Military Power

The crash of a F22 Raptor near Edwards Air Force Base on March 25 must be extremely embarrassing for Lockheed-Martin. Despite all the hype in the past claiming this type to be the best fighter aircraft of all time, it is noted that this is the third accident (two involving fatalities) involving the F22 since 2002.

One would have thought that a design that took twenty years to develop (with a budget that could easily have fed a small nation for a decade) that serious flying problems would have been ironed out long before it commenced service trials. Surely a company with such a long established record of building military aircraft as Lockheed-Martin should know how to counter “progressively violent yaw, roll and pitch transients” (the reason given for the second crash in December 2004)

Discuss