Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

Last edited by firstimpulse on Jul 04, 2012 - 04:08 AM; edited 1 time in total

Here's the scenario:

The year is 2025. China has been under the control of a tyrant for six years now, and it's military capabilities are several times what they were a decade before. China's tyrant decides to boot the US out of the Pacific, and uses hypersonic submarine-launched cruise missiles to decimate US bases across the Pacific Rim. Now, not twelve hours after the opening fusillade, the PLA is preparing to effectively end the war, using the newly captured Anderson AFB as a staging point.
However, the USS John F. Kennedy and it's carrier strike group were untouched by the initial attacks, and now prepares to counterattack. Two USAF F-22 Raptors from the 90th Fighter Squadron are forced to land on the Kennedy after stopping a portion of the initial Chinese strike. Their pilots are Weapons School graduates and former test pilots. For the next seven days, they prove invaluable to the liberation of Guam.

^That's a bit of the backstory from one of the books I'm working on. My question is, could a Raptor (either current F-22A or a new-build F-22C) survive operating off of a carrier for a week? The aircraft in question would not be modified more than is possible aboard a carrier in wartime.
The book is years from hitting shelves, but this is one of the core concepts, and I'd like to know if it's plausible or not.
For those wanting more explanation, a rough draft of the full backstory is attached.

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Sure it may be able to land on a carrier with the emergency tail hook. Egress from the ship though I am not sure.

pants3204 wrote:

Sure it may be able to land on a carrier with the emergency tail hook. Egress from the ship though I am not sure.

TVC and 70k lbs of thrust should be able to take care of that. Cool

Wouldn't the hook get ripped right off trying to stop the F-22 in just the length of the carrier deck?
Does the F-22 have the nose gear assembly required to even hook it up to a catapult?

Seems more likely that they would land on a stretch of highway somewhere friendly, and be resupplied by V-22s.

count_to_10 wrote:

Wouldn't the hook get ripped right off trying to stop the F-22 in just the length of the carrier deck?

Yep, and the gear would be crushed.

Navy arrestors on carriers are a WHOLE lot more abrupt/short than the emergency cables on USAF runways.

Next bright idea?

TEG

That_Engine_Guy wrote:

count_to_10 wrote:

Wouldn't the hook get ripped right off trying to stop the F-22 in just the length of the carrier deck?

Yep, and the gear would be crushed.

Navy arrestors on carriers are a WHOLE lot more abrupt/short than the emergency cables on USAF runways.

Next bright idea?

TEG

Not even a single landing eh? Crying or Very sad

firstimpulse wrote:

That_Engine_Guy wrote:

count_to_10 wrote:

Wouldn't the hook get ripped right off trying to stop the F-22 in just the length of the carrier deck?

Yep, and the gear would be crushed.

Navy arrestors on carriers are a WHOLE lot more abrupt/short than the emergency cables on USAF runways.

Next bright idea?

TEG

Not even a single landing eh? Crying or Very sad

All is not lost. You could do some nifty cloak-and-dagger with a forward basing concept and a deserted stretch of highway. Granted, you have to figure out where that highway would be in the pacific...

Well hey, you're writing fiction remember? I suggest a large dollop of handwavium applied to the "modified" arrestor gear.

Hope you'll excuse me butting in with my Two Cents

But as far as carrier ops go maybe a "souped-up" F-35C? Google FA-XX you'll be surprised how often using the F-35C as a base comes up. Although as of this writing the F-35C doesn't seem to be able to land on a carrier either with the current tailhook design. See this thread <a href="http://www.f-16.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=218759#218759">here</a> and
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2012/01/d ... es-011712/ for more information.
Hope that's of some use - best of luck with your book! Thumb

Last edited by delvo on Jul 04, 2012 - 07:21 PM; edited 2 times in total

An F-22 is not able to fly slow enough. Aircraft carrier launches & landings are done at speeds below the minimum it takes to keep an F-22 flying. This causes a couple of different problems, one for landing and one for launching.

If the F-22 pilot tried slowing down to carrier-landing speed, the plane would just fall into the water, so his landing attempt would have to be at an F-22's actual landing speed. If it snagged the wire at all, not only would there be the damage to the hook as mentioned above because the wire on an aircraft carrier is so much tighter than a land base's wire would be, but it would also damage the wire and/or the things that hold the wire, because those are only designed to handle up to a certain amount of force. The plane might catch the cable but break something and just keep going and slide off the front of the ship into the water anyway, but even if it didn't, the damage to the plane (which the carrier is not prepared to fix), not only in the hook system but also in the landing gear because of the faster descent rate than the plane was designed for, wouldn't be the only problem. The damage to the wire mechanism would also interfere with operations of the ship's own aircraft until it got fixed, and if parts of the plane other than its tires hit the deck because of its landing gear breaking, that might damage the deck. The only good that would have been served is keeping the pilot alive, but that goal is better served by having him eject and ditch the plane close enough to a ship for the pilot to get picked up from the water.

As dramatic as the landing-with-damage scenario sounds, though, the most likely outcome of an attempt would be not snagging the cable at all but zipping right by or crashing into the ship behind the wires, or catching it but being too far off to one side or the other and either falling off the side anyway or hitting someone/something else on the deck. Catching a ship's cable properly is hard to do, and non-Navy pilots in planes that aren't supposed to do it don't train for it.

For launching, by the time it got to the end of the deck while trying to take off, it wouldn't be up to its minimum speed for flight yet, and it would just fall off the edge. Its only hope might be to very quickly pitch up so that its its engine thrust pointed at some upward angle to add enough to its aerodynamic lift to avoid hitting the water, but that has its limits too so it's unlikely to work, especially while carrying any load at all. And you don't even get to try it with a plane that has no catapult attachment (or front landing gear strong enough to yank the plane forward by) and suffered irreparable damage (or just fell into the water) when it first arrived.

