Air Force negotiates extra Raptor

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. A.J. Bosker
  • Air Force Print News
WASHINGTON --  Air Force officials have negotiated the procurement of one additional F/A-22 Raptor as part of a recent purchase, raising the total to 21 aircraft, according to service acquisition officials.

The F/A-22 acquisition has a “buy-to-budget” philosophy, said Dr. Marvin R. Sambur, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition at the Pentagon. This means the Air Force can buy as many aircraft as will fit within a fixed budget.

The additional aircraft is attributed to a rise in vendor confidence in the F/A-22 program, partially because of Defense Department and service support, as well as increased program stability, Sambur said.

“This is a pretty significant accomplishment since each of these (Raptors) costs well over $100 million,” Sambur said.

The program is doing a lot better than it was eight months ago, he said. It has overcome many technical challenges, such as canopy wind noise, overheating of the brakes, aerodynamic buffeting of the twin-vertical stabilizers, and equipment and training challenges.

“We’ve put all of those (obstacles) to bed,” Sambur said.

The one remaining challenge the Raptor must overcome before it can provide American forces with unequaled dominance over future battlefields is in the software stability of its avionics suite, he said.

To solve this challenge, Air Force officials have made sure all of the contractors and subcontractors involved in the avionics software have put their best people on the problem, Sambur said.

The Raptor program team also added better diagnostic equipment to monitor the software in real time and is trying to minimize the hardware differences between the avionics software test bed and the actual aircraft, he said.

“We’re definitely getting a handle on the stability issue,” he said. “We’re fairly confident that we should have a solution to this problem by mid-fall.”

The result of solving the stability issue will be an aircraft with unparalleled capabilities, such as stealth and supercruise, giving the Air Force an unfair advantage over any future adversary, Sambur said.

Some of the Raptor’s critics have questioned the continued need for the F/A-22 because F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons were able to successfully establish and maintain air dominance in Afghanistan and Iraq. They suggest the Air Force take its F/A-22 funding and put it toward procurement of new and upgraded F-15s and F-16s.

Sambur disagrees.

“Getting air dominance was the key to the conflict in Iraq, and it was done in record time by great airmen,” he said.

However, Afghanistan lacked an air force or an integrated air defense system to begin with, and the Iraqi air force and its air defense system were eroded by Operation Desert Storm, 12 years of international sanctions and two no-fly zones, he said.

Sophisticated integrated air defense systems and advanced surface-to-air missile technology are increasing throughout the world, Sambur said. Adversaries will require relatively few of these systems to deny current aircraft from flying into their airspace.

The F-15 and F-16 do not have stealth or supercruise capability, and purchasing new versions will not offer those capabilities, he said.

“Without the F/A-22 we will have a significantly more difficult time establishing air dominance in the future,” Sambur said. “This will result in a prolonged fight resulting in a greater number of American lives lost.”

Under the current Department of Defense cost cap of $43 billion, the Air Force expects to procure 276 aircraft, although the service needs 381 Raptors to meet its expeditionary requirements, he said. Once the program gets on track, which Sambur said it should do shortly, the cost will come down.

“The Raptor is a plane that the Air Force can be proud of,” Sambur said. “It’s a plane that the Air Force and the nation needs. And I believe that once people see just how well it performs and the capabilities it provides, they’ll want us to buy more.”