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Fatal Problems Continue To Plague F-22 Raptor
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that even though the Air Force has used its F-22 Raptor planes only in test missions, pilots have experienced seven major crashes with two deaths, a grim reminder that the U.S. military's most expensive fighter jet, never called into combat despite conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, continues to experience equipment problems — notably with its oxygen systems. New details from an Air Force report last week drew attention to a crash in November 2010 that left Capt. Jeff Haney dead and raised debate over whether the Air Force turned Haney into a scapegoat to escape more criticism of the F-22. Haney 'most likely experienced a sense similar to suffocation,' the report said. 'This was likely [Haney's] first experience under such physiological duress.' According to the Air Force Accident Report, Haney should have leaned over and with a gloved hand pulled a silver-dollar-size green ring that was under his seat by his left thigh to engage the emergency system (PDF). It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer. 'It would've taken superhuman efforts on the pilot's behalf to save that aircraft,' says Barr. 'The initial cause of this accident was a malfunction with the aircraft — not the pilot.'"
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
OBOGS isn't bleeding edge even F16s used them http://www.cobham.com/media/75388/SYSTEM%20F-16%20OBOGS%20ADV10556.pdf
This is just a case of poor design, the Eurofighter has Oxygen level warning system, the F22 doesn't. If you put the emergency O2 actuator in an ergonomically challenging position, what do you expect?
When Rolls Royce had to make their Merlin engine reliable enough fr long range bombing missions, they took every 10th engine off the production line and ran it constantly until it broke, took it apart and made whatever piece that failed stronger.
By the end of the war they had one of the most reliable piston engines the world has ever seen.
The problem here with the Raptor is that they replaced the bottled oxygen system, used for decades in dozens of other aircraft, with a complex compressor system that's hooked to the engines. In this particular accident, the plane shut the compressor system down and hence the oxygen. You had a new dependency that, on the surface, seems nuts.
The resolution of the fault required the pilot to manually start the back up system. For whatever reason, the pilot was unable to do so.
Yeah, bleeding edge is bleeding edge but the real problem is that the military has bypassed the prototype system. You build a demonstrator on paper that requires several new technologies. You get the contract and of course once your are building the aircraft, THEN you find big issues. By then you're pretty much committed to either leaving the problem alone, doing some sort of kludge that makes the aircraft more expensive / less dependable and / or delaying the program.
This has been seen in pretty much every high tech military hardware purchase in the last two decades. And it keeps happening.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But you'd lose the entire war if you fielded Spitfires instead of F-22s.
A bit of googling gives 12,604 pounds as the unit cost for the Spitfire vs. $150 million for the F-22. Depending on which inflation and conversion calculators you believe, this might range between $300k and $950k per Spitfire today.
That gives you somewhere between 150 and 500 Spitfires per F-22.
Let's give the F-22 side enough resources to keep one plane on patrol at all times, and they can lose 10 F-22s before they lose the air war.
Then the Spitfire side can keep 150 planes in the air at all times, and they can lose 1500 planes before they lose the air war.
The two sides meet in the air. The Spitfires can't touch the F-22 because it's cruising nearly twice as high as the Spitfires can even fly. Furthermore, it can launch missiles to destroy the Spitfires from outside visual range. OTOH, that will only kill a dozen Spitfires, assuming perfect missile performance. At this point the F-22 has 480 rounds to shoot from its Vulcan cannon. Unfortunately, the F-22 is SO much faster than the Spitfires that it will tend to overtake them before it can do much aiming, so I'm going to say it's not a complete turkey shoot. Maybe another 2-3 dozen Spitfires go down. That leaves around 100 Spitfires left. They should be able to overwhelm the F-22 when it tries to land.
Unfortunately for the Spitfires, the F-22 can land outside of their range. Even if the F-22 airfields are in range, the Spitfires will have to split up into groups to cover them -- but that risks having an entire wing destroyed if they split into more than three groups.
That gets us to bombing. The Spitfires will take heavy losses, but they'll trash pretty much any airfield they attack. The F-22 can bomb the Spitfire airbases with impunity -- but its attacks will be like mosquito bites against the Spitfire's hundred airbases.
Taking all that into account, I'd say the Spitfires would lose a slow battle of attrition, unless ground forces could bring all the F-22 airbases into their range. Then the F-22s would be overwhelmed before they could kill enough Spitfires.
All this ignores SAM sites...and the missiles for those would be running cheaper than the unit cost of the Spitfires. That turns into another battle of attrition; I doubt one SAM site has more than a couple dozen missiles on hand at a time!
The report also says cabin pressure was lost. The incident happened at over 50,000 feet. At that altitude, air pressure is about 1/10th that at sea level. Even if you're breathing 100% oxygen, you're only getting about half the oxygen you would at sea level, about as much as you get at 15,000-20,000 feet. While that would've been enough to stave off unconsciousness, I'm skeptical just how useful the pilot's mental faculties would have been even if he turned on the emergency oxygen at that altitude.
From the plane's trajectory, it seems his first action upon comprehending the failure was to put the plane into a dive to get it into thicker, breathable air. Unfortunately it sounds like he lost consciousness during this maneuver, before he could turn on the emergency oxygen generator, and only regained consciousness a few seconds before impact.