AK 4195. That’s the tail number of the last F-22 Raptor ever, which you can see here fully assembled and about to move into the flight line to get ready for delivery. That assembly line is now closed. Done. Forever.
I say forever because I doubt they will ever open it again. The Raptor was created to be the star of the US Air Force fleet — stealthy, highly manoeuvrable and with the most advanced avionics in any plane in the world. It was going to be the P-51 Mustang of the 21st Century but, at the end, it failed. Grounded by multiple failures, the only thing that the F-22 ever blew up was its original budget.
Only 187 Raptors have been made out of the original 750-unit plan since April 1997, when the first unit came out of the Lockheed Martin assembly line. Two of those were lost in crashes, one in California on March 2009 and the last one in Alaska, on November 2010.
Despite being one of the finest jet fighter ever created, the F-22 has had a sad story of failures, from falling apart because of bad glue to failures in the oxygen supply, which grounded the entire fleet earlier this year. This problem stopped the Raptor from participating in the operation against Gaddafi’s ridiculous air forces, which means that it has never seen any real live combat.
Given the current state of the economy, this may be the last advanced fighter to roll out of United States’ factories for a few decades. I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is eager to ask for money for any 6th generation fighters. Even more so with all the problems and delays in the manufacturing of the F-35 Lightning II.
DNA
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 10:15 AMDon’ t know about that paint job !
Someone needs to take that thing to Westcoast Customs.
Timmahh
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:00 AMStealthy attack drones are the future. They’ll be faster in a dog fight because they can pull massive G’s. they will get cheaper as production ramps up and they will take the expense out of training pilots. They can just hire gamers?
TSH
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:32 AMhttp://farm3.staticflickr.com/2257/2478286851_eb737c78c2.jpg
:–P
RB
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:50 AMThis.
Taking out the need for life support and safety systems, physical limitations of the meat-bags and the need to actually ‘fit’ a pilot in there will drastically cut down on cost and development / build time for fighters. Plus the added bonus of losing a plane won’t mean losing the trained personnel required to fly it.
The days of piloted fighter and ground attack planes will soon become a footnote in aviation history. “You’re telling me that people used to be CRAZY enough to actually SIT IN those things!?!?!”
MotorMouth
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 2:04 PMI admire your optimism but I fail to see how current technology is anywhere near ready to replace human pilots. The first and most important ingredient missing from the formula would be peripheral vision. Next in line would be survival instinct. Then intuition and several lesser traits with which we are yet to imbue our machines.
AAron
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:22 PMThey’ll still have a pilot, he’ll just be back at base flying the drone. His peripheral vision will be better as he’ll have 360degree camera vision. And he’ll bring along all the others traits you’ll think will be missing
Dr Doom
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:43 PMyou don’t have survival instinct sitting behind a a RTV screen & instrument screen.
Rooboy
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:58 PMThey would if their pay was docked for each drone lost or crashed ;-)
Nathan
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:27 AMSo this was an epic failure and Lockheed still got the contract for the next fighter jet. Classic.
TSH
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:39 AMI’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: US Government buys Lockheed, puts NASA in charge. 10 years later, Robotech.
Big Windows
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:28 PM+1 …Nice
MD
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:21 PMMotormouth…. Re. Peripheral vision…..
What about sticking thousands of cameras al around the plane, that will beat your natural. peripheral vision…. (machine vision to pick targets, threats, lock on etc…) AS the machine, (or other human observes can pick objects of interest rather than only having one set of eyes (or two).)
Another benefit with drones, is that a “single seater” (really zero seater) can now have as many personnel as the mission envelope demands…
Removing the operators from a static container, and putting them in a multi axis flight sim module (much cheaper then the real thing) may increase the mission success, giving the operator some real feedback on the flight attitude etc, while drastically reducing G forces in radical manoeuvres.
But the downside, is that other countries have the same level of technology… (as a lot of the sub-contractors are not US companies.. so they can sell to anyone.) and we will end up having air warfare between drones, (ground war for that matter) so it will largely be the war is won when all of the other drones are dead. Computer games have now gotten real.
Also, no-one in the Air-Force or marines etc really wants to fly drones… So the next gen fighter pilots WILL be kids who prefer sipping on Mountain Dew playing vicarious games. As long as they have an on-screen score.
Next Level.