What If #12

What if the President of the United States made a mistake by cutting funds for purchasing F-22 Raptors(last picture)? If you think that the F-22 is the best plane ever built and nothing can ever defeat it, then you are wrong. Other countries, including some enemies, are already working on new fifth generation planes. A fifth generation aircraft means that they have high-performance airframes, internally carried advanced air-to-air, and air-to-ground weapons, all aspect stealth, Low Probability of Intercept Radar (LPIR), and networks for shared situation awareness. Their advanced highly integrated avionics systems, with on and off-board sensor fusion, free pilots to focus on the task, rather than the different systems that generate the information. Some examples of fifth generation aircraft are the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning II, India's Medium Combat Aircraft, China's Shenyang J-XX (first pic), Russia's Sukhoi PAK FA(second pic) and the Sukhoi/HAL FGFA (joint Russian and Indian plane). At the moment, Russia and India are considered allies, but China is a different story. At the moment, they seem to be the biggest threat to the United States when it comes to aeronautics. The new planes all have the same capabilities as the F-22 Raptor has, and if they build way more of their planes than we do, then we will become way outnumbered. At the current date, the United States has only purchased 187 Raptors, with no current plans to produce any more. The plane itself costs $142.6 million per unit with the whole program costing more than $65 billion. Obama just recently signed the new budget without procuring money to Lockheed Martin or Boeing in order to start production of the 187 aircraft. The aircraft cannot help defend the country if they aren't even built yet. The technology on the plane is pretty neat. The radar cross-section of a Raptor appears to be the size of a metal marble on a radar screen. This makes it nearly undetectable to enemy missiles and radar. The newer, but less technological, cheaper version of the F-22 is the F-35(second picture). The F-35 has a new cool Helmet Mounted Display System (HMDS) (third picture) that allows the Heads Up Display (HUD) to move with the pilot's head instead of it being static on the front of the plane. The pilot can now look towards an enemies position and gain information or even acquire missile lock and fire. This now allows pilots to fire missiles when they aren't even facing the enemy. So no more Top Gun-like dogfights where you have to line up the enemy, you just simply look at them. The technology of all nations is constantly being upgraded, are we starting to lose the race for air superiority? Obama tried his hardest to shut down the F-22 program, but only succeeded in stopping production of the 187 aircraft that will be purchased. We can only wait and see what happens.