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Originally Posted by Skybird
Point taken.
One thing one would want to add to what already has been said, is this: since the F-22 has been polanned for a big war in which you would need all your ressources, you nevertheless would not want to need to depend on such a maintenance-heavy piece of equipement with a major failure taking place every 1.8 hours. you want reliable equipement, since it will be put under enormous stress in such a big war, and you want your equipement not sitting in hangars, but putting air presence up into the air, where it belongs. So, even if taking into account the original kind of war the Raptor was planned for, it would be an anachronism, due to it's economic inefficiency.
It seems to me that if you compare maintenance time as well as production costs per piece, the F-22 would need to reach an even much higher kill ratio to justify it'S enormous costs. referring to that (disputable, btw) simulation of duels against the SU-35, and the F-22 scoring a kill ratio of 10:1 and the Typhoon "just" 4:1, you compare this 2.5 times higher kill ratio against 3 times as high costs and 3-9 higher maintenance time - time in which the Typhoon is in the air and the Raptor sits in the hangar.
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To be fair, the MTBF of the F-16C is supposedly only 2.9 hours (at least by Russian evaluation, but I don't have an American opinion on this). Even counting possible different definitions ... it is bad but not a relative disaster.
The overall cost per flying hour is higher for the F-22, but compared to the F-15 it's supposedly not even twice as high according to your article:
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The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.
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So it is arguably not such a disaster on the economic front. It would seem that most of the 30 hours is waiting for glue to dry - so it is irreducible, but presumably at least they are not man-hours.
The problem with just going for the above number is that they came from a 90s DERA analysis, with unknown assumptions, but it is not hard to see that the Typhoon's advantages are less robust than the F-22.
Might also remember that 2-2.5 times poorer kill ratio means 2-2.5 times more planes that won't ever fly again, regardless of the maintenance time you dump on them.
There are also the problems of SAM penetration when facing a first-rate power, and here the difference is one of being engagable versus unengagable (at least with current tech). The Eurofighter IIRC has a cruise missile class RCS or something similar, which in the modern SAM world might as well mean it wasn't stealthed at all.