Honestly, we at FighterSweep couldn’t be any more excited about this Milestone Monday. Eighteen years ago today saw the maiden flight of the world’s most feared combat aircraft, the Lockheed-Martin F-22A Raptor, with Lockheed-Martin Test Pilot Paul Metz at the controls.
Now before you get all bent out of shape about how it’s not fair to say that because it hasn’t the combat record of the Eagle (valid), has been shot down by all manner of legacy fighters during exercises (valid), and even shot down by fifty-year-old trainers (also valid), just hear us out.
The Raptor is a transformational aircraft, one that came along at the perfect time. Why the perfect time, you ask? It’s not as if everyone else has been sitting on their butts for the last thirty years; design bureaus all over the world have been developing and working on new aircraft to beat or compete with our current benchmarks–the Light Gray Eagle, Super Hornet, and the Viper.
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Honestly, we at FighterSweep couldn’t be any more excited about this Milestone Monday. Eighteen years ago today saw the maiden flight of the world’s most feared combat aircraft, the Lockheed-Martin F-22A Raptor, with Lockheed-Martin Test Pilot Paul Metz at the controls.
Now before you get all bent out of shape about how it’s not fair to say that because it hasn’t the combat record of the Eagle (valid), has been shot down by all manner of legacy fighters during exercises (valid), and even shot down by fifty-year-old trainers (also valid), just hear us out.
The Raptor is a transformational aircraft, one that came along at the perfect time. Why the perfect time, you ask? It’s not as if everyone else has been sitting on their butts for the last thirty years; design bureaus all over the world have been developing and working on new aircraft to beat or compete with our current benchmarks–the Light Gray Eagle, Super Hornet, and the Viper.
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