Above left: Raptor
4001 on its
maiden ight
from Marietta,
Georgia. Paul
Metz reported
excellent
handling and
remarked on
the aircraft’s
impressive
performance.
Left: Raptor
4001 arrives at
Edwards AFB via
C-5 Galaxy.
Right: EMD
aircraft 05 ies
over Owens Lake
near NAWS China
Lake during
testing. Lockheed
Martin/Kevin
Robertsonall you have to do. The engines will start
up, the APU will shut down, the avionics
will spool up, they will all do their built in
test to make sure everything’s functional,
when that’s done you’re ready to taxi and
go ying.’
That level of autonomy required a huge
amount of co-operation between the
airframe manufacturers and the engine
team at Pratt & Whitney. ‘I’ve got to take
my hat o to Pratt & Whitney for doing
some of the heavy lifting,’ says Metz. ‘They
took the [F119] engine way beyond the
standard of other engines. For example,
in July 1995, we had a big meeting in Fort
Worth and the main topic was ‘how do
you start the engines?’ They had all kinds
of switches and knobs for this and thata problem. Two, if you’re going to y the
airplane it’s best you know it inside out.
[This approach] gives you the opportunity
to understand what every nut and bolt
does. For me, it was also a thrill to rub
shoulders with some incredibly talented
design engineers.’
Talking of the main di erences between
the YF-22 and the nal con guration of
the F-22A aside from physical appearance,
Metz says: ‘The big thing was the re ned
ying qualities. Early on we decided that
this kind of airplane really needed to
change the paradigm of what a pilot does.
We wanted to make the actual piloting of
the Raptor a secondary task, the primary
task is that of being a tactician — taking
the information you’ve got and using it toaccurately destroy other airplanes. That
meant that we put a lot of emphasis on
the design of the engine and the airframe
to be tolerant to do anything the pilot
can do, we called it ‘carefree abandon’. The
idea was that you can do anything with
the stick and throttle and the airplane
will not be harmed nor will it do anything
untoward. It won’t depart controlled ight
or do anything unexpected. That required
some real re nements in the ight controls
and in particular the engine logic. We also
designed all the mission systems so they
took care of themselves. I can tell you right
now how to start a Raptor and make it
full operational. Put the battery switch to
on, the APU [Auxiliary Power Unit] switch
to run, throttles to idle and wait... That’s(^20) RAPTOR
16-27 Metz First Flight C.indd 20 28/09/2017 14: