STEALTH FIGHTER IN CONGRESS’ SIGHTS

Good gov­ern­ment groups and mil­i­tary ana­lysts have been tak­ing aim at the F/​A-​​22 stealth fighter plane pro­gram for years. The jets cost too much, they say. Designed for Cold War, air-​​to-​​air com­bat, the planes aren’t needed in the anti-​​terror fight. Osama doesn’t have an air force, after all.
The crit­ics got a big pile of new ammu­ni­tion yes­ter­day, in the form of a new report from the General Accounting Office, the inves­tiga­tive arm of Congress. The Air Force still hasn’t said “why this air­craft is needed given cur­rent and pro­jected threats,” accord­ing to the GAO. And the F/​A-​​22 pro­gram is way, way over-​​budget: once sched­uled to buy 277 of the planes, the Pentagon can now only pur­chase 218, due to inflated costs.
“What’s more, the Air Force plans to add extra air-​​to-​​ground mis­sions to a plane designed for air-​​to-​​air com­bat, which could push costs up another $8 bil­lion or more,” accord­ing to the Washington Post.

The Air Force orig­i­nally wanted to see the plane’s sophis­ti­cated avion­ics, or elec­tron­ics gear, achieve 20 hours of unin­ter­rupted fly­ing time with­out a soft­ware fail­ure. When the plane couldn’t achieve that, the Air Force changed its goal to fly­ing five hours with­out a soft­ware fail­ure. As of January, the plane could aver­age no bet­ter than 2.7 hours.
In addi­tion, the plane’s micro­proces­sor is an obso­lete model no longer man­u­fac­tured. The Air Force plans to switch to a newer type, includ­ing one cre­ated for the upgraded F-​​16 fighter jet, a type of plane far older than the F-​​22.

It’s no sur­prise, then, that watch­dog groups like the Project on Government Oversight are ask­ing the Pentagon to put this sick puppy of a pro­gram to sleep.
“There’s no place for weapons with­out a mis­sion like the F/​A-​​22 given the cur­rent bud­get squeeze,” POGO’s Eric Miller said in a statement.

March 16th, 2004 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.