At the beginning of September 1997, the F-22 Raptor fighter made its debut flight. Despite the grudge of many domestic and foreign experts, the performance characteristics of the aircraft are excellent, but several years ago it was finally discontinued. And the point here is not so much in its stunning high cost, but with the incidents arising from its operation.
Taxpayer Impact
The story that the F-22 Raptor hides can be published in adventure books. Everything is intertwined in it: the uncompromising nature of the US Congress, and the hysteria of the developers who were forced to combine the incompatible, and the delights of the first flights, and the mysterious deaths of pilots, and the constant limitations on operational loads ... The amount spent on developing the aircraft exceeded 70 billion dollars only according to official data.
Where did the origins come from?
American designers received the terms of reference for the creation of the new F-22 Raptor aircraft back in 1981, but at the same time, customers in the person of the government were well aware (but not all) that the development would, at best, last a couple of decades. In principle, just in those years, the brand-new F-15s entered the Air Force armament, the capabilities of which should have been enough for several years. And therefore, Washington immediately wanted to get equipment that would completely surpass both Soviet and European. Politicians dreamed of a completely versatile aircraft that could work as a fighter or attack aircraft. How did it work out? To judge you.
Perestroika never ends
The instrument filling was presented with requirements that were simply unthinkable at the time. So, the on-board computer should have a performance of at least 10 GFlops and a RAM of one gigabyte. I must say that the developers still managed to solve such a non-trivial problem using a simple i486 processor. But then the military was in for a blow: in 1996, just a year before the first flight, Intel Corporation announced the phasing out of an outdated model. Meanwhile, initially the Pentagon expected to get at least 1,200 aircraft, each of which required 80 (!) Processors. Where did they get them from? Lockheed Martin repeatedly tried to “squeeze” the developers, but Intel was a tough nut and did not want to release extremely outdated equipment in small batches.
And so I had to urgently rewrite all the software for the new processor. According to official figures, at least a billion dollars were spent on rework alone. In general, “unlimited time limits” turned out to be a hell of a costly affair. And that was just the beginning. Indeed, the fifth generation fighter ...
Count and cry
The military themselves dreamed of a prodigy, the cost of which would not exceed $ 40 million per aircraft. But the price was growing steadily, and therefore the Pentagon had to reduce its appetites. When 187 aircraft were built in 2011 (and production was phased out), it turned out that the cost of one machine exceeds $ 150 million. So the cost of the F-22 “Raptor” “surpassed” (and much) even the price of the F-117 (aka “Lame Goblin”), which until then was considered the record holder for this indicator. However, this machine still has much more positive features than the 117 model, which the American pilots respectfully called the “Flying Iron”.
Set of contradictions
Purely hypothetically, since the Raptor F-22 was not yet in real combat, the aircraft is extremely good in the sky. From the point of view of radar visibility, it is not so much different from the "standard" machines. From the assault point of view, the plane is simply nonsense, since for this money you can buy at least a dozen ordinary attack aircraft, the cost of servicing which is hundreds (!) Times cheaper.
And all this is by no means a consequence of the unprofessionalism of the designers. The Americans have always made good airplanes; experience in this field cannot be taken away from them. Just the developers at the time of the first flight had to make a whole set of compromises from the car. And this, as any technically savvy person can understand, has never led to anything good.
Compromise trail
So, we had to constantly go for a deterioration in technical characteristics. For example, the Raptor F-22 generally does not have an external suspension for missile and bomb weapons, which reduces its assault value to zero. This was due to the fact that, subject to the availability of this suspension, the aircraft became perfectly visible for radars. How noticeable the machine is for modern radar detection systems is not known for certain, since the “combat” use of the Raptor is currently limited to computer simulation.
Therefore, the entire "filling" is located in the internal compartments. There are four of them. In two - one rocket, in the other two - two. Moreover, according to the requirement of the customer, they had to start both in the assault and in the fighter version. As a result, it was necessary to create a complex device that could “push out” a rocket at supersonic speed. Moreover, this is done in two stages at once. First, a powerful pneumatic drive literally knocks a weapon out of the outer compressed air layer, and then the hydraulics throws the projectile onto its trajectory.
