The Hawker Sea Fury, another prop driven fighter, did managed to successfully take on jet powered MiGs in Korea:
I mean, the price of a single F22 Raptor is speculated to be around $180M, while the price of a single Hawker Fury was established to be around $55k.
Although a F22 may dominate all technical criteria, it loses heavily on cost and the amount of resources that need to be spent to get one up and running.
Moreover, it appears that the cost of building a single F22 is enough to build, maintain, man and train a hefty number of complete squadrons, which could also be equipped with the same long-range sensors and weaponry.
They cost more than 55k because of inflation, but also because the sensor systems satellite uplink etc are a large chunk of the overall costs. Still at 4Million a pop the MQ-1 Predator's are cheap. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predato...
It's successor is 16 million but it's larger and "An MQ-9 with two 1,000 pounds (450 kg) external fuel tanks and one thousand pounds of munitions has an endurance of 42 hours."
at 4Million a pop the MQ-1 Predator's are cheap
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-portable_air-defense_syste...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/news/amp27...
Let's say you put identical missiles on both. Once in range, both fire. The F-22 can then turn around and get back out of range before it's hit. The Fury is essentially motionless, and will be shot down. Repeat ad infinitum.
You can't just divide the cost of a Fury into the cost of an F-22 and assume that's even remotely reasonable as a fieldable proportion. The limiting factor isn't the cost of building the planes, it's the logistics of coming up with with enough fuel, pilots, maintenance, and ground facilities to keep them flying. There's nobody who couldn't afford something better that could afford to field maybe 3:1 vs the F-22.
The salesman for Burt Rutan's little gun-armed midget ARES fighter/attack plane liked to tell people to "imagine how the Falklands War would have been different" if the British Harriers had been faced with waves of hundreds of ARES planes.... completely failing to address the fact that Argentina couldn't possibly train enough qualified pilots to sit in those hundreds of cockpits.
Fuel's relatively cheap for a prop plane, one pilot would manage more than one drone aircraft at once, maintenance is dramatically easier and cheaper on a prop plane, etc.
Why are you assuming that a hypothetical 1-on-1 scenario is the only feasible scenario? If an operator can man half a dozen of fury squadrons for the same cost that an operator is able to afford a single F22, why would you assume that they would put up a single fury to counter a F22?
And let's assume that a wave of furys managed to down a F22. Now what? Will the operator of the F22 spend an additional $180M to churn out a single unit? Because for the same cost, the opponent can churn out 100-fold units. Is this sustainable?
Military aviation is still in the exponential part of the technology S curve. Each new generation isn't just a little better than the previous one, it is massively better and embodies some new piece of technology the previous generation is nearly helpless against. The Fury is multiple such technology leaps out of date, and as a result is basically helpless in the sky.
Consider:
The Sea Fury has a maximum takeoff weight of 6,600 kg. The F-22 has a maximum takeoff weight of 38,000 kg. How do you take a plane like the Sea Fury, and let it carry 6 times the weapons/sensors/gadgets? A revolution in engine technology.
The Sea Fury's skin is made from duralumin, and sticks out like a sore thumb on radar. The F22's skin is made of a composite material that makes it nearly invisible to radar. How do you take a plane like the Sea Fury, and let it operate with impunity against radar? A revolution in materials technology.
And so on and so on. The F22 embodies something like five separate revolutionary technologies, any one of which would enable it to defeat nearly unlimited numbers of Furys. But all put together and it's - well, the Furys become so outdated they're almost not even worth killing.
Worse with the F35 which has no gun and can only carry 2 missiles without losing stealth.
The F22 is nearly 2000 km/h faster than the Sea Fury, and the turn around time is said to be on the order of 20 minutes. In the time it takes the Sea Furys to go to the target, do their business, and go home you're looking at 3+ F22 sorties each hitting a nearly guaranteed 12 kills (maximum anti-air missile load with twinning racks) plus however many they can kill with 480 rounds of 20mm cannon fire.
So yes, damn near unlimited. That's what happens when the enemy can kill a dozen pilots every 20 minutes with no fear of retaliation. You get a bloodbath.
>Worse with the F35 which has no gun and can only carry 2 missiles without losing stealth.
Why do people who know nothing about planes instantly forget that fact the moment the F-35 is brought up?
The F-35A does have a cannon, while the F-35B and C have the option for an external cannon pod. The F-35 can carry four missiles in its internal bays, not two.
And for how many sorties can it sustain that? Even if you had enough F22 pilots to keep it going...
Send just enough Sea Furies to force the F22s to scramble until they are forced into deep maintenance - then waltz in with your main force, game over.