Forum: F-22A Raptor

MKeldergod wrote:

2 billion for $ F-35s? nope, it would be plain stupidity to assume this aircraft would be more expeensive than a F-22. The F-35 will be built for other countries too which would only make it cheaper. Also i think the Comanche was cancelled due to the New Unmanned Heli.

If you actually took my advice and looked you would have found that was indeed the case to fund (4) of the pre-production representative airframes. I'll gladly find it for you and post it here...if not this weekend, this coming week sometime. For anyone out there that actually digs for info before posting, you'd want to search DoD/Congressional Budgets on the respective websites....Check

F-16.net Sponsor

Just looked...

FY 2007 Budget
Type: F-35 Advance Procurement Quantity: 5 Cost Each: $173,940,000.00

Its all public information if your willing to go search for it MKeldergod!

Quote:

And what happens when you think you're going to buy 2000, spend the $40 billion to develope it and then end up buying only 200? Welcome to the real world.

Well, you shouldn't buy 200 if you initially plan for 2000, period. As for the F-22, the intent was to buy 700~750 and therefore a $36 billion investment in the development is about $48 million per aircraft. At some point reducing the buy will not save you money and will only cost you capabilities. IMHO, the point is reached roughly when amortized development costs exceed production costs. In other words at roughly 300~350 aircrafts for the F-22 where R&D and production costs become roughly equal.

This is why I have always said that buying 183 Raptors is a bad decision. Instead the Air Force should buy about 400. Instead of a 1780 F-35 + 183 F-22 buy ratio, the buy ratio should be ~1200 F-35 to ~400 F-22. The total costs in both cases will be approximately the same. A 600 unit buy reduction for the F-35A will increase F-35 total unit cost by about $3 million per aircraft. That is insignificant and will not affect the export potential in any tangible manner.

This is also what I think the air force will try to do. At least thats their goal whether or not it ultimately plays out that way. Basicallly, the USAF's strategy right now is to keep the F-22 line open year after year. Every year they succeed in doing so will ad 20~24 Raptors to the inventory. The last bout of F-22 continuance fight ended in a USAF victory in with the congress agreeing to fund the F-22 for three consecutive years (2006-2008) at a constant 20 aircraft per year. Hence, the F-22 willl not face even a line shut down discussion for at least that period. The USAF's strategy is to ultimately make it a yearly norm to build 20~24 Raptors at a cost of about $2~3 billion. If production is sustained to about 2020, the USAF will get the ~380 Raptors that it wants. There is also another specific reason for the 3-year deal. It takes F-22 production beyond the Bush Administration's term in office. Actually, is more like they wanted to secure F-22 production past the lifespan of the Rumsfeld DoD. At the time, it was not known that the Rumsfeld Pentagon will be ended before the Bush administration's term ends. This is why they went for 20 aircrafts/year at a higher unit construction costs when it was clear that they could have gotten the same 60 Raptors for less money had they acquired them at 30~36 per year.

Personally, I don't see any chance of Raptor production ending before 2012~2015 at the earliest. Even if the congress tries to kill it, it'll take a few years to finally close the lline. They have never in history succeeded in terminating a weapons production program on a "end it tomorrow basis".

checksixx wrote:

... I can say that anyone who thinks we don't need the F-22 or the F-35 has never been on a flightline full of broken and/or canabalized jets before. ...
Check

I think it's hilarious that you would use this as an argument for why we should procure the Raptor. The fact is, if you have a flightline full of Rators you still posses a flightline full of broken and cannibilized jets!
Such is life in the fighter world. Very Happy

Naa...your just one of the few I was speaking about...Oh and next time put my whole quote there, the whole thing was my argument...

To borrow what you said in another thread, "Just for clarification purposes... I am not a crew chief. I'm a LO guy. Take anything I just typed with a grain of salt." Don't worry about that at all...Check

checksixx wrote:

Naa...your just one of the few I was speaking about...Oh and next time put my whole quote there, the whole thing was my argument...

To borrow what you said in another thread, "Just for clarification purposes... I am not a crew chief. I'm a LO guy. Take anything I just typed with a grain of salt." Don't worry about that at all...Check

I used ellipses to show that I am only using part of what you said. No intent to pull the wool over anyones eyes.
And you are correct about what I said. I really am not worried about it. Why would you bring that up anyway? What has that got to do with the subject at hand?
What I meant by that was that as an LO guy I am not in tune with operational matters. If I post on something that concerns employment of the weapon system then I have no first hand knowledge and could be misinformed.
I am not misinformed on maitenance matters. I have worked on this aircraft longer than it has been in the 1FW so I'm not new. Niether am I a cheerleader for the Raptor or LM Aero. Not implying that you are either.
If (a big if) subsystems get to the predicted reliability then the aircraft will be greater than it is. I don't think we should buy any more than already contracted for until that is achieved. Or maybe they should buy some with relaxed RCS until they get the bugs sorted out.

Checks the only threat we have is the Middle East. Which has already shown to be nothing for the USA. The F-15C/E/F/K can still fly with the current threat. Its not like if we flew the F-15/F-18/F-16 we would lose a war. The F-15 can still fly with all the the A/C out now.
Also the price I got at globalsecuirty.org said one F-35 is 44.5 mil. If the price hsd gotten higher than so has the F-22. I brought up a good point before. If we went to war with any country the F-35 is all we need.

Clearly, the F-35 will be superior to the F/A-18E/F is every category including BVR and WVR Air Combat. As for a Raptor and Lightning comparsion its very much like comparing the current F-15 and F-16. With the F-15 optimised for Air Superiority and the F-16 for Strike. (i.e. Fighter Bomber)

MKeldergod wrote:

Checks the only threat we have is the Middle East. Which has already shown to be nothing for the USA. The F-15C/E/F/K can still fly with the current threat. Its not like if we flew the F-15/F-18/F-16 we would lose a war. The F-15 can still fly with all the the A/C out now.
Also the price I got at globalsecuirty.org said one F-35 is 44.5 mil. If the price hsd gotten higher than so has the F-22. I brought up a good point before. If we went to war with any country the F-35 is all we need.

1 country is not enough. A lot of our contingencies are based on handling existing non-sense we are tied down in now an also handling Korea and worse at the same time. As for F-35 being all we need, that argument falls flat. As it is going to be exported a lot, expect it to be in the coming years, effectively... compromised. While exporting LO is a dumb idea from the start, we don't have any F-15Ks which are a sight better than our newest E. The 170 or so C/Ds we have left that aren't completely shot from excessive wear aren't going to be anything to crow about in 20 years, which btw is what we are going to have to extend those too. F-15Es are good now in life but that situation isn't going to last forever either. We don't fight on parity. That is a dumb game. We fight on gross domination so as to be able to spread our ever shrining resources thin.
The price each of the F-35 is unknown. That price you mention is assuming we bought the original number. And it assumed the production schedule stays on track. Congress has now ruined that with a production slowdown so we can pay for Operation: Useless Dirt at 10 billion or more a month. So the jury is still out on how much we will pay for F-35 when it is all done. We do know that we will be spending $276 billion over the life of the program.

Corsair1963 wrote:

Clearly, the F-35 will be superior to the F/A-18E/F is every category including BVR and WVR Air Combat. As for a Raptor and Lightning comparsion its very much like comparing the current F-15 and F-16. With the F-15 optimised for Air Superiority and the F-16 for Strike. (i.e. Fighter Bomber)

F-15E and F-15K are a more capable strike platform than any F-16.

dwightlooi wrote:

Quote:

And what happens when you think you're going to buy 2000, spend the $40 billion to develope it and then end up buying only 200? Welcome to the real world.

Well, you shouldn't buy 200 if you initially plan for 2000, period.

Well duh, but how often does that happen? Take a look at the Seawolf program, or the Peacekeeper, or AGM-129, B-2, and so on.

dwightlooi wrote:

As for the F-22, the intent was to buy 700~750 and therefore a $36 billion investment in the development is about $48 million per aircraft. At some point reducing the buy will not save you money and will only cost you capabilities. IMHO, the point is reached roughly when amortized development costs exceed production costs. In other words at roughly 300~350 aircrafts for the F-22 where R&D and production costs become roughly equal.

This is why I have always said that buying 183 Raptors is a bad decision.

Like I said, welcome to the real world. OPM is always easy to waste according to your average politician. And they're getting ready to do it yet again with the DDG-1000, F-22, and F-35. SOBs never learn.

elp wrote:

Corsair1963 wrote:

Clearly, the F-35 will be superior to the F/A-18E/F is every category including BVR and WVR Air Combat. As for a Raptor and Lightning comparsion its very much like comparing the current F-15 and F-16. With the F-15 optimised for Air Superiority and the F-16 for Strike. (i.e. Fighter Bomber)

F-15E and F-15K are a more capable strike platform than any F-16.

That doesn't automatically mean the F-22 would make a superior striker to the F-35. Regardless, the main mission of the F-22 will be as a Air Superiority Fighter and the F-35 as a Fighter Bomber. (i.e. Strike Fighter) Wink

dwightlooi wrote:

There was quite a few high res pictures of the AN/APG-81 antenna mounted on the BAC testbed. I counted the antenna "spikes". There were 46 and 44 respectively on the horizontal and vertical axises respectively. Because the numbers were so close I simply took the average of 45 as the linear density. (45/2)^2x3.142 = 1,590 or ~1,600

snipped for brevity.

No disrespect, but I’m much more inclined to go with the USD document as that is an official DOD document and is much more likely to be accurate vs. attempting to manually count the individual elements from a picture. Its a common misconception is that these arrays are uniform in their density when in fact most fighter AESAs are densest along the X/Y axis and in the center. So while there is certainly improvement in T/R generational iterations, it may or may not result in a denser array as cost and weight are design drivers the JSF program. Additionally the APG-81 has a different design point than the APG-77 does.

