Comparisons

The F-22 is claimed by several sources to be the world’s most effective air-superiority fighter; one example is Air Marshal Angus Houston, chief of the Australian Defence Force, and former head of the Royal Australian Air Force, who said in 2004 that the "F-22 will be the most outstanding fighter plane ever built."[24] US government secrecy makes comparisons with other aircraft difficult. Among its advantages are its sustained high speed and altitude capabilities, thrust vectoring, sensors, stealth features, advanced avionics, and ability to receive data from other U.S. systems.

Though exceptional maneuverability for a stealth aircraft seems unneeded, Lockheed Martin and USAF decided that the Raptor should prepare against all threats. Notably, in the past, similar assumptions about the unimportance of maneuverability for the F-4 Phantom II turned out to be incorrect; the more so for anti-aircraft systems like SA-21 'Growler', which may be capable of detecting stealth planes since there is information exchange with neighbor radars, which observe appropriate zone via different angle and form of signal. In March 2005, Chief of Staff General Jumper, then the only person to have flown both the Typhoon and the Raptor, gave a verbal comparison on the two aircraft. He said that "the Eurofighter is both agile and sophisticated, but is still difficult to compare to the F-22 Raptor." "They are different kinds of airplanes to start with," the general said. "It's like asking us to compare a NASCAR car with a Formula 1 car. They are both exciting in different ways, but they are designed for different levels of performance."[25]

In early 2006, after an exercise involving just eight F-22s in Nevada in Nov. 2005, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hecker, commander of the 27th Fighter Squadron (FS) at Langley AFB, Virginia, commented "We killed 33 F-15Cs and didn't suffer a single loss. They didn't see us at all."[26]

In June 2006 during Exercise Northern Edge (Alaska's largest joint military training exercise), the F-22A achieved a 144-to-zero kill-to-loss ratio against F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18s simulating MiG-29 'Fulcrums', Su-30 'Flankers', and other current front line Russian aircraft, with at times the F-22A being outnumbered 4 to 1.[16][27] The small F-22 force of 12 aircraft generated 49% of the total kills for the exercise, and operated with anunprecedented reliability rate of 97%.[20]