TAXES FOR STEALTH CORRUPTION? THE F-22, F-35 SCANDALS.
The F22 Raptor is the USA air superiority plane. Its stealth costs too much and proved too fragile. In USA style stealth, sharp angles are used because only reflections in discrete directions come back. So US stealth plane act like diamonds: a bright return radar flash is followed by nothing, as the plane has moved slightly in the next sweep, and the sharp reflection went into some other direction, far away.
In 2009, in the United Arab Emirates, F22s Raptors met French Rafales in mock combat. The French weekly Air & Cosmos released an instructive picture. Here is a F22, in the gun sight of a Rafale:
USA F22 Raptor In Crosshairs Of French Rafale. The Outmaneuvered F22 is Fully Vectoring.
[All the targeting data was removed.]
The word “blasphemy” comes to mind. To put things in their proper context, the Rafale is a superlative bomber and ground attack plane. Contrarily to the F22 Raptor, it was not built just for air supremacy.
In the above picture, the Raptor is obviously maneuvering hard in the vertical plane: its nose is up, and one can see the bright flares of its two engines in post combustion, as they vector as hard as they can (see the supersonic shockwaves in the white jet exhausts). The F22 is trying to escape an inverted Rafale pulling with a lot of acceleration (“gs”) toward the ground. The F-22 is clearly not in a position for a gun or an infrared missile shoot (“fox2“). The thrust vectoring the F22 is engaging into is killing its speed. if the Rafale does not shoot it right away, it’s going to be the biggest slow moving turkey the sky has ever seen, within a few seconds.
Also remember that the Rafale carries its missiles externally, and normally the F22 does not (because, if it did, it would lose stealth). So the Rafale is capable of an instantaneous InfraRed missile shot on the F22, should the latter somehow escape the Rafale’s 30 mm gun…
Radars use intermittency to detect a moving object, so, if a reflection is followed by no reflection as the target has moved slightly, the electronic connected to the radar sees nothing.
One of the many disadvantages of USA style stealth is that sharp angles are not very aerodynamic, resulting in all sorts of problems, including fatigue of the exposed parts of the plane. Thus some of the plastic of the F-22 wore off, and had to be replaced by titanium (which is highly reflective).
The F22 Raptor plane is made of toxic polymers and epoxy glue, and technicians have to wear mask and gloves when approaching it. Cough and actually asphyxia have been reported in or around the plane. Making it the only neurotoxic plane in the world.
The F22 also cost 400 million dollar apiece. (And the F-22 lacks more recent features such as High Off Bore Sight and Helmet Mounted Display, let alone a very long range missile such as the Meteor.)
The F-22 was thus replaced by the smaller, cheaper, much slower F-35. With just one single engine. Four hundred (400) billion dollars has been spent on the F-35, and still, more than ten years later, it has not dropped a bomb, fired one missile, or a single canon shell…
[Latest News, January 2015: The F35 will not fire its gun before 2019, at the earliest!]
The F35 program is actually the most expensive defense program, ever. By a very long shot.
By comparison, the Manhattan project cost 20 billion dollars, by the time it had dropped two nuclear fisson bombs on Japan and forced its surrender (and the hurried suicides of a few of the military plutocrats who terrorized Japan).
The F35 cannot cruise at supersonic speeds (the Rafale can cruise supersonically, and stealthily, with ten tons of weapons hanging outside). One may wonder if the F-35 could have caught up with the 9/11 terrorists… (After all, F15s, which fly much faster, could not, but at the time nobody expected that the USA would be attacked the way France had been in 1996, by suicidal highjackers!)
Now for a somewhat peaceful sight:
Rafale (on the left) and Typhoon Eurofighter (built respectively by French Dassault and part-French EADS, the company that owns Airbus). Both planes were successfully engaged in Libya, although:
1) The Eurofighter needed assistance from Tornado bombers to… bomb. (The Tornadoes detected and painted targets for the Eurofighters’ laser guided bombs. Eurofighters can’t bomb on their own!)
2) The Rafales were fully autonomous, and proved capable, using their active stealth, to search and destroy enemy missile batteries and radars of a fully functional air defense system.
3) Somehow American business men and their friends in Washington were able to persuade some of the nations which (helped) built (and purchase) the Typhoon Eurofighter to pitch into the F-35 Lightning II program. That’s very remarkable.
