By Bobbie Mixon
Aeronautical Systems Center Public Affairs
The curtain literally was drawn aside April 9 on a new era in aerial combat.
The F-22 Raptor, managed by Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was unveiled in ceremonies hosted at the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, Ga., by team partners the Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney.
The roll-out ceremony provided a brief preview of the first production F-22 next-generation, air superiority fighter in preparation for its first flight this month. Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall served as the event’s keynote speaker with additional remarks from Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman; George Kourpias, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; and Norman Augustine, chairman of the board of Lockheed Martin.
Gen. Richard Hawley, commander of Air Combat Command, the ultimate user of the F-22, provided the official announcement of the aircraft’s popular name. "This is the day we officially name a remarkable — in fact, a revolutionary — new multimission fighter," said Hawley in a videotaped statement.
"The name we give it carries a great deal of meaning to the people who fly it and maintain it, so we try to make sure the name fits the machine," Hawley said before announcing the official nickname of Raptor.
Widely regarded
The aircraft displayed at roll-out is the first of nine flyable F-22s to be built under the current engineering and manufacturing development contract. Two additional airframes will be built under the contract for ground-based static and fatigue testing.
"Roll-out is an opportunity for the men and women and the families who have dedicated so much to F-22, to see the first fruits of their labors." said Brig. Gen. Michael Mushala, F-22 System Program Office director. "The next exciting step is the return to flight."
The F-22 is widely regarded as the most advanced tactical fighter in the world, combining a revolutionary leap in technology and capability with reduced support requirements and maintenance costs. It will replace the aging F-15 Eagle as America’s front-line, air-superiority fighter, with deliveries beginning in 2002.
Its combination of stealth, integrated avionics, maneuverability and supercruise (supersonic flight without afterburner) will give the Raptor "first-look, first-shot, first-kill" capability against any potential enemy aircraft. The F-22 is designed to provide not just air superiority but air dominance, winning quickly and decisively, with few U. S. casualties.
True multimission effectiveness
The F-22’s inherent air-to-ground capabilities also give it true, multi-mission effectiveness, complementing the primary air-to-ground capability for which the now in development Joint Strike Fighter will be designed.
"Air superiority is not a God-given right of Americans," said Fogleman. "Somebody’s got to pay attention to this. It’s not a business you want to be second best in. You have to dominate. We must overcome an adversary’s fighters and surface-to-air missile systems to ensure air superiority for friendly forces."
Regarded as the most advanced tactical fighter in the world, the F-22 will replace an aging F-15C fleet. A fleet that was built after "...a third rate power (Vietnam) had administered a painful lesson about the importance of air superiority," said Hawley.
Hard working team
"The team has worked hard to bring Ship 1 to this point," said Tom Burbage, F-22 Team Program Office general manager for Lockheed Martin, "and it’s great to have people see and appreciate the result of all that work."
Raptors (derived from a Latin word meaning "to seize and carry off") are very strong, usually large birds, with hooked beaks and sharp talons for grasping, carrying, and killing prey.
As the Air Force celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with the theme "Golden Legacy and Boundless Future," Fogleman said the F-22 is the boundless future.
"It is not an airplane you use to defend your airspace. It’s an airplane that is used to dominate the other guy’s airspace," said Fogleman.
Air Force News Service contributed to this report.
When the first F-22 production aircraft rolled out last month, it represented the payoff of thousands of hours of simulated flight and engine testing performed at Arnold Engineering Development Center.
AEDC testing helped reduce the risk and cost of developing the F-22 by verifying the plane’s optimal shape and solving problems before the first aircraft was built.
"We reduce risk before the actual flight tests begin," said James McComb, AEDC F-22 program project manager. "Here, we can test aircraft modifications in the wind tunnel and provide to our customer data critical to the support of flight testing."
Extensive testing of the Pratt & Whitney F119 engine and wind tunnel testing of F-22 models played a major role in the program.
Beginning in 1988
AEDC began testing the F119 in 1988, 16 years before the expected service date of the aircraft. Center personnel tested the engine in several of AEDC’s simulated altitude test cells, including the Aeropropulsion Systems Test Facility (ASTF). This facility simulated the aircraft’s entire mission without leaving the ground.
