Ouch. With the bomb/rocket incident in Mosul yesterday, this barely got on the radar, but a non-prototype F/A-22 fighter crashed on takeoff yesterday. Pilot ejected safely. But there goes a brand spanking new $130 million fighter plane. Air Force is grounding all Raptors per an investigation.
Crash couldn’t come at a worse time for the program, either.
I love, love, love the plane, but the price tag is friggin’ astronomical on those things.
We had a big thread about it at Futuremark yesterday. Here
As usual when something fails in our military, the Europeans are more concerned about it than we are.
They should have made the YF-23.
Faster according to reports, and it looked a hellluva lot cooler.
But no cheaper. And it would have crashed too. All military jets do eventually. It’s the nature of the beast. Just wait until a B-2 crashes. To paraphrase the late Senator Dirkson, you’ll be talking real money.
Well, not always. For units still in production, it’s just the parts & assembly to replace it, which is often a hell of a lot cheaper than the “entire cost of program amortized over the number of units.” If the B2 was still in production and they needed another one, it wouldn’t cost a billion to make.
No, but it would probably cost about that much to build special climate controlled hanger that another B2 would require, plus the specialized maintenance teams and other replacement parts over the lifetime of the aircraft.
Sure, but they don’t including the NPV of aircraft in the official price tag…
I thought that they don’t come into service until next year, and there are still engine deliberations going on.
Raptors won’t go into squadron service until next year (only 20+ years after the program that led to the F-22 began), but the planes are in production to fill out the squadron, and the first pilots are getting their hands on the plane so they can train others.
True, all planes crash, but to see a brand spanking new Raptor go down hurts. One crashed during early testing, but that was a decade ago. So it was either human error, a freak mechanical failure, or a design flaw. Any of the latter two would really suck considering the amount of money and testing that the Air Force has spent on this plane. Jeezus, the fly-off between the 22 and 23 was during the Bush I adminstration, for Pete’s sake.
When the first B-2 goes down, it’ll be like that Corcorde crashing a few years ago. A huge event. They only built 20 of the darn things, and they’re pampered like babies, in environmentally controlled hangers. But hey, it’s been in service for 10 years and not one yet.
Well, that’s ONE way to get field data.
Any pictures of the F22 crash?
I think one of the Vegas-based papers had a photo. Not much to see, other than the framework of a burnt-out wing.
Just news.google.com it.
At least the model hasn’t had 66% of its crashes in extremely visible situations, like the JAS-39 Gripen.
Cancel the F/A-22. It’s $40 billion dollars that could be spent on more useful projects.
We argued about this already too.
I am still confident in LM’s ability to turn the F-35 into an air superiority fighter if need be.
Not canceled, at least not yet, but word is the Pentagon is going to lop over 100 aircraft from the order, reducing the final production run to about 160.
I had always suspected that the F-22 was designed to look cool in computer games, not to be actually built. Kind of like the eurofighter.