Air superiority is what Lockheed Martin and the Air Force designed the F-22 Raptor to do. But in practice over the Middle East, this mission normally means acting as a scout. Lt. Col. “Shell” elaborated to the magazine that the Raptors are in the air helping “deconflict” the airspace, and helping keep Russian and Syrian-planes away from U.S. troops and the Syrian-Democratic-Forces, an alliance of militias spearheaded by the majority-Kurdish People’s Protection Units.
The F-22 can do it because of its complex suite of active and passive sensors, which combined with instruments, allow the aircraft to “fuse” data together and present it to the pilot on a display screen. As well, this allows the Raptor to stand in for command-and-control aircraft such as the E-3 AWACS, with pilots scanning the area and feeding information to other friendly aircraft whenever anything pertinent pops up — while also warning Russian aircraft to keep away over radio if they come too close.
More at: http://bit.ly/f-22-raptor
Dragon and Toast by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)