F-22 crashes in Florida

[Wickerman]

The problem is you are saying people without technical expertise cannot comment on reliablity issue and the technology
This is what you said.......

I said it could either be cost issues, OR PROBABLY be reliability issues. I never branded the F22 as unreliable.

If you really believe what you just said, should you be shutting up too? As you also commenting on Reliability and technology isse and you have not any expertise....

I am not claiming anything with regards to reliability or technicality. Am just saying that these could PROBABLY BE the reasons. If you read my original post it is very clear. The reliability claim is your extrapolation of my statement. My statement was very balanced.

F-22 have issue so what is the problem? Do you think you can make an aircraft into service without any problem? I don't think you can, This is how an aircraft technology become mature, you find the problem when you have your hour logged and you fix it, Same goes a lot of thing in this world. You cannot error proof something so sophicated like a stealth jet.

Agreed Am not denying that. Am just saying it has issues. What is wrong with that?

I can tell you this, of the 5 aircraft i listed, B-2 and B-1 would have less hour than the F-22 as you train on a F-22 you don't train on a B1/B2. The thing is, you said probably and you bunch it to fact. You said probably mean you are not sure if F-22 have more or less hour than any other aircraft, you said fact to represent something you also think is uncertain, so where is that fact??

Can you give any sources for that?

I also said probably because I dont have exact figures. If you do, then please give me the exact figures. Plus you need to look at your answer to my first post. You compared the F22 (that hasnt flown in actual combat) with B2, B1 etc which actually have been in combat. And compared their crash rates. There is a difference. The B2,B1 if they had longer flying hours than the F22, then that explains why F22 has higher crash rates relative to the flying hours. So if you do have the exact figures for both flying hours and crashes for both types of planes, please do share it. Am not averse to accepting that F22 has the 2nd highest or 3rd highest crash rates or whatever.

You cannot use fact on a adjective (Costly is an adjective) as adjective is unquantifiable. You can say it's a fact the F-22 cost 150 millions (not 200 millions) but you cannot say it's a fact that 150 million is costly, COSTLY IS AN OPINION. As it doesn't, it depend on how people use it, how long people are gonna use it, what the function that provided.

I agree to an extent. Yes cost can be an opinion, but cost is not just an opinion always. It can be considered as a standalone figure, and it can be deemed high. It can also be used as a comparison. . I can compare 2 products providing the same service and compare costs. So I compared the F22 with other air superiority fighters. Agreed the F22 has so many features that other aircraft dont, but the fact that other aircraft serve, while the F22 doesnt casts doubt on the F22. It makes you wonder if it is just overpriced but actually cant deliver. This is a reasonable doubt.

You can say it's costly in your opinion, but you cannot say those are a fact

It is indeed a fact that the F22 is costlier than other fighter jets that serve in a similar role! This is undeniable. And this is indeed fact.

BTW this is an interesting read, or atleast it seems to be. I havent read it, its too late, am too tired. Ill read it tomorrow, nevertheless I'll leave the link here for you:

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/dae/articles/communiques/FighterCostFinalJuly06.pdf

According to that the F22 comes out to be the costliest. BTW the F22 might indeed turn out to be cheaper when it comes to variable costs, or operating costs, but please point those figures out to me. So we can actually compare.

Well, if you only count combat experience is forward deployment, then you have to say there are no forward deployment with F-14 as they have no yet been into combat situation. (Well, not the Iranian F-14...) A deployment is a deployment, you need to fly the aircraft doesn;t matter if you are gonna fight other, the fact (THis is fact) is you get more chacne to get damage or shot down in a combat situation only, but does that mean a no-fly zone patrol or airspace patrol not forward deployment? I don't think so.

I didnt get this paragraph of yours. How did F14 get into the discussion?

Personally i don't think F-22 is a good plane as i am a fan of boeing and my brother work for boeing as an engine technican. But you cannot denial the achievement of the F-22 regardless if you know anything in aviation. Military or Otherwise

I havent denied anywhere that the F22 has some amazing tech stuff in it. But the fact that it hasnt impressed anybody that much through its combat performance, makes you wonder if it is just an overpriced plane with spectacular technology, albeit at an immature state. In the light of all the crashes etc., it strengthens that doubt.

 

[jhungary]

I am not gonna quote your post as it will just make it much more complicated.

1.) I was just saying becuase that is what you said, some people should not make comment on reliablilty and technical issue and yet you are expressing concern the project probably reliability issue. I am just saying you probably just put your own foot in you mouth, for me, anyone is fair game lol

2.) No problem as long as you acknowledge every aircraft have their own problem since birth........

