The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is one of the most advanced fighters available to any air force today; stealth capabilities and top speed of 1,500 mph. Look at this beast.
The Vickers Fighting Biplane 5 was the most advanced fighter available 100 years ago…well, it was the only fighter available; with a gun and a top speed of 70 mph. It’s still a beast.
If the F-22 had to take down these biplanes in flight, how would they go about it? What problems would the F-22 pilot face?
The F22 could probably ram it without any ill effects. failing that a burst from its 20mm cannon should do the trick.
They’d just use the gun. It would be like clubbing seals.
Blow past it at Mach 2 and let the shock waves tear it apart.
(I suspect that if the F-22 is capable of doing any damage to a fixed position on the ground or a truck moving along a highway, the slow speed of the Vickers would not be an impediment to cannon fire. The lack of any significant metal aside from the engine and the lower BTUs of the engine and exhaust might make air-to-air rockets problematic, but the guns still work)
Finding them. Air-to-air radar software tend to filter out objects moving below certain threshold speeds or whose radar “echo” is smaller than X (this to avoid displaying flights of geese or storm clouds for example).
Airborne radars also used to have trouble finding anything while “looking down” because of ground echo, but I believe that particular problem has been solved.
Once that hurdle is overcome, there’s relatively little functional difference between hunting a Biplane 5 and hunting a modern attack helicopter - and that’s a turkey shoot for *any *fighter jet.
Radar-guided missiles would possibly be a bust (for the same reason as above, except the pilot can’t reprogram his missiles’ brains in-flight the way he can fiddle with his plane’s) but IR-guided and going in for guns would work just fine.
If that Vickers catches the raptor while the latter is parked on the runway, see what one .303 will do to $35M+ of fragile hardware.
This.
Or just get close to one and do a sharp bank at subsonic speeds. A 300-400 mph blast of hot air would probably destroy it or send it out of control.
Covered fairly well in this story:
Hawk Among the Sparrows by Dean McLaughlin
Seems like aiming the exhaust at it and firing up the afterburners might even set it on fire.
this. If an A300 can be taken down by the wake of another airplane a Gunbus doesn’t stand a chance.
Are you referring to American 587 here? As I understand it, pilot error played a larger role in that than the actual wake turbulence they encountered.
Lame to even post this, but Gunbus is such a better name than Raptor. Take flight from it (ahem)–Killtaxi! Deathcoach! Slaytrain! Bazookarickshaw!
The A300’s tail mounting design and rudder input system was an accident waiting to happen.
Althought it’s not at all relevant, I can’t resist pointing out that the reason the snail-speed Swordfish (essentially a “typical” WWI biplane (!) with some modifications) was able to inflict catastrophic damage on the state-of-the-art battleship Bismarck (other than luck) was that the Bismarck’s guns panned too quickly to keep the slow-moving Swordfish in their sights.
When the Bismarck’s anti-aircraft guns and system were designed, the assumption was that any attacking plane would have a speed of at least ‘X’ mph, and thus set a lower limit for the AA guns’ tracking speed. So, when the Swordfish attacked with a speed of something less than ‘X’, the Bismarck’s fire control system would always aim the AA guns in front of the plane even when used at its slowest setting.
(For the eidetics among you, yes, I also posted this in another thread four years ago)
Be that as it may, aerial gunnery doesn’t involve turrets, or even software to much extent. Certainly there is no gunnery helping mechanism to move the gun (or the plane :p) in position to shoot true. Granted, jet-to-jet gunnery is very split-second stuff and it becomes much easier with radar lock (which triggers a slew of aiming aids on the pilot’s HUD) but against slow-moving targets that don’t jink all over the place it becomes much easier. Not quite as easy as striking a fixed emplacement, but still something a dozy pilot can do without much thought.
I don’t know what kind of software is run of the F-22 exactly, but from the 60s onwards the typical visual aiming aid was, first, a big static X where shells will strike at a short, specific distance (I believe it’s 100 meters, but my memory is hazy) and then a computer generated funnel depicting precisely where the stream of shells will go next based on ownplane movement, wind, airspeed and so forth. Like so (ignore the half-circle around the whole thing, that’s a missile aid).
Hitting stuff even without a radar lock is then as easy as setting one’s target’s rough wingspan into the computer, placing one’s target inside the funnel so that each of its wingtips touch one side of the funnel (this is as good a quick and dirty rangefinder as any) and let 'er rip. Splash one antique bogey.
The speed of the target isn’t much of a factor in this method, since minigun shells are typically faster ;).
Batman. If he’s prepared.
It’d be a tie.
The Raptor would come in for a look and accidentally suck the Gunbus into its jet intakes. That’s curtains for the Gunbus, and means the destruction of the Raptor as well, unless Chesley Sullenberger is piloting it.
Probably best not to cite Batman in any air combat scenarios. 
I don’t think that’s true at all. Bird strikes have taken down fighter jets.
You’re all wrong actually.
The winner would be the Vickers biplane.
The F-22 would be of course grounded for maintenance/oxygen system/faulty valve seals/corrupted code lines/etc. ad nauseam, and the Vickers would simply fly over and shoot a few holes in it… :eek:
