CentreDaily, LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. – Lt. Col. Dave Rose has blasted a Russian-made MiG jet fighter out of the sky with an F-15, and he's piloted the Eagle through a thicket of ground-to-air missiles over enemy territory.
The Air Force's No. 1 fighter jet performed well during those anxious moments in Desert Storm, but Rose would have loved to been at the controls of an F/A-22 Raptor fighter instead.
“Don't get me wrong,” he said last week, standing next to a Raptor in a hanger at Langley Air Force Base. “The Eagle is an outstanding plane. It's been a stalwart of the Air Force for 30 years.”
But the Raptor, he said, is better.
With current or future threats to jet fighters, he said, the Raptor not only could be the difference between success and failure in a mission, it could mean the difference between success and the death or destruction of pilot and plane.
“If I'm in an Eagle, I get shot down,” Rose said. “In a Raptor, I come home.”
The Raptors are the Air Force's newest and most lethal jet fighters. They're supposed to fly faster for longer periods – nearly unseen and undetected because of special stealth features – than any other jet fighter out there, including the F-15 Eagles they are meant to replace.
All of that comes at a high price. Including development, maintenance and other costs, the tally for each plane will be about $250 million, or about $72 billion for entire fleet. Only the Virginia Class submarine program posts a greater bill for the Pentagon.
The Raptors are now undergoing operational tests to see if the planes can do everything in combat that they are supposed to do. Based on test results, the Pentagon will decide next year whether to buy large numbers of planes. The first Raptor squadron will be based at Langley, with the first operational planes set to arrive in late 2004.
But Rose and another Raptor test pilot, Maj. James Vogel, both of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, touched down with the jet fighter in Langley this week as part of the century celebration festivities of the Wright Brothers' first flight.
Both Rose and Vogel are veteran Eagle pilots who boast of the fighter jet's unsurpassed war record undefeated in air-to-air combat in about three decades of service.
But both pilots perk up like little kids who just got keys to a new spoiler-backed hot rod when they talk of the F/A-22 Raptor.
“The Eagle is still like a high-end sports car,” Vogel said. “But the Raptor is a newer sports car with a bigger motor. The Raptor just outperforms by so much.”
They're trading in their Trans-Ams for Corvettes.
Speed is a factor – they say the Raptor not only beats the Eagle off the mark but can hold a higher speed longer, using less fuel, as it is designed to do.
But most jet fighting is not done when the planes are supersonic. It's a low-speed cat-and-mouse battle of wits, experience and skill. That's where the Raptor shows its true claws, the pilots said. The plane has special back thrusters that swivel, as well as wings that reconfigure, making it possible to make turns and other moves that would make Steven Spielberg's head spin.
“There's no corner you can't square in this plane,” Rose said. “You can get behind someone and fly behind them.”
That kind of ability can't be overemphasized, Vogel said. “The basis for dog-fighting turns around circle size. The smaller the radius, the more defensive and offensive opportunities you have.”
Looking at the Raptor on the runway – a sleek brute of a plane that's a smidgen bigger than the F-15 – it's hard to believe that it could turn circles going hundreds of miles an hour with the relative corner-hugging ability of a an Indy race car.
It's harder still to believe that such a large military jet can do this nearly undetectable to enemy defense systems. Designed and built with special metals, angled surfaces and internal weapons and electronic systems, the Raptor shows up as a bird or even a bee on enemy tracking systems, the Air Force says. No other fighter jet has such a stealthy feature.
“Stealth is huge,” Vogel said.
So, hidden from enemy tracking systems, the Raptor can avoid being a target for relatively cheap surface-to-air missile systems, or SAMs, which have become a big seller worldwide, even to smaller countries that can't afford their own air forces.
Lt. Col. Rose knows what it's like to be an F-15 target for the telephone-pole-sized SAMs and their rockets. “You have to maneuver around them. It's not fun.”
All in all, Rose said, a Raptor is exactly what a pilot wants in a combat situation.
“It's like going into a phone booth with someone else, knife in teeth, and only one comes out alive.”