The US Air Force commanders wanted the response time of this wise mechanism to not exceed 0.2 seconds. That's just, despite the titanic efforts of engineers and scientists, in practice, this value is 0.9 seconds. And the point here is not the slowness of mechanics: if a rocket is pushed out faster at afterburning speed, its destruction occurs. So the reaction of the aircraft, let’s say, is slow.
It should be noted that not all missiles are launched so subtly and not in all flight modes: when attacking, a simpler device is used. If you do not go into details, then if you need to launch a projectile, a bomb hole opens, the rocket is laid on guides, and it starts from them.
Prioritization
In the end, it dawned on everyone that the F-22 Raptor didn’t go beyond the culmins at all, and therefore it would be necessary to sacrifice something. Scientists were given the task to maximize the flight performance of a fighter. Then the engineers decided to use engines with a variable thrust vector, and also significantly improved the contours of the airframe itself. For some reason, the Americans chose to stop only at a vertical change in thrust (our Su-35, for example, can change it in the horizontal direction).
Invisibility on the radar screens put in second place. Unlike the Lame Goblin, that is, the F-117, they were used so as not to harm the classical shape of the airframe and not to turn the plane into an iron from the point of view of aerodynamics. Departing from the topic, let’s say that in 1990, when the production of the Night Hawk was hastily curtailed, all the money from this program was transferred to the Raptor. Theoretically, the dispersion area of the F-22 Raptor is 0.3 m². At Goblin, this figure ranged from 0.01 to 0.0025 m². But the "Raptor" nevertheless decided to make it by plane, and not by a flying iron. Simply put, Lockheed Martin this time decided not to test the patience of Congress.
However, the normal compromise between stealth and precision bombing still failed. Even if considerable funds were spent on finding a solution. So, it was precisely for the sake of the Raptor that “smart” bombs were created with GPS guidance on the target. The fact is that the small bombs of the F-22 simply did not fit normal bombs with active guidance on the target. If you use "simple" ammunition pointing at the target with a laser beam, then all the stealth of the aircraft flies down the drain. So the help of the satellite was almost the only possible solution to this problem.
In general, the bombs turned out to be impressive: they can fly up to 30 kilometers from the discharge point, the deviation from the target does not exceed 11 meters. Strictly speaking, this is a rocket rigidly attached to the specific coordinates of the earth's surface. So if the target maneuvers, it’s unlikely that a fifth-generation fighter can hit it. Which again puts an end to his assault abilities. But this is not the only negative. To hit a stationary target with a smart bomb, the Raptor must fly literally under the nose of the enemy’s air defense forces. So, as an additional load, the missiles are loaded with missiles specially designed specifically to counter air defense.
Assault weakness
It is noteworthy that the universal F-22 Raptor, the characteristics of which we are analyzing, generally does not have special equipment for detecting and tracking ground targets, which again reduces its assault capabilities to a minimum. In general, not the designers were to blame for this: initially the aircraft had similar equipment, but it was removed from the structure at the request of the Pentagon, when the cost of the program was already too high. To the credit of the Lockheed Martin engineers, I must say that they still managed to save at least the basic means for targeted bombing. So, in the aircraft software there are all the necessary options that allow you to quickly and without much loss nevertheless connect the necessary on-board equipment, if the higher management gives the go-ahead.
However, so far the main means of hitting targets on the ground are just the GPS bombs mentioned above, whose effectiveness is great, but only when working on stationary objects. In general, this is precisely the reason why the Raptors did not take any part in the US military operations in Afghanistan. Who is there to catch on GPS? So also for this reason, the old F-16s are still in service with the Americans, for which there is no adequate replacement yet.
In general, given the war in Iraq, where the US military met a more or less serious enemy who had aircraft, the only conclusion suggests itself: to use the F-22 for a war with the countries of the Third World is utter stupidity. The flight hours of this aircraft are almost more expensive than a couple of old F-15s that will successfully perform the same tasks.
Pilot life support system
It may seem that the US Air Force received a car, which is a set of technical absurdities. In principle, there are grounds for such an opinion, but in fact, this technique has a lot of breakthrough technologies. But they are so “raw” that all the advantages they give are nothing in the face of the problems that they create. New items are complicated, expensive and moody in debugging. One of the most characteristic examples is a special pilot's life support suit. In fact, this "suit" in complexity almost surpasses the space suit.
