the high-end air dominance role remains
their bread and butter.COBRAS AND J-TURNS
‘It was a truly mind-blowing experience for
an F-15 guy stepping into that thing’, says
Col Fesler. ‘I have a stealthy platform that can
out-turn everybody, can outrun everybody
and it has better sensors. The F-22 put it all
together. I can fly around the battlefield at
Mach 1.5 in supercruise and just hang out
there, being largely invisible.’
As well as incredible sensors, the sheer
performance of the Raptor in the close-in
fight is awe-inspiring to witness at close
hand. The thrust-vectoring controls of the
twin Pratt & Whitney F119 engines enable
many of the manoeuvres debuted by
Russian ‘Flankers’ in the 1990s, but now in a
swept-up, stealthy killing machine.
‘In an F-15, if I was pulling too hard the
airplane would talk to me and I’d back off on
the stick, otherwise it would stall and fall out
of the sky’, explains Fesler. ‘In the Raptor, the
way to get out of a lot of situations is to just
keep pulling back on the stick. The thrust
vectoring will just kick the nose around to
wherever you want it. In another airplane
you’d just depart [from controlled flight]. But
that’s just a small percentage of what this
jet can do. Like, the first time you point at
an F-15 or an F-16 from 100 miles away. You
can fly right by them, turn around and comeAbove: The side
doors snap
open to reveal
an AIM‑9M
Sidewinder as
the pilot briefly
uncloaks the
Raptor for a kill.
Left: Diamond‑
shape doors on
the upper surface
flick open as a
puff of smoke
and a hiss signal
the start of the
APU (Auxiliary
Power Unit).roster. They help to act as continuity amid
the high turnover of the active duty and to
help spread that experience that the young
pilots need.
The wing and squadron leadership staff
includes seasoned pilots that cut their
teeth on the F-15C. It allows them to truly
appreciate what they have in the F-22.
Col Fesler acknowledges that his pool of
experience is something of a challenge, as
well as the cost and time it takes to ‘spin
up’ pilots fresh out of school. ‘To take aguy from pilot training, put them through
the Basic Raptor Course down at Tyndall
and then through Mission Qualification
Training [MQT], flight lead, instructor and
mission commander upgrades takes years’,
he explains.
Today, F-22 pilot workloads are
compounded by the sheer range of
missions they are expected to be versed
in, from the ‘long stick’ of the AIM-120
Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile
(AMRAAM) to the 250lb SDB — although(^54) RAPTOR
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