During the demonstration validation phase of the F119 test program, engineers and technicians performed approximately 871 test hours with the wind tunnel operating.
Between December 1990 and February 1992, flight testing of the engine preceded the Air Force’s selection of Pratt & Whitney to manufacture and develop the F119 for the F-22. In February 1992, personnel started performing engineering, manufacturing and development testing on the engine.
This new-generation fighter engine will propel the Air Force’s new fighter above the speed of sound in supercruise mode without having to use its afterburner. While this helps keep fuel consumption down, it also keeps down heat, which reduces the vulnerability to heat-seeking missiles.
In February, Pratt & Whitney successfully completed an accelerated mission test and an altitude performance and operability clearance test that were important steps toward the initial flight release of the aircraft. AEDC provided simulated altitude test conditions for these tests.
The test center also performed about 50 percent of the engineering and manufacturing wind tunnel work on the F-22. Test personnel performed approximately 8,000 user-occupancy hours of wind tunnel testing to help refine the shape and performance of the aircraft and verify safe weapons release in flight.
A wide variety of wind tunnel testing has been done at the center, ranging from stability and control testing to aerodynamic drag testing to substantial weapons integration testing.
F-22 chief test pilot Paul Metz drove home the importance of the program, while praising AEDC’s contribution when he visited the center last year.
He compared the leap forward in technology being tested for the F-22 to the leap forward in bomber technology between World War II and today.
"Today, 20 B-2 bombers can do what hundreds of B-17s could do because of the leap forward in technological accuracy," he said. "Today, from bombing altitude, we can put a bomb inside the cockpit of a plane on the ground. We don’t need the large numbers of bombs or aircraft when we can actually target the enemy directly.
Technological leapfrog
"The F-22 presents us with that type of a leap forward, and with it we’ll be able to totally dominate every situation with smaller numbers of fighters."
The F-22 was designed to penetrate high-threat enemy airspace and achieve air superiority with a first-look, first-kill capability against multiple targets. It combines a highly maneuverable airframe at both subsonic and supersonic speeds with low observable stealth technologies.
The F-22’s integrated avionics and weapon systems will permit simultaneous engagement of multiple targets.
By Chris Martin • AEDC Public Affairs
The crucible of war has taught us many lessons, but none so vitally important to all airmen — indeed, to anyone concerned about winning our nation’s wars at minimum cost in blood and treasure — as the importance of air superiority.
Prerequisite for success
Air superiority is the prerequisite for success in all our military operations: on land, at sea and in the air. As (former) Secretary of Defense (William) Perry once put it, "Everything else we do depends on this air dominance." History bears this out.
All Americans should care deeply about this vital mission. They should know that our Air Force has a plan to guarantee United States air dominance for the next three decades — it is the right plan. It is the F-22.
But too many people — includingsome senior military leaders who should know better — still fail to understand how dependent this nation’s war fighting strategies for the next century are on complete and total dominance of the air.
The lessons of the past
They fail to understand that everything else we must do to prevail on tomorrow’s battlefield depends on our ability to be dominant in the skies over that battlefield. So our greatest challenge in the year ahead may be to keep this most important of our modernization programs fully funded and on track to full deployment by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
During World War II, our strategic bombing campaign in Europe began. We thought massed formations of bombers would overcome any defense. But that theory floundered when losses per mission passed 9 percent in October 1943; so we invented the P-51, a fighter that could stay with the bombers all the way to the target. The P-51 helped give us the degree of air superiority that we needed in the final years of the war.
Carrying the lessons forward
We carried those lessons into the Korean War and used a great air combat aircraft, the F-86, to dominate the skies over the Korean Peninsula. The airmen of those years downed 14 enemy aircraft for every one that they lost.
But by the Vietnam War, America’s military had forgotten the air combat lessons of World War II and Korea. The Air Force had focused on the nuclear strike mission to the exclusion of almost everything else, and had fielded great nuclear strike fighters like the F-105. We had adapted a fleet defense fighter, the F-4, to fill our other requirements, but we had neglected job one — air superiority.
