September 28, 2018
The F-22 Is Nearly Unstoppable (But the Air Force Has Too Few of Them)
And the problem can't be fixed.
by Dave Majumdar
Building more F-22s is not the answer however. Air Combat Command is working on ways to keep the Raptor relevant into the 2030s and beyond to the end of its service life in the 2060s. That being said, the F-22 will be increasingly challenged by enemy forces as time goes on as new air defenses and new fighters emerge from development.
With the U.S. Air Force considering the retirement of the Boeing F-15C Eagle, Lockheed Martin’s stealthy fifth-generation F-22 Raptor will be the only air superiority fighter in the service’s inventory.
While there is no doubt that the Raptor is far and away the best air superiority fighter ever built, the U.S. Air Force only has about 186 surviving Raptors in its inventory. Of those 186 remaining Raptors, only 123 are “combat-coded†aircraft with another twenty that are classified as backup aircraft inventory machines. The rest are test and training assets. Even then, some of those aircraft are undergoing long-term repairs after suffering from accidents—such as one Alaska-based aircraft that made a belly-landing in Florida in April —and are not flying.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-22-nearly-unstoppable-air-force-has-too-few-them-32152
