Pilots of the US Air Force's F-22 Raptor stealth fighters are experiencing choking, coughing, memory loss, confusion, and blackouts (hypoxia) because of the way the planes are designed. At least one fatal crash is blamed on the phenomenon, and even ground crews have been sickened while working on F-22s when engines are running. The Air Force says there's nothing that can be done.

  • for_SCIENCE
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=13001904 Jeremy Sweeney

    No, what they said was “we don’t know if it’s a problem, and it’ll cost us a hell of a lot of money to figure it out and fix the problem if there is one”. that’s a far cry from “we don’t give a shit.” This approaches Jenny McCarthyism.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      Did you know that when you put words inside quotation marks that you’re implying that those words exist in the article/ post?   If you’re going to lob insults like “Jenny McCarthyism” over semantics, you might want to consider sticking to the generally accepted rules for communication.

    • http://twitter.com/WotansWoodcraft Woodrow Wotan

      The US government HATES its servicemen and women and veterans.

      For all the useless, empty, disingenuous posturing about caring and honoring, there is no evidence that they give a pull off a dead dog’s wang about the lives of the people they sacrifice in the name of their illegal Corporate Wars.

      Veterans serve as an inconvenient reminder to the Fed that there is a human cost to their illegal wars of conquest. Their lack of concern for the wellbeing of active duty servicepeople is echoed in the barbaric conditions of every VA “healthcare” facility.

      I speak as one of the millions of victims of the US government.

      • eldritch

        To be fair, soldiers willingly sign up to sacrifice themselves. There hasn’t been a draft in over 40 years.

        • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

          True enough, but I wonder if there’d be so many volunteers if the MPAA hadn’t been poisoning minds for decades with their ridiculous notion that sex is more obscene than violence…

          • eldritch

            I think the problem is more that people are loathe to take responsibility these days. Everyone is always looking to cover their own ass. Everything is always someone else’s fault. Blame the system and ignore your own involvement.

            It’s bullshit. No one is responsible for your actions except for you. The outside world may influence your judgement, but ultimately you make every decision yourself. Short of having a gun held to your head, you are the only person truly responsible for your actions.

          • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

            Oh yeah?

            Care to point out where exactly free will springs from in a deterministic universe?

            Conservatives = bad at science.

            You want people to behave better?

            Create better circumstances.

            Or, to put it in nice old-timey aphoristic terms: no man is an island.

            Furthermore, it would appear that currently about 2/3 of folks are disinclined, if not incapable of ‘thinking for themselves’.

            (I appreciate the untended irony there.)

        • robuluz

          Good point. Fuck people who voluntarily put their lives at risk for their country and suffer injury. They’re begging for it, suckers!

          • eldritch

            Ah yes, the old tattered flag of “King and Country”.

            If zealous Nationalists are so damned eager to make war, they can go about it like people did in the Medieval Ages – pay your own way, buy your own supplies, and answer for your own crimes.

            America’s so called “volunteers” are mercenaries – paid to kill in the name of political expediency and corporate profit. They sign up for self-advancement: to get their college tuition paid for them, to get their career training paid for them, to make money by making war. So what if they have to kill a few brown people, eh?

            They do not protect their homes, but travel halfway around the world to invade other lands, other nations. The last time the United States saw war made upon her native soil it was carried out by her own people during the American Civil War! And the last time we defended ourselves from an actual foreign threat was the War of 1812!

            Two centuries, now, we’ve been untouched except for our Imperial Holdings, our captured war prizes, our various conquered Pacific islands. The very worst brush we’ve seen at home in that time was a stray U-Boat off the coast of Florida.

            You want to protect your country? Join the National Guard or the Coast Guard. But if you wan’t to shed blood in order to line your pockets, join the army and quietly reassure yourself of that old lie, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”.

          • robuluz

            Blaming soldiers for the folly of US foreign policy is disingenuous, at best.

            They are public servants who work in extremely high risk situations. Whatever your views on the politics of war, the state has an obligation to them that they are failing to fulfil.

          • robuluz

            Killing people is not a job, you sick fuck.

            I’m sorry, I beg your pardon? Perhaps you need a lie down. You seem agitated.

          • Antinous / Moderator

            I feel compassion for them and simultaneously hold them responsible for their choices. Give it a try.

          • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

            @robuluz You make a fine point that brooks no argument, but eldritch’s point trumps yours.

            After all, the fact that governments shirk their obligations to soldiers in an already raw deal is old news.

            You have to be brainwashed to think it’s a good idea, which is my point.

          • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

            Good point. Fuck people who voluntarily put their lives at risk for their country and suffer injury. They’re begging for it, suckers!

            For your email notification: I made a reply to your unreplyable comment after this one.

          • robuluz

            Thankyou Kimmo. I understand that the requirement for any military at all remains a controversial issue here, which frankly is kind of sweet. But Eldritch standing 3 inches from your face screaming “PEACE, MOTHER FUCKER!” sends mixed messages.

            I’m not from the US, but their mistreatment of vets is legendary. And matched with the rhetoric about supporting the troops that comes from both sides of government, it is a spectacular example of hypocrisy.

          • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

            I’m not a Yank either BTW – Aussie here.

          • robuluz

            Oh OK, snap! Lets continue pretending to drink Fosters just to force it on the rest of the world. Edited my response for accuracy and clarity…

    • http://codeflow.org/ Florian Bösch

      “Hypoxia? Walk it off!”

  • Brainspore

    Sometimes I wonder how many billions of dollars in useless, dangerous, expensive hardware we could have saved if America hadn’t seen Top Gun back in 1986.

    • peregrinus

       and bonus:  Tom Cruise would maybe have learned to act.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        Tom Cruise is an adequate actor.  It’s in the ‘person’ department that he’s not up to standard.

  • Purplecat

     Given that the F-22 has never actually (as far as I know) seen combat, it’s quite likely that it has done more harm to the people that operate it, than it has to any enemy. Quite a weapon, and only $150million apiece.

    • Diogenes

      If we didn’t have the F-22 we’d be stuck with F-16s.  Wait, never mind.

  • foobar

    Is it worth fixing? How many bionic limbs and whatnot could be bought for injured infantry for the cost of the R&D on this?

    • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

       whether they decide to fix it or not, those infantry men aren’t getting shit.

  • http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood

    The F-22 will be the first fighter converted for use as a drone.

    • vonbobo

      This has been existing since at least ww2. Typically they are test aircraft or used as targets, but I believe some bombers were used as rc bombs in ww2.

      I can envision the next generation of fighter plane being purely remotely piloted.

  • GawainLavers

    …even ground crews have been sickened while working on F-22s when engines are running.

    WTFXFiles?

  • http://twitter.com/found_object Charles Howe, PhD

    Pretty sure this was an X-Files episode.

  • Mister44

    I thought the issue for the blackouts was the suits they wore.  IIRC They are supposed to compress at the right time when experiencing high G-Forces. If it compresses at the wrong time it caused blackouts and other problems.  I can’t see how a planes design it self could make pilots sick. Something in the air system or the suits they wear make sense to me.

    • http://www.facebook.com/jkonrath Jon Konrath

      That was an issue, along with reduced oxygen levels from the on-board oxygen system during high-g maneuvers. They think.  It could be something completely different, too.

      • ocker3

         Could be gas/fume leaks

  • grimc

    The coughing ground crews may just be mocking the pilots.

  • SumAnon

    The Decepticons have taken a more subtle approach. 

    • http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

      “You failed me again, Starscream!”

  • sunaj

    There  is  no  real  information  as  to  the etiology  of these  effects,  lets see  some  real meat  here  in  this story

  • tubacat

    Not defending the Air Force here, but from reading the article, it seems like the summary is conflating two things: hypoxia, which they are working on fixing, and a chronic cough, which they aren’t (eg, “The coughing — which, to be clear, is a totally separate issue from hypoxia”)

  • peregrinus

    Skynet is behind this.

    This is how it goes down – feed data to the humans encouraging them to develop incredibly agile and fast fighters.  Monitor the development, and hack the data to ensure humans cannot actually take advantage of the performance of the aircraft.  Doesn’t matter how, just cross-reference to the database on biological performance limits.Ensure the human government spends way more than ever expected.  As pilot sickness data mounts, the motivations of all involved will be to ‘spend to the end’.The decision to replace human pilots with machine intelligence will follow.Once installed, phase (1) Air Superiority is complete.  Await instructions. Start work on ground and sea vehicles.

  • Brandon Wright

    Radiation from Fukushima?…