<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  The U.S. Air Force&amp;#039;s premier air-to-air combat aircraft was just getting back to normal flight operations following an investigation into hypoxia-like (oxygen-deprivation) symptoms among pilots when it got more bad news: The F-22 Raptor is facing new questions over its vaunted air-combat capabilities. In the latest issue of the U.K.-based Combat Aircraft Magazine, German Eurofighter Typhoon pilots recount a recent Red Flag advanced aerial-combat exercise in which they faced off against the stealthy F-22\u2014and came away surprised by the results. In a close combat maneuver where two fighters cross paths, known as the merge, the F-22&amp;#039;s advantage apparently slips away. &amp;quot;[A]s soon as you get to the merge, which is only a very small spectrum of air combat\u2014in that area, at least\u2014the Typhoon doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily have to fear the F-22 in all aspects,&amp;quot; Wing Cmdr. Oberst Andreas Pfeiffer told the magazine. Although the German officers acknowledged that the Eurofighter can&amp;#039;t match the F-22&amp;#039;s beyond-visual-range capabilities, in close combat that two aircraft were &amp;quot;evenly matched.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;To tell you the truth, the Raptor is not built for air combat; you build the Raptor for other purposes,&amp;quot; Lt. Col. Marc &amp;quot;Turbo&amp;quot; Gruene said, according to the magazine. The remarks may strike at the heart of the F-22&amp;#039;s much-hyped claims of air superiority, but they also may not mean much strategically (it&amp;#039;s not likely that German Eurofighters will be facing American F-22s in combat anytime soon). Ed Timperlake, a former Marine fighter pilot, says the points raised by the article are &amp;quot;totally expected.&amp;quot; Critics, he says, once leveled the same criticisms against the F-15, which now has an &amp;quot;over-100-to-zip kill ratio.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Every aircraft can be shot down,&amp;quot; says Timperlake, who also previously served as the Pentagon&amp;#039;s director of technology assessment. Rather, fighter capabilities have to be looked at in the context of how they would be employed, and no fighter goes into battle alone, he says. Still, the incident raises uncomfortable questions about the Raptor, which costs more than $400 million apiece and has faced intense scrutiny in recent months over the previously unexplained cases of hypoxia. At the heart of the concern were a series of unexplained incidents in 2011 and 2012 in which pilots reported dizziness and symptoms associated with oxygen deprivation. Though such symptoms can occur in any fighter, the F-22 saw a high rate of incidents, and those incidents could not be fully explained. Last week, defense secretary Leon Panetta lifted flight restrictions he had placed on the F-22 after the Air Force initially failed to come up with a solid explanation for the hypoxia-like symptoms. In a briefing yesterday at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Charlie Lyon, Air Combat Command&amp;#039;s director of operations, said that most of the cases have now been resolved, though there is no single explanation for all incidents. &amp;quot;In the end there is no smoking gun,&amp;quot; Lyon said, reporting on the findings of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board study of the F-22 incidents. However, while the report points at no single cause, Lyon said that the board members were convinced the problem stemmed from issues in the cockpit. They believe the chief culprit is a valve in the upper-garment pressure suit used to protect pilots from high g-forces. The valve, which was designed for the F-15 and F-16 aircraft, is supposed to allow the garment to inflate only during high-g maneuvers, but in the F-22 it was allowing the suit to inflate all the time, putting pressure on the pilots&amp;#039; chests and constricting their breathing.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like putting a corset around your chest,&amp;quot; Lyon said. A new valve is under development and should be ready by year&amp;#039;s end. While it&amp;#039;s being built, F-22 pilots are not using the old garments. Lyon said the Air Force would continue to investigate and try to understand what it calls these &amp;quot;physiological incidents.&amp;quot; But, he said, such incidents happen on all high-performance fighters; it&amp;#039;s unavoidable when putting a human in such an extreme environment. &amp;quot;Let me be clear: There will be physiological incidents in the F-22,&amp;quot; he said. Lyon said the F-22 now had 8000 sorties and 10,000 hours since the last incident. What he wouldn&amp;#039;t say, however, was whether the pressure suit and other problems the board found during its investigations account for the death of Capt. Jeff Haney, an F-22 pilot who crashed in 2010. &amp;quot;Our efforts have been focused on finding the problem and fixing the problem,&amp;quot; Lyon said. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a7907/should-you-believe-the-f-22-doom-and-gloom-11248461/>