The system is so sophisticated that you have to manage it using far from the weakest computer. If it fails, there is an option to manually switch to manual control (now switching is automatic). But already at the first tests in combat units, the pilots' bosses began to receive dozens of reports from pilots asking them to transfer them from the Lockheed Boeing F-22 Raptor to something more adequate. The fact is that upon entering and exiting maneuvers with severe overload, all pilots experienced acute oxygen starvation, on the verge of fainting. Then the army bureaucrats did not attach any significance to the complaints. Only in 2010, the next pilot turned out to be “weak” and simply fainted when the Raptor was withdrawn from a bend. As a result, the car crashed, a man died.
Subsequently, it turned out that the system of bleeding and forcing air into the pilot's suit was poorly designed. More precisely, the valve “chemically”: due to its inadequate operation, the air did not have time to properly bleed, as a result of which people were simply squeezed by excessive pressure. Moreover, the overload was so strong that even pulmonary alveoli contracted. As a result, one and a half hundred cars that were in operation by then had to be converted urgently. For more than a year, the Raptors were strictly forbidden to climb over five thousand meters (with a ceiling of 20 thousand).
Conclusions
It is believed that by now the car seems to have been brought to its final condition. But the question remains open - why spend so much money on the development of this aircraft. Hypothetically flawless fighters can be replaced by 4 ++ generation airplanes, and the Pentagon tries not to remember once again about their assault capabilities.
However, one should not be deceived: the unpleasant lesson by the Americans was learned quite well. When the development of the F-35 began, they decided to sacrifice maneuverability in favor of stealth. The customer then decided that with high dispersion rates of the radio signal such ideal flight characteristics are no longer so necessary. True, this time the Americans stepped on another rake, but this is not about that ... In conclusion, I would like to say that our PAK-FA is being tested with might and main. Most likely, our designers were able to take into account the negative experience of their overseas colleagues and are unlikely to repeat their mistakes.
It must be emphasized that, in spite of all its shortcomings, the F-22 Raptor fighter is almost the only Western aircraft capable of performing the famous Pugachev cobra. And this is a very unpleasant sign, indicating the high maneuverability of the machine, which is surely able to compete on an equal footing with our Su-37 and later models.
Key Specifications
- The total length of the glider is 18.9 m.
- The total maximum height of the hull is 5.09 m.
- The total wing span is 13.56 m.
- The total wing surface area is 78.04 m.
- The mass of the unloaded aircraft is 19,700 kg.
- The maximum mass of takeoff is 38,000 kg.
- The dispersion area is 0.3-0.4 square meters. m
- Forced engine thrust - 2 x 15 876 kgf.
- The maximum attainable speed is 2700 km / h.
- Speed in normal mode, without afterburner - 2410 km / h.
- The maximum permissible speed at the ground is 1490 km / h.
- The radius of combat use is 760 km.
- The maximum attainable height is 20,000 m.
- Overload during accelerations - 9 g.
- The main armament of the F-22 Raptor is a 20-mm automatic gun, eight air-to-air missiles or six smart bombs, or a combination of both.
Commissioning took place in 2005. A total of 187 aircraft were produced. Lost five fighters.
In conclusion, I would like to emphasize once again that the Raptor is an ideal example of negative PR, which is largely disseminated by the American military themselves. Yes, the plane has many economic problems that the Pentagon may not pay attention to at all. But from a technical point of view, the car turned out to be very decent. The only real drawback is the lack of multitasking.
For ground targets, the F-22 Raptor fighter can’t work practically, the effectiveness of three or four bombs is clearly insignificant. But in terms of the fight against enemy fighters, the plane is probably good, even if in practice this is not confirmed.
By the way, our T-50 also has only closed internal compartments for armaments, and there is no information about the presence of an external body kit ... So our fifth-generation and American fighters are clearly similar to each other. I would like to hope that under combat conditions their capabilities will not be tested. In addition, despite all the technical limitations of the Raptor, one should not forget that in modern aerial combat the lion's share of success is the use of modern missiles. And with them, the Americans are all right.
Finally, a huge plus of the F-22 and F-35 programs (for the USA, of course) is the movement of science and the running-in of completely new technologies. Domestic Su-47 "Golden Eagle" was created and run in with the same goals.