And even if we ignore those problems, there's the fact that an aircraft carrier and its crew are just not prepared for even routine between-flights work on a type of plane that is never based on aircraft carriers, although I don't know exactly what needs to be done between flights or whether it can be skipped a few times.

* * *

You've said the pilots were test pilots before. That diversity of flying experience could enable someone who ditched an F-22 to start flying an F-35C instead if the ship had more planes than pilots. Or if you make them current test pilots instead, you can put them in some kind of prototype for a new plane that wouldn't quite be anything we've got yet. It could even be an F-22 derivative. There was originally going to be a naval version. It would have dealt with the need for a lower minimum speed with Tomcat-like swing-wings.

Or you could have them flying a known current type of plane that could survive flights to and from an aircraft carrier but might also be primarily based on land in some cases. F-35C will never be based on land, but some foreign air forces are considering getting F-35B instead of F-35A as a precaution against damage to their airstrips. I don't think that includes Japan or South Korea, but it does include Taiwan.

Well, from that synopsis, it sounds like if the valiant test pilots tried to land on a flat-top, its Captain would order them shot down with the carrier's Phalanx Vulcans. The next pulp fiction question is....could the Phalanx radar get a lock on them?

redbird87 wrote:

Well, from that synopsis, it sounds like if the valiant test pilots tried to land on a flat-top, its Captain would order them shot down with the carrier's Phalanx Vulcans. The next pulp fiction question is....could the Phalanx radar get a lock on them?

Well, if they had their landing gear down for landing, I don't think that will be a problem.

delvo wrote:

An F-22 is not able to fly slow enough. Aircraft carrier launches & landings are done at speeds below the minimum it takes to keep an F-22 flying. This causes a couple of different problems, one for landing and one for launching.

And even if we ignore those problems, there's the fact that an aircraft carrier and its crew are just not prepared for even routine between-flights work on a type of plane that is never based on aircraft carriers, although I don't know exactly what needs to be done between flights or whether it can be skipped a few times.

* * *

You've said the pilots were test pilots before. That diversity of flying experience could enable someone who ditched an F-22 to start flying an F-35C instead if the ship had more planes than pilots. Or if you make them current test pilots instead, you can put them in some kind of prototype for a new plane that wouldn't quite be anything we've got yet. It could even be an F-22 derivative. There was originally going to be a naval version. It would have dealt with the need for a lower minimum speed with Tomcat-like swing-wings.

You've got some good points there! But last time I checked an F-35C takes carrier landings at over 140 kts. Either I've got some serious memory loss, or an F-22 lands on conventional runways barely faster than that. Of course, the problem is stopping in time. Considering a carrier sailing into the wind at 30 kts, and the entire space of the flight deck used for a landing, it seems to me a near-stall landing followed by a stomp-on-the-brakes decceleration might just do it. And, of course, the Raptors in question would be on fumes and weaponless after the massive opening dogfight.

And if they still can't pull that off, maybe they could pull a hail-mary Cobra just as they cross the back of the ship, and then level out just before they hit the deck.
Like this,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=en ... g&NR=1
Only with wheels-on-deck afterwards.
...or maybe I need to play less HAWX and more X-plane.

The on-board maintenance is a problem. Perhaps I could cheat and have some AF wrench turners/Lockmart engineers get on the ship somehow early on, but the simple fact that nobody from the Navy would know how to do routine maintenance or even put missiles on the birds is something I'd have to work really hard to get around.

When it comes to taking off, F-22s have been known to rotate for takeoff in 800ft- without a head wind to help with lift, and with full A2A weapons loads (IIRC).
The length of a Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier's flight deck is 1092ft. I never intended the Raptors to launch from the catapult- even I'm not that much of a dreamer! Laughing

When it comes to switching aircraft, I do know the prototypes for the F/A-XX should be around at that time... although I really wanted to showcase the F-22.
An F-35 in the story is an even match for the bad guys, and can kick some serious butt if flown right.
An F-22 would be the "hero plane" and dang near invincible with good piloting- although it'd come close to being beaten many times because of the numbers of the enemy.
An F/A-XX would cream everything without lifting a finger, and be no fun.

We all know that APA is terrible most of the time, but they have some interesting things to say about a naval Raptor- and perhaps I could incorporate a few of these features into an Air Force F-22C? Beware of unfounded F-35 bashing.
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-230209-1.html

firstimpulse wrote:

pants3204 wrote:

Sure it may be able to land on a carrier with the emergency tail hook. Egress from the ship though I am not sure.

TVC and 70k lbs of thrust should be able to take care of that. Cool

I take it you're assuming a takeoff without using the catapult?

Quote:

And if they still can't pull that off, maybe they could pull a hail-mary Cobra just as they cross the back of the ship, and then level out just before they hit the deck.
Like this,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=en ... g&NR=1
Only with wheels-on-deck afterwards.
...or maybe I need to play less HAWX and more X-plane.

I'm pretty sure it would crush it's landing gear trying to land like that.
I've seen a video of someone land a 747 on an aircraft carrier in X-plane. It had to be stripped down to minimal weight and just enough fuel to land, and actually came in from bellow the carrier deck: the guy pulled it up into a stall just high enough to clear the deck and slammed on the breaks. No grantee that the simulation didn't overestimate the strength of the landing gear.
Can't find it now, but this is what you are imagining, right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAtw2FDS ... re=related

Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

F-22 Fictional Carrier Ops