Why the Navy never put the F-22 on aircraft carriers
Alex Hollings | April 5, 2021
America’s F-22 Raptor is widely touted as the most capable air superiority fighter on the planet, thanks to a combination of stealth, speed, and maneuverability. It makes sense, then, that Congress pressed the U.S. Navy to consider fielding a slightly different iteration of the Raptor for duty aboard its Nimitz-class supercarriers back in the early ’90s.
In order to make the F-22 suitable for carrier duty, Lockheed Martin would have had to incorporate a number of significant changes to the F-22’s design. Alongside the usual changes one can expect out of a carrier-capable aircraft (things like a strengthened fuselage and added tail hook), a Navy variant of the F-22 would have needed to incorporate a variable sweep-wing design similar to that employed by the Navy’s existing F-14 Tomcats. This addition, perhaps more than any of the others, would have been a real challenge for engineers to contend with. Sweep wings were expensive to maintain to begin with, but incorporating a sweep-wing design into a stealth aircraft may have been nearly impossible without sacrificing some degree of low observability.
Get the full story on why the Navy never managed to field an F-22 “Sea Raptor†in the video below:
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/why-the-navy-never-put-the-f-22-on-aircraft-carriers/