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LOS ANGELES It's the most expensive fighter jet ever built. Yet the F-22 Raptor has never seen a day of combat, and its future is clouded by a government safety investigation that has grounded it for months.
The fleet of 158 F-22s has been sidelined since May 3, following more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, making them woozy.
At an estimated cost of $412 million each, the F-22s amount to about $65 billion sitting on the tarmac. The grounding is the latest stumble for an aircraft plagued by nagging malfunctions and escalating costs. The sleek, diamond-winged fighter was conceived during the Cold War in the early 1980s. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet fighters that the U.S. military feared were never built. And the F-22 has sat silently, not used in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.
"It's a fundamental explanation on how the country has gotten itself in the financial mess that it's in today," said Winslow Wheeler, a defense budget specialist at the Center for Defense Information.
Designed in Burbank, Calif., and built in Marietta, Ga., the F-22 won the final go-ahead from Congress in 1991, after a lobbying campaign by manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp. and nearly 1,100 subcontractors.
"The Cold War was over; it didn't make any sense to go forward with the program," said Thomas Christie, a retired official who worked 50 years at the Pentagon.
The plane takes about 3,000 people to maintain, the Air Force said; for every hour in the air, the F-22 spends 45 hours in maintenance.
