Will F-22 Raptors at Eglin AFB be retired? It's being proposed for 2023 defense budget.

Jim Thompson, Northwest Florida Daily News
·3 min read

WASHINGTON — Nearly three dozen F-22 Raptor fighter jets now at Eglin Air Force Base would be retired under terms of a recently released Air Force budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

The affected aircraft, assigned to the 325th Fighter Wing, are "Block 20" versions of the stealth fighter jet that have been flying since the early 2000s and are thus among the oldest of the F-22s in the Air Force inventory.

According to a Monday report in Defense News, Maj. Gen. James Peccia, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for budget, said "it would take $1.8 billion over eight years to get those F-22s ready for combat, making it prohibitively expensive."

Instead, according to the Defense News report, the Air Force plans to use that money to modernize other F-22s, modify some fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighter jets and pursue the service's Next Generation Air Dominance systems.

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The 325th Fighter Wing, whose primary mission is training pilots, maintenance personnel and other aircrew for the F-22, has been operating out of Eglin since 2018, when its operations were relocated after Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall Air Force Base

Tyndall is being redesigned into what the Air Force is calling an "installation of the future." As part of that, the 325th Fighter Wing will begin flying the F-35A, the Air Force version of the fifth-generation fighter jet. The first of 72 aircraft that eventually will comprise three F-35A squadrons of the 325th Fighter Wing are slated to begin arriving at Tyndall in September 2023.

In the meantime, the planned retirement of the F-22 Raptors, if it stays in the currently proposed defense budget, would be completed by Sept. 30 of next year, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told the Daily News on Wednesday.

An F-22 Raptor fighter jet displaying the "TY" tail code indicating that it is from Tyndall Air Force Base, touches down at Eglin Air Force Base. Thirty-three F-22s from Tyndall's 325th Fighter Wing, which has been working out of Eglin AFB since Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall AFB, are scheduled to be retired under the current U.S. defense budget proposal for the upcoming 2023 fiscal year.

The proposed defense budget is part of the federal budget proposal for the 2023 fiscal year released Monday by President Joe Biden. The 2023 fiscal year begins Oct. 1, and the final shape of the budget will be determined as the spending plan moves through Congress before being sent back to the president for final action.

The likely destination for most of the Block 20 F-22s being retired is Arizona's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, home of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) and more popularly known as "the boneyard."

There are various levels of aircraft storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, under which some aircraft are kept near to flying condition and others are used for parts for other aircraft. According to Stefanek, the level of storage for the F-22s set to come to Davis-Monthan has not yet been determined.

As far as the 325th Fighter Wing personnel working with the F-22s, they will go on to other jobs in the military under normal Permanent Change of Station procedures, according to Stefanek. Some of them could go to other units flying the 186 F-22s currently in the Air Force inventory, while others could get entirely new assignments, she said.

The F-22 has been somewhat problematic at Eglin, with at least two apparent nose gear failures upon landing. One of those apparent failures occurred earlier this month, and a similar incident occurred almost exactly a year ago.

And on May 15, 2020, an F-22 with the 43rd Fighter Squadron, part of the 325th Fighter Wing, crashed in a wooded area about 12 miles northeast of the main section of Eglin while participating in a training mission flown out of Eglin with a number of other aircraft. The pilot ejected safely, but the aircraft was destroyed.

The crash occurred as the pilot was having difficulties in controlling the aircraft, a circumstance which the Air Force said was the result of "a maintenance error made after the aircraft was washed, which impacted control inputs transmitted to the aircraft."

This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: Tyndall F-22 Raptor jets at Eglin to be retired under budget proposal