It's the deadliest fighter aircraft ever built, but what if it went back in time to World War I?
The F-22 needs little introduction. Developed at the end of the Cold War, it's a fighter aircraft
with no mission. Designed to go up against the best the Soviet Union could throw up against it,
and win every time, the F-22 was uniquely suited for fighting conflicts in eastern
Europe. Its advanced stealth still makes it the stealthiest fighter aircraft in the world,
and would have been perfect for securing air dominance over and past the front lines.
But what if this modern marvel ended up in the
hands of the US as its troops hit the battlefields of World War I Europe?
With a thunderous roar the F-22 would make its presence known above the trenches
of war torn Europe. Supercruising without the need for afterburners,
the F-22's supersonic crack would stun the thousands of troops assembled below,
who have quite literally never seen anything of the like. With silvery skin,
a gold cockpit, and a delta wing body, the F-22 is generations ahead of anything flying at the time,
many would immediately assume this technological marvel to be an alien
visitor- because no nation could possibly be advanced enough to field such a capable machine.
And in truth, the F-22 might as well be a UFO to the allies of World War I. Impressive
to think that the Raptor was designed just 60 years after the end of 'war to end all wars',
and yet upon showing up over the trenches of eastern France,
it's so advanced that no living engineer could possibly begin to comprehend its construction.
The F-22 is up against some of the best aircraft of the time. Germany and its
partners were generally ahead of the Allies in fighter plane construction, and the Fokker
D VII was one of the most feared aircraft to prowl the skies. It only saw combat for six months,
and that's a good thing too- because if the war had dragged on much longer than that the Allies
may have been very hard pressed to keep any of their aircraft flying. The Fokker D VII was a
predator, lightweight enough to give it incredible agility and maneuvering- Germany would score 565
aerial victories in the Fokker D VII's short service life span. And its most famous pilot,
the Red Baron, would go down in history as a true Fokker legend.
But compared to the Raptor, the Fokker D VII, or anything else in the German arsenal,
was basically just a pile of flying scrap. Despite that,
the F-22 would likely have practically zero effect on the war. How is that possible?
First, since we're not the modern Russian army, let's talk logistics. The F-22 is
a true wunderwaffen, an absolute wonder weapon of the 21st century- despite being
designed in the 20th. However, like many of America's cutting edge technological marvels,
it's an absolute prima donna. The plane has great difficulty in maintaining the stealth
coatings which make it so formidable, and daily maintenance is required to make sure it remains
effective. Its computer systems are powerful, but incompatible with the rest of the Air Force so no
other plane can 'talk' to the F-22- this is a big reason it's being retired early.
The Raptor is formidable, but just flying it will cost you an annual salary. For just one
hour of flight time, the Raptor costs over $85,000 in fuel and maintenance. A 12 hour
flight will basically set you back an entire mansion- unless you live in LA and New York in
which case it only sets you back a 1 bedroom shack in the worst part of town. Granted,
some of this cost comes from scale issues- the US Air Force had planned to buy hundreds of this
fighter, but cut back to just under 200 when the Soviet Union cried Uncle and tapped out of the
Cold War. With no near-peer potential adversary, the mighty Raptor was a plane without a mission,
a high tech marvel of engineering that was less useful than a moderately sized rock. Without
buying the F-22 in large numbers, production costs never came down, leaving the Raptor as
an absolute bank breaker that's better served having it sit in a hangar than prowling the skies.
And this is where we immediately run into problems with teleporting a Raptor back to World War I. As
we mentioned earlier, the F-22 might as well be a UFO to the early 20th century allies,
and this comparison is extremely apt. It's widely considered that if UFOs were real and one ever
crash landed in our backyard, we'd basically be completely helpless in trying to reverse engineer
or even understand how to turn the windshield wipers on. A craft capable of traveling across
interstellar distances, or interdimensional if that's your jam, would require manufacturing
processes so advanced we'd likely need thousands of years of advancement to understand. The very
composition of the materials used would require chemistry and metallurgical skills we're likely
nowhere near to developing. Sure, maybe we'd eventually figure out how the windshield wipers
work by just pressing random buttons, but good luck replacing them when they break.
The F-22 would be as immediately confounding to even the brightest minds of the time. Back then,
the internal combustion engine had only been small
enough to mount on an airplane for about a decade, and still decades behind the
pinnacle of the design for piston engine aircraft that would come in the 1940s.
The first thing to confound World War I engineers trying to do maintenance on the raptor would be
the engine. Jet engines weren't unknown at the time, in fact the first jet engine- a simple
steam powered device that used two nozzles on a sphere to make it spin rapidly on its
axis had been described as far back as 1st century Egypt. What we would understand as
the modern jet engine would have been known to some of the brightest minds of World War I,
who had already identified the concept of compressing air, heating it, and releasing
it out the back, simply lacking the means of creating one. Thus as the engineers of early
20th century earth peeled back the hood and looked at the Raptor's Pratt & Witney F119s,
they would at least know what they were looking at after a brief investigation.