3.) I can only calculate the flight hours as all the flight log are classified

An average Fighter Pilot have to fly 200-300 hours to keep his wing. And 1 F-22 does not only service 1 fighter pilot, and we know from fact (that thereare more F-22 than B-2) that there will be more F-22 Pilot than B-2 Pilot. and the B-2 pilot average 2 sortie per month (Exact word are 1-4 sortie per month) with 4 hours average per sortie (According to 131 bomb group exact word are few hours to 24 hours depend on mission, but average 4 hours per sortie) Simple mathmatics. You got a F-22 Pilot with 200-300 hours a year where a B-2 pilot would have average 96 hours per year. Put in the effect B-2 only enter service 1 year ahead of F-22, so if the calculation is correct, F-22 would have more hour than B-2.

131st Bomb Wing pilots reach 1000 flying hours
ANG Fighter Pilot: How many hours per year? - Airline Pilot Central Forums

3.) I am just saying the costly factor is not a fact, costly is an objective factor, mean you judge it according to your standard. And since different people have different standard, you cannot call costly a fact.

You can say it cost 150 millions, that's a fact, but that does not represent anything. And yes they are the most costiest air superiority fighter of today, but does it mean it's costly, depends. As you also need to know there are no Air superiority fighter can do what the F-22 do currently. If you ask me, 150 mil a pop for nearly 20 years and counting of Air Dominance, it's worth the pricetag and hence not costly.

4.) The F-14 story is form what i response to your F-22 non front line service. F-14 itself was designed and deployed in the early 70s, yet its first deployment is on Desert Strom and only fire after desert storm finish and begining of the no fly zone phase.

There are many reson why the latest fighter were not deployed in the war zone, reliability is one of those, also secrecy is another, if you deploy and you got shot down, theneveryone in the world would know the secret. Or necessity is also a factor controlling on the forward deployment.

 

[VCheng]

USA designed it, built it and flew it. If there is a problem, USA will fix it. Being at the very leading edge of technology is never a comfortable place, but that is also why only the best can go there.

 

[Wright]

USA designed it, built it and flew it. If there is a problem, USA will fix it. Being at the very leading edge of technology is never a comfortable place, but that is also why only the best can go there.

Not to mention it was/is the first of its kind, a stealth air superiority fighter. Mistakes are bound to happen.

 

[v9s]

Uh-oh!

Another Day, Another $678 Million Stealth Jet Wrecked
The Air Force admitted losing two of its 184 — make that 182 — top-of-the-line F-22 Raptor stealth fighters on Thursday. It was one of the worst days yet in what’s turning out to be a bad year for the pricey, radar-evading jet built by Lockheed Martin.

At 3:30 local time on Thursday an F-22, apparently belonging to the 325th Wing, a training unit based at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, plunged into the ground in a wooded area inside the base perimeter near Highway 98, sparking a small fire.

The pilot ejected safely. “The cause of the crash is still under investigation and additional details will be provided as soon as they become available,” the flying branch said in a statement.

The same day, the Air Force copped to an earlier accident involving the stealth fighter, which costs as much as $678 million per copy (depending on how you crunch the numbers). On May 31, a student pilot on his second solo Raptor flight at Tyndall neglected to power up his jet’s engines fast enough after retracting the landing gear.

“Without sufficient thrust, the aircraft settled back to the runway, landing on its underside,” the Air Force explained in its official report, released on Thursday.

In June, 325th Wing spokesman Herman Bell said the incident would likely be categorized as a “class A” accident costing more than $2 million to fix.

In fact, the repair cost totals $35 million, the Air Force said yesterday. That could put the damaged stealth fighter out of action for years, assuming it gets patched up at all. The F-22 is made largely of advanced composite materials that are expensive and time-consuming to replace. The flying branch preserved the tooling from the shuttered Lockheed Raptor factory specifically for extensive repair jobs.

The recent crashes are only the latest bad news for the cutting-edge F-22, which currently ranks as the Air Force’s most accident-prone fighter. The last of the Raptors rolled out of the Marietta, Georgia, factor in December and flew into a veritable firestorm of controversy.

The Air Force twice grounded all or some of the fleet over concerns about the Raptor’s apparently faulty oxygen system, which might have contributed to a fatal crash in 2010. Two F-22 pilots even mutinied, refusing to fly the speedy, high-flying jet until the Air Force worked out its problems. Months of investigation costing millions of dollars failed to definitively solve the jet’s oxygen woes, although the Air Force is installing a backup oxygen generator just in case.