In the six months from August 1967 to February 1968, North Vietnamese MiG-21s racked up a 17-to-1 kill ratio over our airmen and naval aviators. By the end of the war, the United states had reversed that ratio to 2.55-to-1 in our favor; but a third-rate power had administered a painful lesson about the importance of air superiority — a lesson we had learned years before, but that had been lost in our enthusiasm for new war fighting doctrines that came with the nuclear age.
After Vietnam’s sobering wake-up call, the Air Force refocused on the air superiority mission and built the F-15, an aircraft that will have been in service for 30 years when the first F-22 squadron is fielded in 2004.
In Desert Storm, the Air Force destroyed 45 Iraqi aircraft in air-to-air combat. We made it look easy because we had developed and fielded the world’s best equipment, trained our warriors to win the air battle, and stayed focused on job one.
Despite the lessons of history, the Air Force finds itself again defending the need for air dominance, and the need to invest the resources to guarantee it.
The requirement for tomorrow
Air superiority will be just as important on tomorrow’s battlefields. Because we have reduced our force structure by 40 percent, and have decreased our presence overseas, America’s military will fight as expeditionary forces, rapidly deploying decisive combat force from the United States to the theater.
This strategy requires the commander to provide our forces a sanctuary free from enemy aerial attack as they disembark at ports and airfields. As in Desert Shield, air superiority fighters will be the first in theater to provide cover for incoming forces. These fighters need an overwhelming advantage in capability to either deter an adversary or, if deterrence fails, fight outnumbered and win.
This nation’s war fighting strategies are founded on total dominance of the air. This dominance must be theater-wide, spanning both sides of the battlefield.
Key questions to answer
We talk of information dominance and digital battlefields; but how dominant will we be if the Airborne Warning and Control System, Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, Rivet Joint and other information-gathering systems are subject to attack by aircraft operating from sanctuaries — sanctuaries guarded by dense networks of modern surface-to- air missiles?
How precise will our attacks be if the attacking aircraft are forced to react to determined air- and surface-based defenders?
How effective will our maneuver-based strategies on the ground be if our enemies have the ability to observe our movements with reconnaissance aircraft operating from those same sanctuaries?
The answer to these and a host of other similar questions is the same: Not very!
Challenges to air superiority
Everything that America’s forces must do to prevail on tomorrow’s battlefield depends on our ability to dominate the skies, and the Air Force faces two issues that challenge our ability to provide air superiority.
First, nations continue to improve their aerial warfare capability. While the F-15C has established an unmatched combat record, other nations have stepped up to the challenge and have produced fighters that match the F-15C in several performance areas.
The MiG-29, SU-27, Mirage 2000, Rafael and Eurofighter 2000 each have performance advantages in some areas such as acceleration, radar capability, and/or firepower. These aircraft are aggressively marketed worldwide and we face improvements in both the quality and quantity of potential threat aircraft.
Second, potential adversaries looked at the American way of war and concluded that one way to counter America’s air dominance is with sophisticated air defenses built around modern surface-to-air missile systems such as the Russian SA-10 and 12.
This strategy seeks to deny America the ability to operate over enemy territory, and it will be an effective strategy against air forces that fail to appreciate the importance of, and deploy, low-observable technology.
Stealth and supercruise work together to shrink surface-to-air missile engagement zones, allowing us to hold the most highly prized targets at risk, destroy the enemy’s air defense system, and leverage the joint force by affording freedom of action.
Recent studies by the highly regarded Institute for Defense Analysis examined the ability of various aircraft to engage targets in the face of defensive systems that we can expect to encounter in 2015. They concluded that the F-22 will be able to attack 12 times the number of targets that could be engaged by a conventional aircraft such as today’s F-16 — without exposure to attack by the SAM that will be the foundation of those 2015 defenses.
Revolutionary leap in capability
The United States has the technology to guarantee air dominance well into the next century — it is the F-22.
The F-22 will be the most lethal and efficient aircraft in the world, allowing us to dominate the skies faster and with less support than ever before. The F-22 will deploy quickly to establish air superiority, with half the support required for an F-15.
