I actually think the most impressive thing about the aircraft is its ability to attain and maintain high speeds without reheat, as it was with the BAC Concorde. All the airshow antics you see from fighter jets are nice to watch, but they almost all invariably end up with a fighter that has pissed its fuel away in ten minutes if it's using the 'burner at low altitude. Which of course doesn't matter at an airshow as the airfield is right underneath you, but in combat, the more capability you have without relying on the 'burners to power yourself out of trouble, the more options you have.
Even if you end up in a circling dogfight and the other guy has to bug out without anyone being shot down, he's still lost the fight, and in fact this is often how dogfights - both real and mock - are decided, because anyone running for home with the fuel light blinking is either out of the fight, or setting himself up for a missile up the tailpipe, probably both. Turning after the merge is primarily a defensive move and this is nothing new of course, but ask any Luftwaffe bf109 pilot in the Battle of Britain what he would have preferred, some more fuel on board or some more agility, and you know what he would choose!
It's interesting to read the comments (of which there are many) under the YouTube video of the original post, with various people who are doubtless not very qualified to comment authoratively on the matter, opining on 'this or that plane being better', but for me the question of fuel saving when actually doing its job , makes the F-22 a hands down winner, and you don't need to know the 'brochure figures' to see what an advantage that capability confers. In contrast, some earlier generation jet fighter aircraft cannot even use all their fuel without becoming dangerously out of balance on their fore-aft centre of gravity (famously the the Shenyang J-7/Mig-21), so fuel consumption is a very important factor. But it's obviously not the whole story, I remember watching an F-16 and a Sukhoi 35 both doing maximum rate turns at low altitude (this at the USAF's 50th Anniversary show at RAF Fairford), the big Sukhoi was doing it without 'burners and turning inside the F-16. Of course the F-16 was making more noise and doubtless impressing people in that way, but I remember thinking 'damn that's amazing' seeing the Su-35 do it in dry power, and it was clear that in a real fight, the F-16 pilot would have been ejecting from his jet as the engine conked out from fuel starvation; but if anyone thinks an Su-35 is going to get a shot off prior to an F-22 before the merge, they must be dreaming, so it's something of a moot point where the USAF's new jet is concerned. That said, when your fancy missiles fail to do the job, as they did in Vietnam, and doubtless will again in some future conflict, turning an
not 'burning is going to be a decider.
The 'brochure figures' for combat aircraft have always been somewhat misleading in this respect, they are okay for documentaries and the 'ooh' factor when listing superlatives, but the truth is most mach 1 and 2-plus fighters are severely limited in their abilities to use that speed or power for sustained periods unless they can go off to a tanker somewhere after a fight, and with a fighter in the area that is difficult to detect, and long-ranged too, who is going to want to be flying a tanker that lights up on radar like a christmas tree? This is another advantage the F-22 will confer.
In reasonably recent years, we've seen how important fuel consumption is for combat deployment, and if we go back as far as the Vietnam air war, it was a deciding factor on which aircraft even got sent to the theatre. The F-104 Starfighter being withdrawn after one tour, largely because it lacked range, being replaced in the CAP role by the F-4 thus it, and F-105, had to fight their way to targets in the North much of the time, often having to refuel in a coasting shallow dive coming home, as their tanks were nearly dry.
So if I were overseeing the design of a new Russian/Indian air superiority jet, I'd be concentrating on loiter times and long range shooting capability, because, all things considered, the fuel left in the tanks and the long range shot will probably decide the battle. And the F-22 is definitely the one to follow where both these are concerned, regardless of fancy airshow antics.
Chock