I saw the same thing with red bull.. one of their field guys pressed a buddy of mine because of how he painted his jet.. These companies dont get it... I am saddened if Lockheed pressed Yellow aircraft.. that is truly sad. I have been around the full scale business all my life and I have seen this stuff come and go. I know LM is stinging from the Govt's decision to stop production at the current approved level. but it doesn't need to spill over into a non political arena. We are honoring the beauty of the aircraft by building. This is one more case of some minor small group action being imposed upon a larger, when the larger group wasn't doing anything wrong.

TP777 said it very well. the plane performs very well and performs its mission very well. I have never seen anything perform as well as that plane...that also I know personally from the cockpit of my F-16 chase plane during test... If you ever ask a pilot that flew the F-22 and any other plane, what he would like to go to war in, I would say hands down he would say the raptor.. Spent a bit of time working the program..

By the way, the cost issue is another story... There are two costs associated with a program. THe production cost and the total cost...per copy (im simplifying) The production cost was the repeatable price tag that was paid per plane. The 300+ cost stated is the total cost with the development cost wrapped in per copy. If we built 700 planes, half that cost would have been spread over each plane. the actual price tag is half that in general. I am speaking general terms. The F-16 was the same way. the plane may cost 30 million, but if the R&D cost was rolled in, and we bought 180 of them it would have been more something like 50mil. but since we bought so many, it spread the cost to the point it was much less.

thats basic acquisition process that the govt uses...( very simplified)..

All that said, I wish the companies would understand, we model planes because we love what that company produced and we wish to honor it with our time and effort. We are not trying to make big money off of copyrights and BS like that. We just want to have fun. Some of us just want to make a little money to model more and support our love of the hobby, such as Yellow...and other model companies. I know Charles is Passionate about the F-22. He has a great love for that plane...I know that personally.. I have a great love for the plane too, as I poured out my heart and soul into the program for about 4 years..trying to make it better for my buds in the field.