Media Galleries

Collection of videos of the F-22 Raptor.

F-35B Lightning II photo collection.

Various images of F-35A Lightning II.

Website News

Various photos of F-35C Lightning II aircraft.

Convair abruptly halted efforts on its losing Kingfish design when the CIA selected the Lockheed A-12 in August 1959 as a high-speed, high-altitude replacement for the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The CIA officially terminated Convair’s work on Project Gusto—the project code name for the Dragon Lady replacement—in February 1960. The company received a final payment for work related to the program in January 1963.However, only ten months later, Convair used the predecessor to Kingfish — FISH — as the starting point for design studies for an A-12 replacement.

Through 3 March 2012, the F-35 test program had completed 161 flights totaling more than 250 flight hours and had accrued more than 1,100 test points. F-35B test pilots have executed twenty-three vertical landings so far this year. With several more checkout flights completed, thirty-three pilots have now flown the F-35. Twenty-six pilots are flying currently.

A few straightforward exterior tweaks will make larger military aircraft markedly better. Using mostly company research and development dollars, researchers found that what will be the most practical answer—an elusive intersection of cost, difficulty to engineer, improvement in aircraft efficiency, and length of time for payback on investment—ended up being slightly different for the C-130, the C-5, and the P-3.

This first half of a two-part F-22 chronology covers the major program events from those first studies to that first flight in 1997.

The 149th Fighter Wing, the Texas Air National Guard unit located at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, trains both active duty and Air National Guard F-16 pilots in a variety of courses, from a basic course for new F-16 pilots recently graduated from undergraduate pilot training to a requalification course for experienced pilots.