The Associated Press April 04, 2004
Langley busy preparing for arrival of stealthy fighter jets
By Sonja Barisic
Lt. Col Ray O'Mara is an F-15 pilot, but he hopes to get tapped to fly the F/A-22 Raptor, the next-generation fighter jet coming to Langley Air Force Base by the end of the year.
"I would put body parts on sale on eBay if I thought it would do me good to be able to get to fly this airplane," said O'Mara, chief of the 1st Fighter Wing F/A-22 Integration Office at Langley, which is busy tearing down and putting up buildings to prepare for the Raptors, even as the stealthy jets continue to encounter criticism over rising costs.
"From a pilot's perspective, it's an absolute dream," O'Mara said. "The things that this aircraft can do, the speed that it can fly, the maneuvering capability that it's got, are just incredible."
Langley will be the first operational unit to receive the Raptors and expects the first planes to arrive by year's end. The 1st Fighter Wing will be the first Air Force unit to convert from another aircraft to the F/A-22, O'Mara said.
The Raptors are replacing the F-15Cs, which are approaching 30 years old. Unlike its predecessor, the Raptor can fly at supersonic speeds for long ranges.
Langley has about $105 million of construction going on at the base, plus about $20 million to $25 million in renovation projects, O'Mara said.
Langley is tearing down three old hangars and replacing them with facilities that will have a smaller footprint but more usable interior space, O'Mara said.
Langley also is building a facility to maintain the new jets and a training facility for pilots that will provide real-time training in a 360-degree cockpit. The screen will project different scenarios allowing pilots to gain more flying experience without actually being in the air.
In addition, about 25 Langley-based mechanics are being sent to Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to learn how to work on the jets.
The Langley projects are on track, an Air Force spokeswoman said, even despite a report last month from the General Accounting Office that said the military can now afford only 218 of the F/A-22 planes within a $36.8 billion spending cap.
The Air Force originally planned to buy 750 but since has reduced the number to 277.
The plane was conceived at the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon recently agreed to advance the Raptor to a more rigorous phase of testing.
The first combat-ready planes are supposed to hit the skies next year, and the military is supposed to decide by December whether to continue with full production of the plane. The GAO report called on the Pentagon to submit to Congress a detailed justification of the program before that decision.
The plane has had problems with its tail fins, canopy and computer software, the report noted. Its avionics computer processors are obsolete, and changing to new ones necessary for the plane's expanded role will take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the report said.
Defense analyst Patrick Garrett called the Raptor "a new toy for the Air Force."
While "pilots are hot to trot to get into the cockpit ... and drop a bomb or two," there are questions as to whether the plane is needed, said Garrett. He noted that the Iraqis did not get a single aircraft up in the air against the United States during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Garrett also said the F-15s that are being phased out still have some good fighting life in them.
"So long as you're able to buy the spare parts and fix the airplane, and the Air Force is very good at that, I'm not worried about planes," said Garrett of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit military intelligence and space research organization in Alexandria
Garrett said the F/A-22 was a good way to learn about stealth technology for fighter aircraft but that its technology is going to be obsolete by the time the jet is deployed to all the Air Force wings.
Brig. Gen. Kelvin R. Coppock, director of intelligence at Air Combat Command's headquarters at Langley, said the Air Force is not building the Raptor simply to push the technology envelope.
"The reason we even get to this point of building the F/22s is there's a threat out there," said Coppock, who leads more than 16,000 intelligence operations people.
"Our adversaries are continuing to develop capabilities that are trying to counter the capabilities that we have," Coppock said. He said the identity of those adversaries is classified, but "it's not hard to imagine who those adversaries are."
"We have to improve what we can do against our adversaries because we don't want a fair fight," Coppock said. "We want to be so overwhelming to whoever is threatening our values and our way of life that they decide they don't want to do that because they know if they do it will be catastrophic upon them."
© Copyright 2004, The Associated Press