They could probably even figure out how to start them up- at least once separated
from the aircraft itself as figuring out the digital controls would likely be impossible.
But the advanced alloys that go into the construction of the mighty Pratt & Whitney F119
would simply be beyond the ability of chemists and metallurgists at the time to understand.
For starters, they'd have no way of analyzing the composition of the alloys. But they also
lacked the aid of computers and other advanced equipment to create said alloys even if they did.
The sensitive stealth coating wouldn't matter, nobody was using radar at the time- it wouldn't
be until 1935 that Britain invented the first practical radar unit. However,
the flight surfaces of the F-22 require careful maintenance, but nothing comes close to the
labor intensive repair of all the parts of the plane that are near, or help with, the constant
controlled explosion of hot gasses that makes the plane go vroom. At best, the plane could be flown
until basically it fell out of the sky from disrepair- basically the Russian Air Force's
standard operating procedure- and the allies would be lucky to get three or four missions out of it.
But there's another problem- fuel. The F-22 takes a carefully calibrated mix of jet fuel,
itself a result of decades of research by the US Air Force into the best explosion juice that
doesn't go exploding when you don't want it to. Try filling a Raptor's gas tanks with Premium
gasoline and the engine won't even turn over. The F119s that power the Raptor need a carefully,
very high energy calibrated fuel that's much more energy dense than regular petroleum or gasoline.
So the Raptor's flying with whatever it's got in the tanks after coming
through a time portal to World War I, and that's not much as a combat
radius of 470 miles means you're only getting a few hours of flight time.
But let's say that the plane made it with full tanks, and a pilot in the seat who
immediately knows his mission is to aid the Allies. What could it actually do?
In all honesty... not much.
The Raptor is the deadliest aircraft in the world,
unless you're flying a 1910s biplane. The first and most immediate problem is the Raptor probably
couldn't even keep up with German Fokkers. The Fokker VII had a top speed of 116mphs,
leaving many allied pilots to exclaim in surprise, “That fast Fokker out turned me.
It's a big airplane, but that fat Fokker really can fly!”. And they were right,
Imperialist German Fokkers would end up losing the war, but the aircraft was formidable.
A Raptor would absolutely smoke a Fokker, but ask it to shoot one down and it's a different
story altogether. The slow speed of WWI planes would put the Raptor at threat of stall if it
performed any sort of dog fighting maneuver. The plane would be forced to try to pounce from
above in short strafing runs of a very agile target- a dicey proposition made even worse
because the F-22 only has a few seconds worth of ammunition. Armed with 480 tungsten-steel rounds
that would punch through even the fattest Fokker the Germans put up into the sky,
the Raptor's cannon shoots so fast that it only has a few seconds of ammo. That's a fantastic
quality when taking on fast-moving supersonic capable fighters, but terrible when trying to
make any sort of dent on the numbers of the Central power aircraft in the overall war.
And when the cannon's out of ammo, the Raptor is basically done fighting its war,
because without the advanced gunpowder used by ammo in modern aircraft cannons,
the Raptor's cannon couldn't operate properly.
But the Raptor carries two AIM-9 and six AIM-120 radar-guided air to air missiles... which are
basically going to have zero impact on the air war. Even more importantly,
they might not even be able to lock on to flying Fokkers zooming around the sky. That's because
the cheap Fokkers were made, like most aircraft of the time, from wood and canvas- things that
radar aren't very good at locking on to. The AIM-9 short-range missiles are capable of locking on to
the heat of enemy engines, but the early piston engines of World War I would probably give off
so little heat that even the AIMs might not be able to hit a single lucky Fokker.
Unable to accurately target enemy planes, with only a few hours of flight time available,
and construction so advanced that there's no chance WWI engineers could try to replicate
or even repair it- the F-22 would ultimately have zero impact on the war. Unless of course
it was armed with a laser-guided bomb and knew the precise location of the German chancellor
at the time. But despite being useless to WWI air forces, there is one thing about the F-22
that allied engineers might be able to make use of- the engine. After the end of the war,
the US would have in its hands engine technology nearly a full century ahead of their time. This
would leapfrog American aircraft design as slowly the secrets of the jet engine, and the fuel needed
to power it, are unlocked. It's unlikely, but if Anthony Fokker hadn't moved his company back to
the Netherlands after the war, there's a chance that primitive versions of the Raptor could have
been swatting evil Nazi Fokkers right out of the sky and winning an easy victory for the Allies.
Now go check out WW1 Pilot With Highest Kill Count- The Red Baron,
or click this other video instead!