USAF F-22 Raptor goes missing yesterday, causing Billy Beck to comment and my roomie to start singing Thomas Dolby lyrics...
The wreckage has apparently been found, but still no word on whether the pilot punched out or not.
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The big question is, how are they going to blame Sarah Palin for this?
The pilot must be Sarah Palin's baby.
Beck's comment says more about his ignorance on subjects such as cell phone technology, Air operations in general and Alaska in particular, and SAR operations than anything useful.
At east they found the wreckage. I was worried that the pilot might have been paid a very good sum of money to fly the plane somewhere overseas in close proximity to Alaska...
Maybe becks confusion is because it's a STEALTH aircraft?
Beck's a putz.
Hank beat me to it. Losing a stealth aircraft shouldn't exactly be unusual. Ideally, we'd like the Air Force's tower control to be mildly surprised every time one comes in on approach.
Randy,
I took it as a tongue-in-cheek joke rather than any kind of technical briefing... ;)
Bearfood?
Tam,
Fair enough.
As former USAF aircrew and survival school graduate, my sense of humor and irony detection capabilities tend to be seriously degraded during situations like this.
That and personal experience with seriously stupid statements made by the public when an aircraft goes down.
Adjusting my attitude to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The pilot punched out - but that MOA is full of really rough terrain, and it's already deep in cold winter.
My thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.
Tam: I do admire your sophistication.
Let me only point out that the "stealth" aspect goes one way: it most certainly is not as if these things are flying boomer subs, designed to slip U.S. command authority as soon as they clear the end of the runway. You do understand this, right, Hank? "Wolfwood"? Right?
Right.
Dang, Billy! Sometimes I don't think you deserved to have such a good cat as Priss was to you. I bet you never finished building the Fly Baby, either. You are such a grump!
P.s. Electric guitars are only provisionally and probationally musical instruments, being at least one level below saxophones, and two levels below violas.
P.s. I now seem to be considered a B. Beck-level smartass by at least a coupla commenters over at Lex's blog, for quoting a bit of "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill" by Robert Service. Maybe I've been hanging out at SociopathWorld.com a little too much, lately.
I believe stealth aircraft use transponders when operating in non-combat airspace so that they show up on radar.
The F-22 is a *remarkably* stealthy bird when it wants to be. In addition to it's utterly amazing performance and it's analytical systems, it was designed to be stealthy enough to escort a B-2 Spirit into harm's way without compromising the Spirit. Yeah, it's *that* good.
I personally believe that the decision to permanently decommission the F-22 production line is going to ultimately prove very shortsighted.
Word in the trade (I still lunch with the aerospace side of the company) is that the next generation of fighters is about ready to go, will be semiautonomous and unmanned, escorting the F-22's and getting their final release from them.
Anything that can outturn a short range infrared type missile has to be able to beat 30+ g's in a turn, and if they can get these things flying for supposedly less than the cost of a Phoenix, the Russians and Chinese, both trying very hard to look like they're working at a 5th Gen fighter, are so screwed it's embarrassing.
As for the F-22 pilot, I grew up in Navy Air, have seen good landings and bad ones, and can only hope for the best.
Fighter pilots usually think the world revolves around them. When it thoroughly goes in the pot and they're out at the pointy end all alone, it does. God bless them all, and I'll hope for a happy ending here.
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