“Yesterday we had Raptor salad for lunch.” That was said, with a series of close-range training conflicts in Alaska behind him, than any technical diagram could ever have done in crafting the popular mythology around one exercise. In 2012, German Luftwaffe Eurofighter Typhoon pilots left Red Flag Alaska with accounts of notional kill against the U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor an aircraft synonymous with stealth, sensor fusion, and being able to dictate the conditions of a fight long prior to an opponent noticing that the fight has begun.
The important point is that they were within-visual-range Basic Fighter Maneuvers which is basically controlled dogfighting. That format is designed to deplete the playbook of the Raptor: identifying, pursuing, and fighting at range and remaining hard to locate. The idea of Red Flag is not to maintain the aura of a person, but to see who can push the boundaries when they are pushed and to see who can push the corner cases that a force can not afford to overlook.
Reportedly, in Alaska, the engagements were initiated in a configuration that compelled a visual convergence and focused on turn performance, energy management and timing. In that set of conditions, the defining features of the F-22 were not as important as the choices made within the first few seconds the jets were crossing. More importantly, the Raptor was being reported to use external fuel tanks that were carved onto the aircraft even during some of the drills, a design decision which can introduce aerodynamic costs and diminish the capability of maneuvring aggressively.
The Typhoon side of the ledger was otherwise. German pilots have been reported to pull the tanks in order to get optimum performance with Maj. Marc Gruene once saying, We pulled all the tanks to get the best alpha; the Eurofighter is an animal with no tanks. Clean jets, particularly in a one-on-one arena, are more likely to favor designs that are energy-retaining and reposition at a fast pace. The delta-canard design and thrust to weight of the Typhoon were most appropriate to that type of knife battle where being able to remain fast during turns hard may determine which side of the rear quarter is in control.
One of the most controversial details of such accounts can be related to thrust-vectoring. Most fighters can not point their noses in such directions, although the F-22 can, though there is a price: energy. During turning fight, the hemorrhage rate, without instantly transforming it into a shot, can provide an “energy fighter” the opportunity to go up, stay in smash and come down with options. In a broader discussion of the incident, one Eurofighter test pilot was quoted in the same context as follows: “In a dogfight, airspeed is life,” and any maneuver that causes high drag is capable of changing a temporary advantage into a permanent handicap when the enemy continues to move.
It does not take the foregoing to conclude that the Eurofighter is “better” to the Raptor. It can be taken as evidence that the episode is more appropriate as an illustration of how training regulations can reverse strengths. The F-22 was intended to be used as a component of an integrated force that would discourage close engagements, but still survive in such, which is also reflected in the reaction of Air Force officials at the time, such as the argument that one-on-one dogfighting is not the only, or most typical, method of determining the combat utility of a modern fighter.
The lessons of engineering may be even longer lasting than the headline: with the stealth and beyond-visual-range tactics carefully isolated, the battle returns to aerodynamics, configuration, and pilot energy management. The high-tech platform even in that thin slice of air combat can be turned into something ordinary by design.
