With help from flight simulator, test pilots at Hanscom Field make case for Raptor funding By Jack Minch Lowell (Mass.) Sun February 5, 2009 BEDFORD -- Test pilots Bret "Low Key" Luedke and Steve "Hooter" Rainey have no intention of playing fair. When the former Air Force officers go up in the F-22 Raptor fighter plane, they're not looking for air superiority. They want air dominance. Mission accomplished. The Raptor is a fifth-generation fighter that takes the best capabilities of all previous generations and rolls them into one lethal package other planes can't match. Each $140 million jet can clear a path over hostile territory, guarded by surface-to-air missiles, then seek out and shoot down enemy planes before they even know the Raptor is in the sky. It could be claimed the plane is environmentally friendly compared to other fighter planes, cruising at speeds others can reach only by using afterburners. "It is the best, period," Rainey said. "As you can see, it absolutely dominates. When we're airborne, it dominates the sky. It does everything better." The biggest problem for the Raptor is not enemy planes or surface-to-air missiles. It's finding funding to keep production lines working. Lockheed Martin and Boeing have delivered 134 Raptors to the Air Force. The question, for some, is whether the plane is overkill. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there are no other superpowers to challenge air dominance, opponents say. In November, Congress authorized $523 million in advance funding for 20 more Raptors to be built starting in 2012. But the Department of Defense released just $50 million of the funding toward construction of the first four Raptors. It deferred the rest to the Obama administration, which is scheduled to rule on it by March 1. Luedke, the F-22's chief test pilot for Lockheed Martin, and Rainey, a test pilot for Boeing, stopped at Hanscom Field in a barnstorming mission to build support for the plane yesterday. They brought a simulator with a full-sized cockpit and three plasma screens used to project the horizon. It's like an amazing video game. The cockpit is an array of screens, buttons and levers. There is also a simulated "heads-up display," or HUD, which projects onto the cockpit canopy so pilots can monitor information about everything from the enemy position to the jet's speed. It's realistic in almost all details -- except the seat. In place of the normal seat, tilted at 17 degrees and equipped with an ejector button, is a plush Recaro car seat. As soon as a would-be sky jockey sits in the seat, Rainey starts the simulator, with the plane flying at 40,000 feet over a desert. A monitor picks up four Russian-built SU27 fighter planes 36 miles away. As soon as the computer locks on to the first target, the novice pilot is challenged to push the "pickle" button on the joystick that releases missiles with the right hand, check a screen between the knees to ensure the bomb doors open and close in the required heartbeat, flip a switch on the throttle in the left hand to lock on to a new target, and look back to the HUD with any sense of coordination. It happens as fast as you can push the buttons. Four shots and four kills for the first-time pilot. Mandy Smithberger, national security investigator for the watchdog group, Project on Government Oversite in Washington, D.C., questioned the value of the plane yesterday. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said there is no strategic need for them, she said in a telephone interview with The Sun. "Part of the problem is, we're not using it in the conflicts we're engaged in," Smithberger said. "Part of the problem is, we're not hearing the Department of Defense say we need this, we're hearing Congress say we need this." Indeed, there are 95,000 jobs either directly or indirectly related to the plane's production, and congressmen across the country are pushing for production to continue. In Massachusetts, there are 22 companies employing about 400 people to supply plane parts, including L-Com in Andover, said Lockheed Martin spokesmen Jim Conlin and Rob Fuller. The impact on the state's economy is about $50 million. Brigadier Gen. L. Scott Rice, deputy commander of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, said he was impressed with the plane. "Certainly, as we look to defend the United States and be a force to deploy under the expeditionary concept, having the premier, fifth-generation fighter as part of that is certainly the direction we would like to go," he said. (Archives)