What makes a good fighter aircraft or attack aircraft?

I flew F-16s 30+ years ago… A models, which lacked AMRAAMs. Later variants had/have them. You’ll never find a greater F-16 partisan than the guys (and now gals) who’ve flown them.

Up close and personal within visual range, nobody could touch us back in the day and it’s less one-sided now, but I’d give up a lot to go do that again against damn near anyone driving damn near anything else.

A given of radar design is that the performance at any given level of tech is proportional to the antenna area. 2x the antenna area → 4x the range & discriminating power. The F-16 has a very small nose compared to an e.g. F-15 , F/A-18, or F-35. It has always suffered from a nose size/shape that impedes its radar capability.

It was the USA’s first-gen machine to use vortex lift, relaxed static stability, and fly-by-wire. As such, the slightly earlier F-15s lacking those things were mere targets once we got in close past the radar limitations we had compared to them. It wasn’t even fair how badly we beat those red-headed stepchildren.

The vortex lift, RSS, & FBW on F/A-18s is definitely 2nd gen; much improved. And the same stuff on F-22s, F-35s, and corresponding foreign machines are pure Star Wars voodoo by comparison. The best F-16 driver is at a decided disadvantage against Joe/Jane Average in one of those newer jets.

Progress. You’d hope we’d be making some since the 1970s for all the money we’re spending.

The A-10 is really quite unlike most of the other planes in discussion, as it’s very slow. All the other modern planes under discussion are supersonic; the A-10 isn’t any faster than the better World War II fighter planes. The A-10 is, truly, a ground attack aircraft.

The F/A-18 designation is as much political as anything else; the F-15, F-16, and F-35 are all also capable bombers, but for whatever reason aren’t called F/A.

There used to be more A-type planes, but generally speaking the USA, and the Western world in general, has been moving towards trying to standardize on fewer airplanes. The US Navy used the F/A-18 to replace TWO planes, the F-14 Tomcat and A-7 Intruder. Eventually, the F-35 will replace the F/A-18, though the plan is very slow.

In the modern era (meaning F-22/F-35 and beyond) is there some correspondence between the fighter vs attacker designations and stealth vs ordnance tradeoffs?

Is the F-35 more multirole and the F-22 a purer air to air fighter in that regard, despite both being designated “F”?

And is there a reason we tend to export the F-35 but not the F-22?

Not exactly.

There is definitely a tradeoff in general between stealth & ordnance load. To be at all stealthy 100% of ordnance and fuel must be carried internally within the stealthy outer shape (“outer mold line” in the argot) of the basic vehicle. Which means either you build a bigger heavier vehicle with lots of hollow space inside for weapon bays or you build a smaller lighter vehicle that carries very few cubic feet of ordnance.

Not directly related to the above, the F-22 was designed as a pure air to air machine. The weapon bays are sized for air to air missiles, not bulkier bombs or air to surface missiles. By keeping them small, they can maximize performance = speed, Gs, altitude, etc.

F-35 came a long a decade+ later and was designed from the git-go for air to air and air to ground. They attempted to square the circle of stealth-induced limited ordnance capacity through a combo of developing smaller weaker bombs, claiming that for limited wars like in Afghanistan smaller bombs were actually better, and trying through precision guidance (AKA “smart bombs”) to ensure a bomb with 1/3rd the explosive would do just as much damage because it would land closer to the desired target.

But even so the weapons bays on F-35 are much larger than F-22 to even hold the baby bombs. And since the airplane is smaller too, that means there’s a lot less of something else in there. Fuel. One of the consequences of the larger weapons bays is less performance by all the other metrics compared to the older F-22. But compared to the non-stealthy predecessor F-15/16/18s the -35 has a pitiful ordnance load and a pitiful unrefueled range due to lacking external ordnance and external fuel tanks.

OTOH, in a modern high tech battle against a near-peer adversary, the F-15/16/18 have a very hard time surviving to arrive over the target with their greater range and payload. Being non-stealthy they were probably detected and shot down 20 minutes ago. While your F-35s have sailed serenely in undetected and / or untargeted to do their dirty work. With their delicate little pop-gun bombs that we hope they can deliver with great precision. While the F-22s help to keep any visually guided enemy fighters off the F-35s. Or at least that’s the theory. Will it work? We may have to find out in the next 5-15 years.

Why no export of F-22s?

The fact the main enemy, the Soviet Union, evaporated a decade after the F-22 project was laid out, but also a decade before the first one flew did not help with the justification one little bit. The development cycle was insanely long. A bit like the B-70 that became the XB-70, and the B-1A that became the B1-B, this was a bleeding edge wonder-weapon that was first deployed after its planned-for enemy had died of old age. The difference was that DoD/USAF was able to re-aim the B-70 & B-1A programs pretty early on to a more useful form and purpose. F-22 came out as it was originally designed / intended. But now with 20 years of unplanned development costs baked in to be amortized over a small fleet.

Once they started to be built DoD realized they didn’t dare export it in case one fell into enemy hands. It was too good, too precious, too techno-magical to risk giving to allies and semi-allies. And too expensive for almost any ally to be able to afford to buy or want to buy.

Not long after that they realized it was also too techno-magical (read “expensive”) for even USAF to afford to buy or operate. So they stopped producing them after fielding a tiny fleet, permanently foreclosing any hope of cost-amortizing export, then loudly started waiving their arms towards the F-35 to distract the anti-DoD faction in Congress from pillorying them over this expensive and largely useless 30-years running boondoggle.

Meanwhile, the opposite tactic was being tried with F-35. Like the F-16 before it, the idea was to sell lots to anybody and everybody who didn’t absolutely hate us this week and thereby get the unit cost as low as possible through the miracle of mass production. Which is in fact working favorably now. Shame about the 15 years of delays and cost overruns getting the v1 product in the air. The first “fully” combat capable version of the F-35 hopes to be fielded in late 2024. Everything out there today is an “interim” configuration with major gaps in the originally promised baseline capability.


Returning to the narrow question of “F”, in a logical labeling scheme the F-22 would be labelled “F-22” and the F-35 would be labelled “F/A-35”. But ref my earlier posts, these labels nowadays are a lot more about inter- and intra-service politics than they are about logically designating a category of combat capability.

I am guessing this is why the Air Force is emphasizing the F-15EX Super Eagle. In situations where either 1) the enemy poses no air threat or 2) the stealth jets have knocked out the enemy air threat, the big bomb trucks like the Super Eagle can then go to work, carrying far more ordnance than an F-35 ever could.

'Zactly.

And also why they’re considering new F-16s for USAF as well. If you’d asked me 40(!) years ago when I was flying them if USAF would be getting more new ones fresh from the factory when I was an old fart 40 years hence I’d have said you were nuts. Shows you how strange things have become.

This is a very interesting and educational thread. Thanks to all, particularly LSLGuy for the firsthand tales.

Thanks for this super detailed and thoughtful reply!