Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

I apologize if this has already been discussed but I was wondering has Dozer performed a backflip like the Su-37's I believe its the Cobra maneuver? Has done one of those at any of the airshows he's flown at?

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Yes he has.

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Active Member Joined: Nov 22, 2004 - 09:20 PM Posts: 134

dunnman19 wrote:

I apologize if this has already been discussed but I was wondering has Dozer performed a backflip like the Su-37's

He has performed maneuvers of a similar nature, and there's no reason to believe that the F-22 couldn't mimic such maneuvers more closely if there is a desire to do so. Check out some of Dozer's moves in the following video:

http://semperapollo.com/Quickstart/Vide ... Raptor.mpg

dunnman19 wrote:

I believe its the Cobra maneuver?

Nope, it's the Kulbit, which is sort of an extension to the Cobra where thrust vectoring is used to push the plane all the way around instead of pitching down to recover. Dozer performs a somewhat reminiscent maneuver in the F-22 at around 1:30 in the above video, except that he was mostly vertical and added a high-alpha turn in order to rapidly change his heading. In effect, it's sort of like the X-31's Herbst Maneuver, only cooler, especially when you consider that it was performed with neither yaw vectoring nor canards. Evidently, the F-22 has very nice aerodynamic qualities. Thumb

dunnman19 wrote:

Has done one of those at any of the airshows he's flown at?

Yes, but not officially--he was essentially goofing around backstage at quite some distance from the audience, reportedly stealing most of their attention in the process. Unfortunately, it was not deemed appropriate for F-22 demonstration pilots to continue doing this, but hopefully some of these maneuvers (or even better ones performed closer to the F-22's limits) will eventually find their way into the official F-22 demonstrations in the future.

As for the Cobra, about the closest thing Dozer has done, to my knowledge, can be seen in the following video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7288052978

Actually, that's more like a Super Cobra. The main difference is that a real Super Cobra is supposed to use a higher pitch rate and then include a brief hesitation during recovery at 90° alpha. Some people have criticized the F-22 for this, but give me a break, it would have no problem pitching up faster and hesitating if Dozer had chosen to do so. I guess some people really take their fancy airshow maneuvers seriously. Smile

In actuality, the Flanker becomes unstable in the alpha region where the F-22 lingers a bit in this video, so in general its pilots pretty much have to rapidly throw it around in the air in order to maintain control, while the F-22 is virtually always controllable during maneuvers like this. It would be interesting to find out whether Dozer has ever had to use differential thrust to augment yaw stability like Flanker pilots often do, but I doubt it.

RobertCook wrote:

In effect, it's sort of like the X-31's Herbst Maneuver, only cooler, especially when you consider that it was performed with neither yaw vectoring nor canards. Evidently, the F-22 has very nice aerodynamic qualities. Thumb

Yeah it is pretty cool. I've read two articles putting the yaw rate of the Raptor in excess of 30deg/sec at some speeds. That's great for a fighter without 3D vectoring.

Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

Backflip?