Price: £26.29
(as of May 01, 2025 22:29:55 UTC – Details)
I began the Introduction to my F-22 Raptor In Action book with this statement: “What the F-15 was to the last quarter of the 20th Century, the F-22 is to the first half of the 21st century. “ That statement is still true, but to a much lesser degree than I expected when I wrote that. The Raptor was a ground-breaking design, the first Fifth Generation Fighter, designed and built primarily as an air superiority fighter, it could also deliver air-to-ground munitions in devastatingly accurate fashion.
The USAF planned to replace its F-15s with Raptors, but the end of the Cold War and the seeming end of real air dominance competition caused the politicians to curtail defense spending and one of the casualties of that decision was the Raptor, resulting in ending production at 187 operational examples, far short of the number needed to replace over a thousand F-15s.
The F-15 Eagle had been the most dominant air-to-air fighter in history., having never been bested in aerial combat. The Eagle had an air-to-air record of 104 kills to 0 losses in air combat, and no air superiority version of the F-15 Eagle had ever been shot down by enemy forces, so developing a replacement that would outperform the Eagle was no small undertaking. The Raptor more than met that standard, and despite its low production run, is still a dominant air superiority fighter, and is still receiving upgrades more than a quarter of a century after its introduction. The Raptor had been envisioned and designed as a “Super Eagle” with enhanced maneuverability for dogfighting and stealth for hiding from enemy radar. It has lived up to those goals, and then some.
While the competition (allied and others) were designing 4th generation fighters to challenge the Eagle, American designers were focused on the technologies of the future…..stealth and battlespace management, aka: Situational Awareness (SA). Both of those are embodied in the F-35, a stealth fighter for the rest of the (friendly) world. The emergence of the F-35 also discouraged any idea of reopening the Raptor production line, even in the face of increasing threats from peer competitors.
Even as F-35s proliferate, with more and more worldwide sales, the F-22 Raptor remains a quantum leap forward in air supremacy capability, incorporating the most advanced avionics, propulsion, stealth, and aerodynamic technologies in the world, continuously upgraded and enhanced. When the Raptor became operational, no other fighter in the world could match it in terms of propulsion, aerodynamics, or in data processing capability, and it remains at the apex of apex aerial predators.
This volume of the “Illustrated” series includes the developmental history, along with the operational history through 2024, and though there are few, if any, markings derivatives, it will show the Raptor from every angle, inside and outside. Unlike my “In Action” title, I am not constrained to the number of pages or photos that I can show, so this title contains many more photos, including detaila and action. I have added a section at the rear of the book detailing the stealth competitors of Russia and China.
ASIN : B0F5PZ5ZGG
Publisher : Independently published (20 April 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 90 pages
ISBN-13 : 979-8280591127
Dimensions : 21.59 x 0.56 x 27.94 cm
