Air Force ( USAF) has some 183 F-22s in active inventory, as of August 2022. Lockheed managed to make and deliver a number of them, and the U.S. That doesn’t mean F-22s aren’t flying anymore. And it was all that, for a while, but a series of outside factors, including the lack of a state, near-peer adversary that could justify the spending with these things, led to the aircraft’s discontinuation in 2011. This one had its first flight a quarter of a century ago, and entered service in 2005 with the promise of being a revolution in terms of capabilities.
Technically speaking, the first of this new breed of aerial fighting machines was the F-22 Raptor. Two of them, the Sukhoi Su-57 and the Chengdu J-20, are fielded by America’s traditional adversaries, Russia and China, respectively, while the other two, the Lockheed Martin-made F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, are in the service of the U.S. At the time of writing, the world has just four aircraft types in the fifth-gen category.
