Bill Sweetman reports at Aviation Week‘s Ares blog that the U.S. Air Force has, at last, declared the F-22 combat ready:
So it’s taken a while. And Sweetman points to the F-16 as a counterpoint, an aircraft that went quickly from design to full-scale production, and which, as Stuart Koehl noted here earlier today, has since become an Air Force workhorse and a dominant player in the export market. (For anyone interested in why the F-16 was such a success, it’s worth checking out the excellent book Boyd.) The F-16 was a far less ambitious project than F-22, and there was nothing really revolutionary about it. It was simply built to be a pure air-to-air fighter, with less emphasis on new technology than on aerodynamics. But the F-22 is revolutionary. Still, it’s disconcerting that the project has taken so long to become combat ready, and that even as it has entered service it has been plagued by embarrassing problems. Which is why I’m curious to see how the the Air Force’s push for a new bomber by 2018 turns out. With no money in the budget for the project next year, the Air Force still seems confident it can develop a system using existing technologies in that relatively short time frame. The 2018 bomber is supposed to be a temporary measure until the service can begin work in earnest on the 2037 bomber, but as one expert told Defense News:
That’s because the 2037 bomber, like the F-22 25 years ago, will be built with technologies that don’t yet exist. If the service can build the 2018 bomber in a short time frame and using existing technologies, perhaps they’ll end up with a real prize like the F-16–both affordable and effective.
