May. 1, 2012 - 02:55PM |
By BRIAN EVERSTINE
A “very small number” of
F-22 pilots have requested to not fly the U.S. Air Force’s Raptors following
the grounding and unfruitful investigation into the oxygen problems plaguing
the stealthy jet, the head of Air Combat Command said April 30.
The service has yet to
identify a root cause for 11 unexplained hypoxia-related incidents, and the
command has extended its investigation to looking at ground maintainers who
have experienced oxygen-related problems in handling the jet, Gen. Mike Hostage
said in a wide-ranging media briefing at Joint Base Langley -Eustis , Va.
There is a worry among
pilots, Hostage said, but he does not see a reason to stand down. The briefing,
in fact, came just days after the Air Force announced that a squadron of F-22s
were headed to a deployment in southwest Asia .
Officials on April 30 would not say where the F-22s were deployed from, or give
additional details about their mission.
“The risk is not as low
as I’d like it,” Hostage said of the deployed F-22s.
“This nation needs this
airplane. I wish I had 10 times as many. It’s our best airplane,” he added.
The Air Force in May
2011 grounded its entire F-22 fleet for four months due to repeated cases of
hypoxia. Maj. Gen. Charles Lyon, the director of operations for ACC, said that
the F-22 has flown 12,000 sorties since September with 11 unexplained cases of
hypoxia.
Since the grounding was
lifted, pilots have taken extra precautions such as wearing a commercial pulse
oximeter to measure the amount of oxygen in their blood and added a charcoal
air filter to measure the amount of toxins in the air. The filters were
recently removed, Lyon said, because analysis
of more than 500 revealed no unhealthy amount of toxins post-flight.
ACC has directed all
pilots to abort their mission and land the aircraft if they encounter any
physiological problems, Hostage said. Since the directive was announced, which
began after pilots were cleared to fly following the grounding, there has been
an expected increase in incidents.
“We fully expect that we
are going to have more incidents since we lowered the threshold,” Hostage said.
Hostage said the F-22 is
back to flying long flights and at high altitude. The Raptors were contained to
a lower ceiling immediately after the grounding was lifted.
A large task force,
including engineers, doctors, physiologists, analysts and others, is continuing
to try to determine a root cause. Lyon said he
believes there is a root cause and that the service is narrowing down on it.
Either pilots are not getting enough oxygen for some reason or toxins are
either not being filtered or the aircraft is creating them, he indicated.
“The smoking gun is
disassembled in a mosaic in front of us ... at some point we’re going to have
the smoking gun assembled,” Lyon said.
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