic wing design. The GDFW design was superior overall to the designs of Lockheed and Boeing, and was incorporated. [Unfortunately, I don't know the GDFW aerodynamicist name(s).]
 

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