Yf-23 vs F-22: Did the Air Force take 2nd best?

Not, as i understand on that day, no:



According to this , and other sources, the YF-23 were capable of achieving very nearly the same AOA as the F-22 WITHOUT thrust vectoring. Since i am no engineer ( and this guy claims to be) you migth be better able to judge it's accuracy.



Which is entirely a function of it's vectored thrust, right? Given the far more capable thrust vectoring P&W F100's on the F-15 active wouldn't it handily outperform the larger F-15? Isn't this what Riccioni is trying to say in terms of physics allowing for certain things and not others. Why compare the thrust vectoring aircraft to one isn't then claiming the far more expensive one to represent some kind of miraculous engineering breakthrough?



Neither were the F-22 until a few years ago. I fail to understand why you wish to make the distinction when the F-15 active could have been in service ages ago without the additional expenditure of tens of billions of dollars? How can it be argued that LPI radar technology is somehow unique to the F-22? Wouldn't a F-15 active with the standard escort of stand off jammers also have a very significant advantage?



In practice, yes, and i should have said the F-22 flight characteristics would not have been massively superior to a evolutionary design of a F-15 active type plane by virtue of the very same physics that allows the very capable P&W F119's to give it a thrust to weight advantage and super cruise with the addition of the larger fuel stores in a bigger aircraft. The F-22 is a substantial step over the F-15C by virtue of it having the 'upgrades' and technologies that were never implemented on the basic F-15 airframe.



Again, presuming it's all accurate and 'impossible to copy in the YF-23, this is not because the F-22 is built from alien metals but due to the very mundane fact that it has very powerful engines ( Each with twice the dry thrust of the standard F-15C P&W ) giving it twice the thrust while only being around 30% heavier with 'standard' load out. Fact is the F-22's empty weight is only two tons more than the F-15C's thus giving it a rather large advantage in a engagement where it has burnt half it's rather larger fuel stores. As Riccioni attempts to explain this is a matter of physics rather than engineering prowess to the tune of thirty billion dollars.



The YF -23 is admitted to being very nearly as maneuverable as the F-22 without the usage of any thrust vectoring technology. Basically that means that the F-22 is a souped up F-15 with a massive thrust advantage and thrust vectoring with the YF-23 being the closest to a engineering marvel of the three aircraft.



Both aircraft are steps above the line F-15C but mostly, and perhaps logically ( if you don't believe in alien technology/metals), due to them having bells and whistles that were not available back in 1980. If such technologies are implemented as per the Su-27 family you could not only have aircraft that are mostly superior to rivals anywhere but also deploy them in the numbers that will allow for effective air dominance, by virtue of nearly always being present ( not just the 5 hours per day F-22's might be around ), in many conflict zones around the world. It is simply HILARIOUS that aircraft are built to reduce 'casualties' amongst pilots when the next world war could lead to the potential death of tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans. No one besides pilots cares if a few pilots die in a air war as compared to their colleagues on the ground they will still having a much better time of it.

Frankly i am very happy that the Pentagon is shooting itself in the foot and if it continues along this path it might soon not have the capability to invade anyone least of all first world powers.

Stellar

TVC on the F-22 is not asymmetric. Pitch only - it doesn't help roll. Like I said TVC on the F-22 is primarily for low supersonic trim drag & high pitch rates. F-15, clean, with F100-PW-229, dry, have trouble getting supersonic - so minus low speed handling (whose usefulness is debatable), TVC is useless.

TVC? Waste of time on F-15.


'Cause LPI to the extent the F-22 takes it requires AESA -, which is still maturing now. You're unlikely to get the LPI capability anywhere close to the F-22 until relatively recently. If you put AESA on unstealthy airframe then there's no reason a new airforce could not datalink you... might as well go PESA instead... cheaper.


You're going to need far more fuel - then you've got a practically whole new aircraft much like the Super Hornet - not exactly cheap. Isn't a F-22 without VLO pretty much exactly what you're proposing?


To run a war, you're firstly going to need public support. You're not going to get support when your brand new fighter jets get shot down in a 3rd world nation. The F-22 needs less airlift support than the current F-15C - if you're deploying large amounts of Super Eagles you need additional airlift capability, something we do not presently have - they're already stretched thin. You're also going to need dramatically more tanker support. New C-17s & KC-30 are what? 150 million each? Price is ballooning.

I also think it's safe to say that if hundreds of millions of Americans are dead, there is going to be NO logistical support or much of an airforce left.

And with the F-35, F-22 you're likely to obliterate any countries Air Force that presently exists today & in near future. All the Russians have is Mig-29SMT / Su-27SM. India? MKI, Mig-35 & Mig-27. China? J-10, J-11, F-17, Flankers. Is that enough of a 'threat' to buy substantially more aircraft & logistics despite the current plan will outclass them all? I sure don't think so.


Wouldn't the F-23 be a souped up F-15 with a massive thrust advantage, slightly better RF stealth (compared with F-22), & significant IR stealth? I always thought the F-23 was rejected because it was more risky of the two and needed a more costly redesign. I've heard it carried less fuel, less weapons & the compressor blades could be exposed from certain angles...

[edit on 28/8/2008 by C0bzz]

Sorry, but that is simply incorrect.

The F-22 can retain complete controllability at sustained AoAs of 60 degrees and higher.


When your at stupidly high AoA - you've little in the way of useable airflow, and need the leverage provided by TVC - even if only to trim the aircraft and allow your control surfaces to move themselves into an optimal neutral position to provide control authority for when the pilot requests manouvres.


