Forum: F-22A Raptor

munny wrote:

Think this about says it all, Pierre Sprey's dream fighter force.....

...

Notice a pattern relating who had a hand in developing the majority of that force? This smacks of old man having an old man tantrum because his pride and joy is considered obsolete.

I think it's more personal than that. He threw his tantrum before he was old, right after the F-16 was built...larger and more capable than the YF-16 he championed. He's worked in the music industry since then. It's not that his plane is obsolete, it wasn't even his plane by the time it went from YF-16 to F-16. It's that everything he knew about planes, and therefore he himself, was obsolete since the F-16 proved itself. And importantly, proved itself more because it was larger and better equipped than the YF-16, rather than in spite of the changes he opposed. Even truly great aviation geniuses like Kelly Johnson felt a plane had to be designed to do one thing and one thing only. But that was then. Planes aren't designed with slide rules and paper any more; it's now possible to run gigantic calculations to optimize a design for multiple tasks. Nothing Sprey knows is at all current or relevant, and even then he was just slightly too old to re-learn his field from scratch. And that's what bothers him, and why his only hope of clinging to his self-image of past greatness is to loudly deny modern reality.

Sprey's theories, while groundbreaking at the time they were introduced, led to their own extremely rapid obsolescence. Sprey did such a good job in his heyday that simply put, the F-16 was approximately as maneuverable as a manned aircraft with a useful payload could possibly be. Chasing after the law of diminishing returns to find that little extra bit of maneuverability or energy retention to exploit the OODA loop was a losing game. First of all, aerodynamics was an established science so everyone knew how to do that, and soon all modern fighters were approaching the human limit of maneuverability. And that limit was a hard brick wall. It was proved when neither the X-29 (supermaneuverable) nor X-31 (thrust vectoring) were game-changers in exercises vs. existing fighters. And everyone had the same eyes in WVR so there was no advantage to be had there. The Germans further proved mathematically (leading to the Lampyridae project before they realized that stealth, while effective, was going to do anything but save them money vs. then-current fighters) that an advantage in medium-range combat was the most important advantage in the air. Changing the first O in OODA, by giving your plane better "eyes" to get first look and first kill (improved BVR radar and BVR missiles), or taking away your enemy's ability to lay eyes on you first (stealth), turned out to be more effective post-F-16 than trying to out-F-16 the F-16 for increasingly small dogfighting advantages. In air to air combat, a larger, more capable multi-role aircraft might give up slight advantages were a dogfight to occur; but would have more likely won before it ever came to the dogfight; among modern planes was still maneuverable enough that it wasn't at a major disadvantage even if it did come to a dogfight; and unlike a "lightweight day fighter" was actually still useful as a bomber after the air war was won.

Moreover, bombing proved in real combat to be a more important mission than dogfighting time and time again. The F-117 never scored a single dogfight victory but still proved invaluable. Even the F-16 itself has proven more valuable as a bomber than a fighter, as has the "not a pound for air to ground" F-15 in its recent incarnation as the Strike Eagle. So again, since what Sprey knew was small, single-purpose fighter and CAS aircraft, everything Sprey knew (and which was actually true and innovated when he first proposed it) was surpassed long ago. Being fairly young when he wound up with no further ability to make contributions to a field he had just been on top of, a realistic assessment of the future of air combat couldn't have been a pleasant life to look forward to for him. His bitterness is understandable, if not foregivable given its cost.

F-16.net Sponsor

@river otter.. my view also.
Sprey and the other detractors are on the outside looking in. As they are no longer part of the game as many of them once were, they have to find some sad fulfillment booing and hissing from the bleachers.

Forum: F-22A Raptor

Fighter mafia shoots down F-22