The United Kingdom, which is in a depression (its GDP numbers are worse than in the 1930s) and bankrupt Italy are now funding a useless, immensely expensive plane… made in the USA. As if money grew on trees, or, at least, so it does in Washington. How much money has been passing under that table?
Rafales recently visited Great Britain. Instructions were issued to British pilots, with their “Typhoon” Eurofighters, to NOT engage in war games with French Rafales.
Is it all bad with the Typhoon Eurofighters? Well, not at all, as long as they stay away from Rafales, and go shoot F22s!
Lockheed Martin haughtily claims: “the F-22 is the only aircraft that blends supercruise speed, super-agility, stealth and sensor fusion into a single air dominance platform.”
In mid-June 2012, 150 German airmen and eight twin-engine, non-stealthy Typhoons arrived at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska for an American-led Red Flag exercise involving more than 100 aircrafts from Germany, the U.S. Air Force and Army, NATO, Japan, Australia and Poland.
Eight times during the two-week war game, single German Typhoons flew against single F-22s , simulating close-range dogfights.
Conclusion? In a close-range tangle — which pilots call a “merge” — the bigger and heavier F-22 is at a disadvantage. German Typhoon pilots said that, when flying without their external fuel tanks, in the WVR (Within Visual Range) arena, the Eurofighter proved to be better than the F22 Raptor.
The F-22 tends to lose too much energy when using thrust vectoring (TV): TV can be useful to enable a rapid direction change without losing sight of the adversary but, unless the Raptor can manage to immediately get a kill, the energy it loses makes the then slow moving plane quite vulnerable!
(Also the F-22 burns fuel like crazy during TV, and it has a short range to start with, due to its poor aerodynamics, and enormous engines to push its brutal shape.)
The Raptor fights well from beyond visual range with its high speed and altitude, sophisticated radar and long-range AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles. Yet the AMRAAM maximum range is around 100 kms, less than the Meteor missile used by the Typhoon (and the Rafale!).
At this point, the partisans of the F22 will start their usual USA superiority sing-song. They will say, the Raptor is so stealthy, outside of visual range, it will sneak onto non stealthy Typhoons. And yet, this is another lie.
At a distance of about 50 km, the Typhoon IRST (Infra-Red Search and Track) system can find even a stealthy plane “especially if it is large and hot, like the F-22″ a Eurofighter pilot said. (Another reason for compact beauty, as in the Rafale!)
In any case, the Typhoons killed several Raptors during the Red Flag Alaska. On one day a German pilot quipped: “yesterday, we have had a Raptor salad for lunch.”
Other problems with the Raptor: it chokes its pilots, and its long range missiles do not work when it’s… cold (like it tends to get, up there in the sky). Both problems have been with the plane in the last two years, and it’s supposed to stay close to a base all the time!
Ah, and what of the Rafale already?
Well in an exercise, Rafales and Typhoons met, 9 Typhoons got “killed” while a single Rafale was disqualified… for flying too low. “Super agility“, anyone?
So, taxpayers, to your purses! The stealthy Military-Industrial Complex wants more from you. Much more. Some will say: wait a minute, why all these useless planes? Well, because after charging two billion dollars apiece for the completely useless subsonic B2 bomber, the plane makers of the USA realized they had found a story taxpayers bought with relish: the STEALTH plane. It was a nationalistic story: only the USA had stealth planes. The American public loves nationalistic, only-in-the-USA stories.
One difference between the USA and France is that one needs more nationalistic fervor to keep the USA together (the same applies to other countries, and the less they hold together naturally, the more strident the nationalistic fervor!). The French are more blasé: they are stuck together, anyway (although they feel it would be more elevated not to be).
OK, most publics are nationalistic, but can the most advanced civilization be the most nationalistic? Well, no. Nationalism is a form of hubris, and there is no stealthier poison. Athens tasted of that delicious poison, the poison of hubris, the poison so many in Germany, helas, even while torturting Hellas, tasted with relish.
All and any argument resting on nationalism is logically suspect, it’s a contaminant.
After building and operating for more than a trillion dollar of these useless planes, the F-22, the F-35, more money will be needed… For weapons that really work. Thus a double subsidy for the Military-Industrial Complex. One for useless weapons, and then one, absolutely necessary, for weapons that actually work!
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Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 