The radio message was elementary and immediately viral: “Fox 2! Death one Raptor on right turn!” In July 2023, during a Philippine Air Force controlled training sortie, an FA-50PH of the Philippine Air Force registered a simulated within-visual-range missile hit on an American Air Force F-22 Raptor on a Cope Thunder 23-2 training sortie over Luzon. Cheating on scoreboard was not as much about the scoreboard upset, but as a reminder of the fact that the most advanced jet in the formation still can be “painted” when a fight falls into the merge.
Cope Thunder in itself is made to place the pilot in the awkward angles. It was first practiced in 1976 in the Philippines, then moved into an ecosystem in Alaska in Red Flag, and was then reinstated in 2023 with approximately 225 personnel and a mixture of aircraft types to create force integration across tactics, comms, and planning. Scenarios in that environment are designed in such a way that they bring errors to the fore, rather than authenticate procurement brochures, and typically involve instilling limitations that cannot be perceived by a watching audience who are looking at one highlight.
The imbalance on paper is excessive. F-22 is a supersonic twin-engine fighter aircraft designed to the concept of the “first look, first shot,” i.e. poor observability, high altitude/speed margin, and sensor fusion to give pilots an incentive to Death at range and avoid a knife fight. Its fundamental design- stealth shaping, internal weapons carriage and the AN/APG-77 AESA radar are best suited towards taking charge of the air picture at beyond visual range. The T-50 family has spawned the FA-50PH, a smaller and lighter non-stealth aircraft used by many air forces to fill the training/air-defense gap. It is authentic, yet has no comparison in terms of class and mission design.
Then the geometry changes. The signal of a shot by an infrared-guided short-range missile in a within-visual-range system is a “Fox 2” call, in which the largest benefit of stealth, the inability to be detected and tracked, is reduced to tiny proportions. Then it is an engineering issue in terms of turn rate, energy storage, sight lines and reaction time. When a situation causes the fifth-generation jet to operate within those parameters, then the competition can be to whoever discovers the first clean angle, particularly when both pilots are purposefully collided into a merge rather than being free to control spacing and schedules at range.
Configuration information could be as significant as airframe pedigree. It was reported under reference that the F-22 might have been in flight carrying external fuel tanks, a realistic training option to certain profiles but which also increases drag and changes the handling. In the meantime, the smaller visual and infraviolet footprint of the FA-50, combined with its capability of turning sharply within a close-in regime, may provide brief situations in which a heat-seeker solution appears and vanishes within seconds.
This type of “Death” is not something new. The same has happened with Western exercises where fourth-generation fighters have achieved within-visual-range hits on the Raptor with limited rules. The similarity is that the F-22 is not outdated: it is that the training environment intentionally creates worst-case scenarios in order that pilots may practice recovery, defense and decision making when the plan has already gone sideways.
The Luzon moment in reality points to the fact that the short-range envelope is still lethal in a world filled with networks, sensors, and long-range missiles. A fighter of the fifth generation is designed to ensure that the fight does not become personal but there is no plane that is invincible when the merge occurs and the speed of the fight exceeds the benefits that traditionally keep it away.
