More F-22s For Cheap—The U.S. Air Force’s Plan To Waste Fewer Raptors On Basic Training

The U.S. Air Force has a scheme for boosting the combat capacity of its fleet of 185 F-22 Raptor stealth fighters.

No, it doesn’t involve paying Lockheed Martin
LMT
$50 billion to re-establish its Georgia Raptor factory and build 75 more of the twin-engine, radar-evading jets—an option the Air Force studied and rejected back in 2016.

Rather, the Air Force could change the way it trains pilots and, in the process, free up some of the 31 F-22s that the service currently dedicates to training.

Shifting training jets to the fighting force probably wouldn’t allow the Air Force to stand up a new Raptor squadron. But it might make the existing squadrons more resilient—and better able to absorb losses in combat.

The Air Force says it needs 21,000 pilots to fly its roughly 5,500 manned aircraft. But the service as recently as 2019 employed just 18,500 pilots—a nearly 10-percent gap.

Air Force pilot shortfalls are common when the U.S. economy is strong and the airline industry is hiring. Pilot shortages tend to shrink during recessions when government employment becomes more attractive.

While the economic impact of the novel-coronavirus pandemic could help to alleviate the current aviator-shortfall, the Air Force isn’t waiting to find out. The service has proposed to revamp its pilot-training program for the first time in decades. The end result could be a quicker education for thousands of aviators, a growing pilot payroll and a reduced requirement for training jets.

Some of those jets could become available for combat, instead. That could include F-22s.

Gen. Mike Holmes, the head of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, signed off on the new “Reforge” training concept in a June 2 memo. Air Force Magazine was among the first to report on the new concept.

The idea is to replace the roughly 500 1960s-vintage Northrop Grumman
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T-38 lead-in trainers with at least 350 new Boeing
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T-7s plus dozens of high-tech flight simulators. The $9-billion new training system could cut pilot training time from 40 months to 22 months, the Air Force claimed.

Reforge also could relieve front-line fighter types of their own training duties. David Timm, an Air Combat Command planner, told Air Force Magazine the F-22 training community devotes 60 percent of its sorties to basic flying skills. The T-7 with its advanced electronics could do that job, instead.

That could free up some of the Raptors assigned to the 43rd Fighter Squadron, the F-22 training unit. “We can take some of that training-coded iron and turn it into combat-coded iron,” Holmes told Air Force Magazine.

The 43rd Fighter Squadron was based at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle region before Hurricane Michael swept through in October 2018, wrecking the base and damaging several F-22s.

In the aftermath of the storm, the Air Force scrambled to rebuild the Raptor force. The 43rd Fighter Squadron moved to nearby Eglin Air Force Base. The service disbanded the Tyndall-based 95th Fighter Squadron, a combat unit, and used that squadron’s jets to boost the inventory of the five remaining front-line Raptor units—in Virginia, Alaska and Hawaii—from around 20 jets apiece to 24 jets.

A crash at Eglin on May 15 left the Air Force with 168 active F-22s. Twenty-nine older Block 10/20 models for training. 123 newer Block 30/35/40 in the front-line squadrons. Sixteen of the oldest Raptors are for testing. The balance, 17 airframes, is in the back-up inventory.

Just 13 of those 17 spare jets are the combat-coded models. In other words, the Air Force can afford to lose 13 F-22s to accidents or enemy missiles before the front-line squadrons start shrinking.

If the Air Force cut the F-22 training fleet by, say, 10 planes and moved them into the combat fleet, it could make the overall front-line force a third more resilient. That could mean the difference between winning and losing the air battle in a prolonged, high-intensity conflict.

The change wouldn’t be free. While the older Block 10/20 training jets can fly and fight, the Air Force would prefer to upgrade them to the current Block-40 configuration, with the latest weapons and software, before sending them into combat.

Holmes said he repeatedly has floated the idea of upgrading some of the training planes to the Block-40 standard. The upgrade costs around $50 million per plane. That’s a lot cheaper than the $666 million it would cost to build a new F-22.