Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "F22 RAPTOR vs RAFALE DOGFIGHT 1/2" video.

  1. The Rafale has capabilities that rival the F/A-18, F-16, and F-15 since those don’t have IRST integrated with AESA. Block 70 F-16V with modern systems integration and F-15EX should do better, but they’re at parity and don’t have the IR concealment over the engine nozzles that Rafale has. F-22 and F-35 are a leap ahead in all the relevant metrics.
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  2.  @ATECHUET  There’s a RAAF exchange pilot who was flying F-15C Aggressors out of Nellis against F-22As. He said the JHMCS and AIM-9X would not acquire the F-22 in WVR.
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  3.  @fabiena1787  (I’m sure you already know this.) In modern fighters, you want an airframe meant for superior performance at altitude and speed with the ability to behave well in the transonic region, with high density air performance a secondary requirement. If you sacrifice the former for the latter, it’s more ideal for the lower altitude bands where surface-to-air missiles are more prevalent and deadly, fuel consumption is high, and sensor detection ranges are lower. F-15, Typhoon, F-22, and F-35 were designed with higher altitude bands in mind, with lower speed performance as a secondary (but important) attribute as well. The F-16 was designed for lower altitude bands as a day visual-only fighter, and never used that way other than one partial exception over Bekaa Valley in 1982, with lead flights coming from 90˚ to Syrian MiG ingress routes using Range While Search radar mode, and trail flights using eyeball search of any squirters.
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  4.  @fabiena1787  My pleasure. You an AeroE for structures?
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  5. Luneberg lenses are on all the time, but can be turned off when “stealthing up”. Can also be used for deception and tactics to ruin threat fighters, as well as networked EW. An example would be going active with the Luneberg at a certain distance at BVR to set up a fighter to head in that direction, then turn the Luneberg off and get very offset angles outside of any of his sensor envelopes for an easy NEZ window.   The Rafale has avionics that allows the OSF to be cued by the AESA radar and its EW system, where the HUD symbology is being generated by a fused track. This is what ATE is avoiding since pilots aren’t able to really discuss it in an open setting. Within Visual Range and with the Luneberg lenses actively blasting the F-22’s RCS into a large TGT, the Rafale’s AESA will immediately see that, and tell the OSF and missile seekers to "look there”. It’s a way of having fun and providing a challenge for the Raptor pilots doing dissimilar BFM. If they maximized the F-22’s VLO capabilities even for BFM, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge and would cheat the Raptor and Rafale pilots out of good training. This was a line abreast merge with separation of x miles, converging towards each other. F-22A would have had valid missile shots within a very early turn towards the Rafale, as ATE mentioned was very likely, when he discussed the Rafale pilot using his Radar guided missile mode during that early stage as well. If someone is walking away from this HUD footage thinking the Rafale can defeat the F-22 easily, they are making a huge mistake and are not understanding the intent of the exercise. We do this every year with and UK, France under what is called Atlantic Trident. As ATE mentioned, it is a joint operations centric Large Force Exercise designed to get 3 historic allies working together with good interoperability.
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  6. How many valid shots did the F-22 have during this? Started off with at least 1 or 2 pre-merge, then since we don’t have the F-22 HUD footage (they won’t release it because it indicates capabilities that rival 4.5 Gen MMI), we are left only with one set of HUD data from this BFM exercise that a Rafale would never survive to anyway.
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  7.  @a-10thunderboltii24  There’s an account from a RAAF Hornet pilot flying exchange with USAF in F-15Cs saying he could not acquire the F-22A with JHMCS and AIM-9X, so the IR stealth actually works even within visual range. On the US side, they will have the Luneberg reflectors on during BFM to help the other fighter get radar and HUD data sufficient for tracking and prevent technical exploitation as much as possible. There are some recent images from Rafale OSF that show really hi-res photos of F-22A at close range, and it’s a really cold TGT in the IR spectrum. Lots of cold air flows over the engine exhaust, there is heat-sinking of leading edges to pull aerodynamic heat away from them, and IR topcoat to reduce IR thermal reflectivity from the sun and other sources. This was basically a fun exchange to do some BFM against each other. There were way more sorties than this, and we’ll never see F-22 HUD footage, so.....
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