In air combat, the F-22 will far outclass any adversary. The F-22 will sustain supersonic speeds without the use of fuel-consuming afterburners. This supercruise capability increases responsiveness, expands weapons envelopes, and reduces vulnerability to threats. Its stealth and supercruise will ensure survivability and lethality on the 21st century battlefield. Its advanced integrated avionics will allow the F-22 to neutralize the enemy before he can react, and will provide the pilot with dominant battlefield awareness.
Affording the F-22
The combination of stealth, super- cruise, and advanced avionics will give us a "first-look, first-shot, first-kill" capability. Moreover, the F-22 will be capable of delivering accurate air-to-ground weapons to hit crucial targets deep in enemy territory, such as weapons of mass destruction, long before they can threaten our deploying forces.
Fiscal constraints have always challenged our ability to provide for America’s defense, and the Air Force has met that challenge by adopting a sequenced modernization strategy that allows us to modernize all parts of the force within a fairly constant investment of about 10 to 12 percent of our total budget authority.
The current aircraft modernization cycle began in the early ’70s when we began to replace the Vietnam-era fighter force with the F-15, F-16 and A-10. In the ’80s we turned our attention to the bomber force and developed the B-1, B-2 and substantially upgraded the B-52 and the KC-135 tankers that leverage so many of our other capabilities.
Shift in focus
The ’90s have seen another shift in focus, this time to the airlift force, with development and deployment of the C-17 that is replacing the aging C-141. And that brings us full circle. It is time to begin a new modernization cycle and return our focus to the fighter force that is showing signs of age.
The F-15 we depend on for air superiority today will be 30 years old when our first F-22 squadron is fielded in 2004. The F-16 will achieve an equally ripe old age when it is replaced by the Joint Strike Fighter beginning late in the next decade.
As acknowledged in the recently released Congressional Budget Office report on tactical air modernization, this sequential modernization strategy has given us the world’s best Air Force with a relatively constant investment of about 10 percent of the Air Force’s traditional share of the DOD budget.
Our plan for the next century will sustain that record, but there are those who suggest we should change those plans in midstream. They would have us abandon our investment in the F-22 and take a different approach to maintaining air dominance into the next century.
They would have us wait for the Joint Strike Fighter, a relatively low cost fighter that will not have the stealth, supercruise and weapons capacity to achieve air dominance. It will be a capable replacement for the F-16, but it will not give us what we need to own the enemy’s air space.
Or, they would have us buy an upgraded F-15, a course of action that would consume most of the remaining resources we plan to invest in the F-22 and still leave us unable to be dominant in the skies over future battlefields.
Purchase plan
Many of those who urge us to abandon the F-22 do so because they don’t think we can afford all of the TACAIR modernization programs that are currently planned for the Air Force, Navy and the Marine Corps. One could get the impression that we are planning to buy all of these aircraft at the same time, crowding out all of the other important things that the services need to do their jobs. That is simply not true, especially for the Air Force.
The Congressional Budget Office report on TACAIR modernization puts it this way, "… the Air Force has made an effort to develop a phased procurement schedule that avoids large overlaps in aircraft purchases. That strategy means that the Air Force plans to begin JSF procurement when funding for the F-22 is tapering off."
Affordable investment
That phased investment strategy will give us an Air Force that is as dominant in 2021 as the one that proved so dominant in 1991 during the Gulf War. Can the nation afford less?
This nation has invested billions to achieve technological dominance in aerospace. With the F-22 we propose to spend less than 1.3 percent of a much reduced national security budget between now and 2002 to provide guaranteed air dominance through the first third of the next century.
Delays in this schedule not only threaten our warfighting capabilities but also that carefully crafted sequential investment strategy that has served the nation and the Air Force so well.
The F-22 flies in May. There are few uncertainties remaining about how much it will cost or how well it will perform. We can afford this program that will preserve air dominance for America and enhance the capabilities of every other part of the joint force.
Investing in the future
It has been more than 45 years since American soldiers have been subjected to attack by enemy aircraft. Perhaps this impressive record leads Americans to take our air superiority for granted. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To extend this record and ensure America’s continued military success, we must invest in the F-22. It will save American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen’s lives and ensure quick victories for our forces. Our investments in air superiority will yield enormous national security benefits and ensure that we can provide air dominance well into the 21st century.
