Actually, any front line pilot familiar with his aircraft can take his jet to its maximum performance in any airshow airspace. The issue is allotted time for training.
Am going to do a quick review of the flight control system loop for the benefit of the readers out there.
In a 3-axes fly-by-wire flight control system (FBW-FLCS), stability augmentation (stabaug) is constant and the process loop takes inputs from these components:
- Command
- Gyroscopes
- Accelerometers
- Air data
- Feedback position sensors
Flight control surface displacement is governed by continuous gain calculations of the above factors. But to put it simply, the slower the airspeed, the greater the displacement to make a maneuver. It make sense because the slower the airspeed, the less aerodynamic forces upon the fight control surfaces.
Russian fanboys are crying foul on why when their pilots does it the maneuver is useless but when the F-22 does it, the maneuver is 'combat' effective.
There is a reason why there is an angle-of-attack (AOA) limiter: Decreasing aerodynamic forces upon the flight control surfaces.
Decreasing, and eventually lack of, aerodynamic forces upon the flight control surfaces leads to out of control flight. In ACM, even a fraction of a second of loss of controlled flight increases your odds of dying to above the %50 threshold.
If we imagine the Su fighter to be continuously moving from left to right, at number 2 when the Su pilot command a full pitch up with the AOA limiter disabled, there is
ZERO pitot (ram) air component. Air data inputs consists of pitot (ram) and static pressures. At this point, the flight controls laws are operating at their maximum gains precisely because of zero pitot air. Any command from the pilot and the flight control surfaces will respond at the highest rate of movement and to the maximum limits of the hydraulic actuators at the flight control surfaces. In the absence of any of the above stabaug components, the FLCC is programmed to respond with defaulted values, which is equivalent to that of take-off and landing (TO/L) values. TO/L values are considered 'safe' values.
If there is an F-22 at the top of the 'cobra' movement, the Su pilot will be helpless to do anything about it simply because he turned into a full time pilot instead of a killer. He will need a guy-in-back (GIB) to do the shooting or to tell him when to shoot. Plus, his airspeed was near zero. A completely helpless position.
If we look closer to the F-22 in this thread, the only time when it was missing an air data input is at timestamp 3:33 to the end when the F-22 completed its loop. Airspeed was minimally lost or sacrificed and there were full aerodynamic forces upon the flight control surfaces.
For an airshow, the Su fighter would have made a tighter loop using maneuvers similar to the 'cobra', but in the real world, he would have been dead.
