1st Fighter Wing Conducts Largest F-22 ‘Elephant Walk’: Does the Raptor Have a Future in Service?

The U.S. Air Force has conduced the largest runway lineup of F-22 Raptor fifth generation fighters in history, with 24 of the fighters from the 1st Fighter Wing conducting an ‘elephant walk’ alongside six T-38 Talon trainer jets. “This demonstration highlighted the wing’s ability to mobilise forces rapidly in high-stress scenarios,” the fighter wing announced, elaborating: “As Air Combat Command’s lead wing, the [1st Fighter Wing] maintains unparalleled combat readiness to ensure national defence at a moment’s notice.” The show of force represented 13 percent of the entire F-22 fleet of 185 aircraft, although only approximately two thirds of the fleet is combat coded with the remainder using older software considered unfit for frontline operations and utilised only for training.

Elephant walks are particularly difficult to conduct for the F-22, with its maintenance needs and operational costs having far exceeded program requirements which resulted in very low availability rates of around 52 percent. These rates are by far the worst in the Air Force, with even F-15C/D fighters built in the 1980s proving far easier to maintain. With availability rates and maintainability only expected to further worsen as the fighters age, these deficiencies were considered a key factor in the decision to cut F-22 production by more than 75 percent, with orders to terminate production given in 2009 less than four years after the aircraft had entered service.

In May 2021 the Air Force confirmed that the F-22 was not part of its future plans for the fighter fleet, with the aircraft intended for an early retirement despite the Cold War era F-15s and F-16s it was designed to replace being retained in service and continuing to be produced. The Air Force’s efforts to begin retiring F-22s that were only a fraction of the way through their service lives, while continuing to invest in the procurement of new F-15s – the Raptor’s direct predecessor and a design that is 30 years older – provided the clearest indicator that the F-22 program had been far from successful.

Although designed as a high performing air superiority fighter, the F-22’s increasingly obsolete avionics leave it at an increasingly severe disadvantage against its lighter counterpart the F-35 which is in production today. The Raptor is also considered by far the least versatile fighter class to have entered service since the turn of the century, primarily due to the limitations of its avionics suite and total lack of air to surface missiles, which seriously limit its utility for any role other than air-to-air combat. The future of the fighter fleet remains increasingly uncertain, although there has been speculation that difficulties the Air Force has faced in financing development of a sixth generation air superiority fighter under the NGAD program could lead it to increase investment in modernising parts of the F-22 fleet to partly remedy obsolescence issues.