Two F-22 pilots have spoken for the first time as on CBS 60 Minutes, in an interview with Lesley Stahl that will be broadcast Sunday, May 6 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
According to Dave Majumdar at Flight Global, the show featuring the “military whistleblowers” could explain the Air Combat Command chief Gen Mike Hostage’s sudden public admission: in a recent media briefing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, he explained that “a very small number” of F-22 pilots who have asked not to fly the F-22 Raptor fighter jets, or to be reassigned to other units, because of the oxygen-deprivation problems with the fifth generation stealth fighter.
Maj. Jeremy Gordon and Capt. Josh Wilson, of the 192 Fighter Wing of the Virginia Air National Guard, an associate unit of the Air Force’s 1st FW at Langley are among the Raptor pilots who have experienced hypoxia symptoms while flying the U.S. top fighter plane. For this reason, they have chosen not to fly the F-22.
“I’m not comfortable flying in the F-22 right now” Gordon says in the interview.
Wilson describes his battle to overcome hypoxia experienced in February 2011 “It was…kind of a surreal experience,” he says, taking “immense concentration” to perform “simple simple tasks”: when he attempted to pull the emergency oxygen ring he couldn’t find it. “I couldn’t remember in what part of the aircraft it was in.”
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In the seven months since the grounding on the F-22 fleet, whose final, 195th example, was just delivered to the Air Force, there have been 11 more oxygen-deprivation incidents.
Way too many to feel safe.
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