The APG-77 is not exactly a 1m array; it’s elliptical with dimensions of roughly 100cm x 80cm. That gives it an area of roughly 0.63m². If the APG-81 is really a 70cm array then it’s about 0.38m². That indicates then, according to the USD document, that the average T/R size is approximately 25-35% smaller in the APG-81, depending again on the designed density (the APG-77 might very well be denser). That sounds about right for the 4th gen T/R modules. Curiously I have yet to hear that the APG-77(v)1 has increased performance over the original -77, all indications are for lower cost and A-G capability.

FWIW- the APG-77(v)1 flew about 6-7months ago and I’ve heard RUMIT that they are on the Block 30 birds for AK.

BDF

Corsair1963 wrote:

elp wrote:

Corsair1963 wrote:

Clearly, the F-35 will be superior to the F/A-18E/F is every category including BVR and WVR Air Combat. As for a Raptor and Lightning comparsion its very much like comparing the current F-15 and F-16. With the F-15 optimised for Air Superiority and the F-16 for Strike. (i.e. Fighter Bomber)

F-15E and F-15K are a more capable strike platform than any F-16.

That doesn't automatically mean the F-22 would make a superior striker to the F-35. Regardless, the main mission of the F-22 will be as a Air Superiority Fighter and the F-35 as a Fighter Bomber. (i.e. Strike Fighter) Wink

But for strategic first nights of the war Rodney King beat downs of IADS, F-22 is a superior striker compared to the Buick-of-Stealth JSF. F-22 stealth and speed = better survivability.
Would I want F-22 doing CAS and battlefield interdiction? If I had other aircraft around, probably not. F-22 can earn it's keep simply by hitting first nights of the war targets and nobody being able to stop it. We are getting JSF, failing some large calamity. However if we only had F-22 and legacy aircraft, we wouldn't be bad off. Navy would just have to go back to the drawing board and get an F-22 like jet (one squadron per carrier) for it's use. Our "allies"? Not my problem, Eurofighter and Rafale and Gripen are still around.

dwightlooi wrote:

I don't think that is an official USAF position or even a L-M company position. That is an assumption which many third party analysts and enthusiasts like to tout. There is no way to prove or disprove it. However, with a greater range and greater payload than the F-22 -- and with internal weapons carriage, a better set of weapon target and delivery sensors and a stated 1st day of war strike agenda -- the F-35 will certainly be employed as a deep striker.

The main deficit of the F-35 may be its lack of economical high speed cruise capability -- the longer you stay in a high threat zone the more likely you are to get into trouble. It may also be the lower degree of shaping of the engine exhaust which may lead to a lower degree of rear LO. In addition, the lack of thrust vectoring controls will also lower control authority at high altitudes and hence lower the effective altitude at which it can prosecute combat effectively. This is in fact the greatest advantage of TVC accord to Raptor pilots not low speed dog fight agility.

There is also no official or reliable information to support the claim that F-35's LO measures are somehow more specific to the X-band frequencies or that it is in anyway narrower band than the Raptors or the B-2s. The only think we know for sure is that the official statements peg the overall RCS as being higher via those intentional vague golf-ball and insect statements. The latter is especially vague because while a golf ball is clearly 1.68" and round, an insect can be anything from a flea to a locust.

Actually Gen. Jumper’s GSTF (and GSI) works give a good insight on Con-Ops for the F-22/B-2 and JSF. It’s very clear from these works that the F-22 and B-2 are ideal for dealing with top tier anti-access threats and that the F-35 was part of the follow on forces. Comments by folks associated with the F-22 and JSF programs in the various trade pubs such as AvLeak, JED etc. have talked about the two in similar lines as outlined in the Con-Ops for GSTF. This doesn’t mean that the F-35 can’t operate 1st day, but it indicates that it is unsuitable for operations against the highest tier threats.

I’d be cautious about trying to correlate range to mission set. Long range is desirable in any platform and the JSF’s long range could be indicative of several unrelated criterions, theater access among the top. What is clear is that the JSF is not ostensibly earmarked to replace or supplement any of the interdiction aircraft in current service, and is in fact earmarked for replacing the various tactical strike assets and designed to take on those mission sets. The F-22 OTOH, probably the Block 40 jets, has been already tasked to replace the F-117.

In the end you’re correct; there is no proof that the F-35 has larger “wideband” signatures than the F-22. The problem is that you can make opposite argument, that there is no proof that the F-35 has the same wideband capabilities as the F-22. IMO, the Con-Ops for the F-22/F-35, the jets the F-35 is designed to replace, and the exportability of the F-35 all point to a lower degree of VLO capability vis-à-vis the F-22/B-2. We could probably go around and around with this and if you still feel differently, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I do think the F-35 will be a great jet, but I’m not convinced it will be as capable in certain mission sets as the F-22 (particularly A-A, DEAD etc.). It is more flexible and has more A-G options, which it should that is what it’s designed to do primarily.

BDF

Forum: F-22A Raptor

F-22 Raptor vs F-35 Joint Strike Fighter