As part of Fleet Week festivities, there's supposed to be a flyover of F-22 Raptors over the Hudson Corridor between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. However, it's weather-permitting, and as NYC Aviation puts it, "Weather not looking good."
Still, the F-22 Raptor one badass-looking fighter jet—here's how Boeing describes it, "The Raptor's unique combination of stealth, speed, agility, precision and situational awareness make it overwhelmingly effective in its combined air-to-air and air-to-ground mission capability. In its expanding role as an ISR asset, the F-22 is making the entire joint force more effective by collecting timely information about the forward reaches of the battlespace and relaying it to other aircraft and command/control nodes. Ongoing modernization efforts—including integration of the Small Diameter Bomb, electronic attack capability, synthetic aperture radar and the Coordinate Seeking Weapon—will ensure the Raptor's relevance throughout its 40-year service life."
The F-22 program cost over $66 billion; the unit cost is supposedly $150 million (PDF). Expensive, evil and elegant! By the way, Top Gun is screening at the Intrepid tomorrow (weather permitting).
Update: A reader pointed out that the military restricted F-22 flights because pilots "refused to fly the planes because of fears of oxygen deprivation in the cockpit." So maybe today's gloomy rain was for the best!
