Our DRDO US-brothers are screwing up the USAF too !

The Sad Odyssey of the F-22: America’s Big Broken $24 Billion Toy !! The F-22 has been okayed to fly again, after being grounded, cleared, grounded, then cleared once more—all within a year. And yet, the Air Force hasn't fixed the plane's life threatening flaw. It doesn't seem like it cares. The F-22 Raptor program was birthed two decades ago, designed, according to its proud Air Force backers, as a decisive stealth, electronics-jamming, nimblest-of-nimble finger in the eye of the Soviet Union. It would guarantee Communist-free skies, being able to out-maneuver and outgun anything Moscow could scramble. It was plagued from the start. A year after the USAF and Pentagon high-fived over the super billion dollar plan, the first and only F-22 crashed and exploded due to a computer guidance glitch. The program remained "essentially unaffected," the NYT reported back in 1992, and it continued—with nail-biting Pentagon urging: Today, though, at least six other aircraft — the Russian MIG-29, SU-27 and SU-35, the French Mirage 2000 and Rafael and the European Consortium's Eurofighter — threaten to surpass the aging F-15, our current top-of-the-line air-to-air fighter. These words came from Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters in a 1999 NYT op-ed. Note that none of those countries posed (or pose) a threat to the US. France is in NATO. And since then? It's not just the oxygen supply problems of recent months. After formally entering service in 2005, the plane has proven to be a mechanical pain in the ass, all while making us exactly 0% safer against enemies that don't exist. It flies exercises, rather than fighting. In May, Wired's David Axe summed up the plane's material woes: Last year, rust problems briefly grounded most of the F-22 force. A whole squadron of Raptors had to turn back from a planned flight from Virginia to Japan in 2007 when their navigational systems went haywire as the planes crossed the International Date Line. In 2006, an F-22 pilot was stuck in his plane on the ground for five hours because the canopy wouldn't open. READ MORE HERE