The F-22 WAS a pretty good aircraft ....
Yeah, but that production line is kaput.
Until the chinese and the russians and pretty soon the japanese/koreans caught up, and the remaining, flying F22’s are given to the muslim brotherhood.
“The F-22 WAS a pretty good aircraft ....”
I remember reading in Aviation Week in the ‘80’s that in the 2020’s each fighter jet would cost hundreds of millions. Well, the F-22 is 361 million a copy. That’s the purchase price. Maintaining them for 30 years will greatly increase that cost. We obviously need fighter aircraft. But maybe, just maybe, we’re going about it all wrong. Perhaps they should be a combination of Artificial Intelligence and remote control. That ought to cut the cost and the risk in half. Maybe they should be bought in a multi-year contract that’s funded for the entire contract rather than one year at a time so Congress can get lobbyist funds for their campaigns. Perhaps we should get the military out of the day-to-day engineering as they change what they want moment to moment. Or, never define what they want, as in the case of FCS. Maybe we need to incentivize companies differently. FCS was incentivized based on how much they spent. If their spend plan stayed on target they got extra money. The program’s design fell behind, but, they certainly spent the money on time.