F22 Program

 

Find a year or term on this page:

The F-22 Raptor is a new breed of super-fighter for the 21st century. With its stealth, supersonic cruise, agility and advanced integrated avionics, it will dominate the skies over any future battlefield and bring unequaled capability into the hands of America’s Air Force fighter pilots.

Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney have joined with the U.S. Air Force to develop and produce the revolutionary F-22. The world’s first stealth air-to-air fighter, the F-22 will be unseen and deadly at long range and unmatched at close-in dog fighting. As a true multi mission fighter, it will also have superb, precision-strike ground attack capability. A multimode electronically scanned radar, internal weapons carriage, vectored thrust and a sophisticated fully integrated sensor array are only some of the revolutionary advantages that Raptor brings to the air combat arena. Slated to be operational early in the next century, F-22 will replace the U.S. Air Force’s aging fleet of F-15 Eagle fighters.

The F-22 is the first production aircraft with the ability to super cruise – flying at supersonic speeds without the use of afterburners. The Raptor achieves this by combining efficient aerodynamic design with two Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100 engines, rated in the 35,000-lb thrust category.

Designed and built with reliability and maintainability in mind, the F-22 offers new capability to deploy and fight on day one. Twice as reliable and capable as its predecessors, it will allow the Air Force to get to the fight faster, stay longer and fly more missions than any conventional fighter aircraft.

The F-22 is proving itself today through a rigorous flight test program in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base, California, and the results have been outstanding. Air Force and F-22 Contractor Team test pilots are putting the Raptor through its paces, and the aircraft, engines and avionics will be thoroughly tested before the F-22 enters active duty.

The Raptor will carry existing and planned air-to-air weapons, including a full complement of AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAM) and AIM-9 Sidewinder short-range missiles, along with an internal M61A2 Vulcan 20mm cannon. Multi mission air-to-surface weaponry includes the new GBU-32, 1,000-lb joint direct attack munition (JDAM) for precision, all-weather attack