It seems clear neither the May crash nor yesterday’s incident are related to the stealth plane’s oxygen flaw. But that hardly softens the blow from the recent mishaps. The Air Force wanted 381 F-22s but in 2009 then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates cut that number to just 187, dismissing the pricey jet as a “niche, silver-bullet solution” to the Pentagon’s air-defense needs.

Normally the Air Force sets aside around15 percent of its fighters for backup and crash replacement. Not so in the case of the F-22. “There’s zero attrition reserve built into our fleet plan,” Maj. James Akers, then-chief of Air Combat Command’s Raptor branch, said last year.

Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he wanted to build more F-22s, but later retracted the statement. Despite the appearance of new Russian and Chinese stealth fighters, the Obama administration has not expressed any interest in reopening the Raptor production line, preferring instead to continue developing the smaller F-35.

But the F-35 has been repeatedly delayed, so much so that even once-stalwart defenders of the program — history’s most expensive weapons procurement — have wavered. That leaves the F-22 to hold the line mostly on its own for years to come. But every crash leaves the frontline Raptor squadrons with fewer jets, and less firepower in the unlikely event of a full-scale war.

Another Day, Another $678 Million Stealth Jet Wrecked | Danger Room | Wired.com

A bad week for the USAF.

 

[VCheng]

Not to mention it was/is the first of its kind, a stealth air superiority fighter. Mistakes are bound to happen.

Mistakes are an opportunity to improve, that is all.

 

[fallstuff]

This is basic probability. The more complicated an aircraft is, higher the chances that something will go wrong.

 

[pakdefender]

This is basic probability. The more complicated an aircraft is, higher the chances that something will go wrong.

That’s true for every system, the US financial system is another example where credit and it derivatives got so complex that when is started to go wrong no one really knew what the hell was going on.

The F-22 has been under development since 1986 , there is bound to be code and ip in there whose original designers have moved on and even with the very strict DoD requirements for documentation , there is every chance that this machine absorbs so much complexity that in itself becomes a problem

Designers that work on avionics (both hardware and software components) will not always be there and once you have large chucks of complex legacy code in the design, which was signed off earlier, then no one really wants to fiddle with it (and end up taking the blame if something goes wrong afterwards) at this stage when you will get problems that no one will fully own and as a result no one will fully solve them!

 

[Esc8781]

Keep on bashing the f-22. ;

 

[Thorough Pro]

No big deal, teething problems. More complex the tech gets, more time it takes to get the bugs out.

 

[Luftwaffe]

Reliability is in Question, beginning to see these F-22s as merely technology demonstrators.

 

[A.Rafay]

One f-22 crash is not a big deal. Thousands die everyday !

 

[Mahmoud_EGY]

Well, you have admit that plane catches a lot of attention

If a MiG crashes, nobody cares...but a Raptor....WOOOSH...

It's a star plane. A superstar



Glad to know

maybe most members here see the F 22 is a threat to their homeland so they feel good if they knew it is a failure

 

[VCheng]

maybe most members here see the F 22 is a threat to their homeland so they feel good if they knew it is a failure

The F-22 is not a threat to anybody. It is merely one manifestation of USA sweating more in peace so that it bleeds less in war, to paraphrase Gen Patton, that is all.

 

[gambit]

I said it could either be cost issues, OR PROBABLY be reliability issues. I never branded the F22 as unreliable.

You have been playing fast and loose with your interpretations based upon facts. Typical of those who have no military experience, let alone military aviation experience.

If I have 100 F-16s and manned them with 50% of fresh out of flight school pilots and let them loose, am going crash a lot of aircrafts.

If I have 100 F-16s and manned them with 50% of seasoned and/or combat experienced pilots and let them loose, am still going to crash a lot of aircrafts. Probably even more than the previous example.

Are you going to tell me that the F-16 is problematic based upon those statistics?

I have an excellent book for you that I also have on my shelf...

Amazon.com: How to Lie with Statistics (9780393310726): Darrell Huff, Irving Geis: Books

...Just in case you have no education even in basic statistics.

I got 4 yrs on the FB-111A/D/E/EF, 6 yrs on the F-16A/B/C/D up to block 30, I pulled a short duty with the USAF Systems Command (Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio), specifically with Foreign Technology Division, dissecting, testing, (re)building, and operating Soviet avionics up to the point when the USSR collapsed, then nearly 8 yrs in civilian life in avionics between flight controls and radar where I used to design field tests on low altitude radar detection of low altitude subsonic targets, in both over land and water at the time when a 'laptop' was an expensive luxury and had to rely on TI calculators to crunch data.

So yeah...I think I have enough background to call your criticism bullsh1t.