When I push forward on the stick, the nozzles go down, and all that thrust goes off the paddles on those nozzles, and the nose just goes 'gink,' and falls straight forward like you saw. I still have flight control authority because the motors in the back have nozzles that move up and down. When I get up there, I push forward on the stick. And so the airplane is just kinda hanging there on its power. 'When I get to the top of that climb, for all practical purposes, I’m at zero airspeed. (The F-15’s engines by comparison, produce less than 30,000 pounds of thrust.) But the F-22 engines have an additional advantage: They can direct their thrust. The F-22 has two 35,000-pound thrust Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100 engines. Michael Shower, the only F-22 demo pilot in the Air Force. 'The airplane has a lot of excess power-more thrust than it weighs, depending on how much fuel is on board,' says Lt.

And while spectators on the ground are thinking they’d like to start breathing again, the pilot lowers the nose as if he’s told the airplane, 'Drop and gimme 20.' And then it tears off, away from the show grounds, and disappears. We’ve all seen Air Force F-15s shoot straight up at airshows and disappear in the high-altitude distance.

How fast does the f 22 raptor go