Courtesy of ACC News Service
• The aft fuselage houses the two Pratt & Whitney-built F119 engines that power the F-22. It also contains all or part of the aircraft’s environmental control system and fuel, electrical, hydraulic and engine subsystems.
• The aft fuselage and wings were designed entirely on the three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) system called CATIA.
• The aft fuselage and wings are designed to withstand supersonic speeds for extended periods of time and extremely "high-g" maneuvers.
• The wings incorporate structural design modifications made early in the development program. After analyzing the results of live-fire tests simulating severe combat damage, engineers chose to reinforce the wing by replacing every fourth composite spar with one made of titanium. The titanium reinforcements ensure that the F-22 will be more survivable in combat.
• The wings are designed to be interchangeable from airplane to airplane.
• A completed aft fuselage weighs 5,000 pounds and measures 19 feet long by 12 feet wide.
• The aft fuselage is 67 percent titanium, 22 percent aluminum and 11 percent composite by weight.
• Approximately 25 percent (by weight) of the aft fuselage comprises large electron-beam welded titanium subassemblies called booms. The largest of these booms, the forward boom, spans more than 10 feet and weighs approximately 650 pounds.
• By weight, the Boeing-built portion of the wing is 42 percent titanium, 35 percent composite and 23 percent aluminum, steel and other materials in the form of fasteners, clips and other miscellaneous parts. Each wing weighs about 2,000 pounds.
• Each wing measures 16 feet (side-of-body) by 18 feet (leading edge).
• The welded booms of the aft fuselage are extremely weight-efficient and reduce the use of traditional fasteners by approximately 75 percent.
Acquisition reform initiatives and state-of-the-art technology will make the F-22 a cost-effective, front-line fighter for the 21st century, Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall said April 10 during a visit to the F-22 System Program Office.
The F-22 Raptor, which was officially unveiled during an April 9 roll-out ceremony in Georgia, is the service’s next-generation air dominance fighter designed to eventually replace the F-15 Eagle.
Widnall said commitments from F-22 contractors, which include Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney and Boeing, to control production costs, and effective Air Force management of the program will give the Air Force a new fighter "at a cost that is only a modest increase over the F-15 itself.
"What we have in the F-22 is an extremely cost-effective program that is vital to the future military strength of this nation," Widnall told workers at the F-22 SPO.
Fighter for the future
"We’re not talking about the F-22 arriving on the ramps today at our tactical bases," the secretary added. "We’re talking about it arriving between the years 2005 and 2010, and beyond. By that time the F-15 will be 35 to 40 years old.
"You can talk about how difficult it is to maintain an old aircraft, and you can talk about how we’ll get spares for an aircraft that has been out of production for that many years," she said. "So not even taking into account the increase in capability this aircraft will give us in stealth and dominance of airspace, you just reach a point where it is simply more cost-effective to go with new technology."
A model program
Calling the F-22 "a model program," Widnall said recent moves toward automated manufacturing and improved engineering technologies on the part of F-22 contractors will help hold down the price of the new plane.
"The program is very sound and sensible," she added. "We have worked very hard over the past few months to do as accurate a projection of costs as possible."
That effort, Widnall said, will give the Air Force a fighter that "will be a 25 percent more expensive airplane (than the F-15) with a nine-to-one increase in capabilities.
"Just that kind of tradeoff makes the F-22 extremely attractive," the secretary added.
Air Force plans call for purchasing 438 F-22s at a cost of $71 million each.
Widnall said she doesn’t expect the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, a Pentagon study due out in May, to affect that or the number of Joint Strike Fighters the service plans to buy, but she noted that Defense Secretary William Cohen said "everything is on the table" as part of the congressionally mandated study of defense forces.
While some lawmakers have questioned the need for the F-22 and other new aircraft, Widnall noted the proposed fighters serve distinctly different missions.
"We view the F-22 as the first-day air dominance fighter," concluded Widnall. "That is a unique mission — and it will be an enabler; it will make everything else possible."
By Brian Barr • Aeronautical Systems Center Public Affairs