The only other aircraft to have similar levels of controllability all have TVC - MiG-35, X-31, F-16 MATV or F-15 ACTIVE to name a few.






No, not for roll... well not directly anyway. The F-22 and F-15's engines are too close to be used for roll coupling (unlike say, the Su-30 MKI)

But the TVC will be used to trim the aircraft longitudinally so the elevators and ailerons can be used in conjunction to provide maximum possible roll moment. However, that doesn't begin to happen until higher Mach numbers, where the F-22 already has a substantial lead over the F-15.





My original statement was:



I have already pointed out things like roll control where the F-22 is ahead of the F-15 which is not directly influenced by TVC.





So the bigger airframe can outmanouvre, out gun and out last the smaller one...

And you insist it is not because it is simply better?





See that in bold.

Along with internal stores and improved aerodynamics - thats the engineering prowess that gets you those advantages.


If fighter aircraft were all about engine power, then the Foxbat is the best thing ever.






Where it was tested... in the lower end of the flight envelope - where TVC is not so much an issue.

The YF-22 got through a much more complete Dem/Val program than the YF-23.


Quantitative data on the YF-23 is very hard to find, only qualitative statements.




You keep believing that. Your very wrong.

Not new and in my reading still quite accurate?



Isn't the question rather 'capable of what'? I mean what would 180 F-22's do better than 1000 - 2000 F-15's with LPI's, thrust vectoring , very modern engines and generally updated avionics and electronics? Which air force would they 'dominate' more with 180 F-22's than with a additional one thousand thrust vectoring F-15's and 100 odd extra tankers to offset their slightly smaller legs?



Operating costs are projected to be lower ( by virtue of smaller footprints or what do you mean?) in the same way that maintenance is projected to be lower due to having learnt from past experience. I don't see why newly manufactured F-15 actives or the like need to be greatly more maintenance intensive per plane than a F-22 or why the very inefficient USAF aircrews ( compared to many NATO allies) can not be trained to the standards in other air forces. As for less people in harms way no one gives a rat's ass about a few hundred pilots when a cold war ground war would have involved tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties per day.



Well the Russians do have enough flankers and Foxhounds to match the F-22 4 to 1. My point is simply that the USAF could have matched those flankers at four to one rates with F-15 active type airframes.



It does act as a force multiplier in even it's small numbers and what i am suggesting is that it could or would have multiplied it even more if the money were spent elsewhere. As for the claim of 'beating' double digit Sam no one has so far flown combat missions against them so i will presume that the speculation related to 'beating them' will be as accurate as the USAF speculation in general.



No F-15 in service can but it could have been different if the F-15 were developed along the same lines as the Su-27. War is in the end all about 'sacrifice' ( what else would you call Vietnam and Korea and even much of the USAF effort in world war two) and attrition and wars of attrition is clearly not something the F-22 were built for. If you want to talk about saving lives you could have taken a F-22 ( current price + development = 340 odd million USD) and instead deployed 50 Abrams tanks with about a hundred million dollars left to keep them serviced and deployed for a good many years. Lets not fool around and suggest that the best way to protect lives is to build horrendously expensive aircraft.



The LPI is to reduce your own signature when engaging enemy aircraft as per AWACS direction. The F-15 does have a comparatively massive RCS but obviously you still have the same EW aircraft supporting you thus in theory allowing you to get close enough to the Sam complex ( Export versions costs around 150 millions USD per battery) to do damage. It's just not a good thing when the F-22 is even outnumbered, in terms of price, by double digit Sam batteries that each have somewhere between 16 and 64 READY to fire missiles. What's worse is that they have their own LPI engagement radars as well as passive and active search radars and can set up or pack up and be gone in five minutes . These things are not too be trifled with and especially not when they are supported by far cheaper Sam systems that are mobile enough to literally paint the sky and engage targets while moving. It makes sense to not want to fight these things head on but when your countermeasure system starts to cost the same as a navy destroyer you have to know that your risking a a whole boat load of stuff in your attempt at a stealthy approach.



Id like to see what a the F-15 airframe can do with P &W's that can give twice the thrust coupled with thrust vectoring. Either way going supersonic, and certainly staying that way, is a largely a function of the fuel fraction and thus not something even a F-15 with the -229 is going to do often . Since i am not familiar with the dimensions of the F119 i will just take a guess and presume that you could equip F-15's with them without breaking the bank to the tune of many billions of dollars provided a new production run of F-15's.



I don't see why many of these systems can not be integrated with modern miniaturization methods at a fraction of the cost inherent in a totally new airframe containing exotic materials and the like. What you say have certainly been the case for the F-16 as so many of these additions are introduced that the plane can't go anywhere carrying much anything thus keeping it from playing the role it could be virtue of desperately trying to keep attrition rates artificially low. If you have no public support or legal mandate this makes a great deal of sense but to presume that the third world war will be won by those who are trying hardest not to lose men and systems is in my opinion ludicrous. Every war is 'high tech' in the respect that one side tries to deploy 'better' equipment to enhance it's capabilities and as before it wont be any guarantee of success.



Well if that was all true it would make a great deal of sense. When some work has been done to substantiate a few of those claims then we can easily agree that it makes the most strategic sense.



Where? When?



That's not fair! The USAF could have easily deployed twenty thousand Super Sabre's in the gulf. Did the USAF leave Europe when Me-262's took to the skies or did the simply build and deploy more Mustangs? Yup.... With reference to the 'outdated' aircraft the idea is to win the wars you are forced to fight ( unlike, Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and so forth) and to win them no matter how 'uncool' you look doing it.



If that's how long it takes that's how long it takes.

Stellar