Just a thought on the F-22
I would have to believe that the F-22 has to be the most overated fighter that i have ever seen. Some of its key features are in real terms useless in the real world. I think that way too much money has been spent on a fighter that really only does one thing well, but not well enough to even remotelly justify its cost. Let me explain
Supercruise
Has it ever occured to anyone that an aircraft that claims to be 'stealth' would find it useless to cruise along at supersonic speeds... The reason for this is that a supersonic fighter, regardless of its stealth capability makes a pretty bloddy big impression when its breaking the sound barrier. In real terms supercruise would only ever be used in training and in the manufactureres pamphlets. In the real world it would operate subsonically like most aircraft and only resort to supersonic speeds to either get into or out of action in a hurry.
Stealth Ability
The problem with stealth fighters is that they are designed to not return radar reflections from below them (i.e. ground based radars). This is all well and good when fighting against a 3rd world force such as Iraq or the like, but against a powerful country equipped with AWACS then its not always guaranteed that the powerfull radars will be beneath your aircraft. As well as this the Mig-29 and Su-27/30/32/34/35/37 etc. range of aircraft are fitted with powerfull IRST systems which allow them to search for infa-red signals out to 120km's... no matter how stealthy a plane is it will ALWAYS be hotter than the surrounding athmosphere, therefore it will be in just as much danger against a plane fitted with an AA-11/IRST combination as a J7 or a mig-19 for that matter...
actually, it would be in more trouble than a J7 or a mig-19 because an F-22 CANNOT manouver on par with either a lightweight fighter nor a supermanuevarable russian/chinese sukhoi. It is the same style of fighter as a Mig-31, an F-15 and a Tornado ADV, It is a large heavy advanced fighter designed to kill at long range, not to mix it in with the lighweights, a lesson learned in Vietnam by the American Phantom pilots.
So before we all go on about this aircraft like it is god-with-wings lets consider how truly effective its so called advantages are.
Oh... one last thing... the Russians used the paramaters and information about the stealth shootdown in its latest S-300PMU software packages... The same S-300PMU sold to China... Russians are neither dumb or slow, they have NEVER been beaten in a war in the last 200 years ( a real war... not afghanistan or the WW1 debacle where they had one gun per 3/4 men)
