Back to the original post, the current full-up F-22 demo puts the flanker demo to shame. In half of the flanker maneuvers, the pilot puts the plane into an extreme position and then the plane just sort of falls off back to a flying attitude. This is obvious to just about any pilot who has ever flown high performance military aircraft. It can't actually hold those crazy positions and it is certainly not fully controllable in many of those maneuvers. Look at the cobra maneuver... It will quite often recover back to level flight with just a little bit of rotation. That's because the plane has been flown past the point where it's controllable, and the pilot can't really do much to direct the plane until it gets back to a normal attitude.
Yes, the flanker has pretty amazing maneuverability and capabilities, but after seeing the F-22 demo, to some extent the flanker demo is about as impressive as throwing an arrow backwards and applauding when the pointy end moves back to the front.
The F-22 remains fully controllable through the demo and does not rely on the natural or computer-enhanced stability of the plane to recover from any airshow maneuvers. And even being limited to controllable maneuvers that any F-22 pilot could perform, the demo maneuvers are in my opinion at least as impressive as the flanker demo maneuvers that can't be flown by anyone but a specially trained flanker demo pilot.
If you have a chance to see a full-up F-22 demo, you should definately go see it. I think it's amazing. If you see the F-22 at an airshow and it doesn't do some weird stuff, then either the plane is partially broken, they're operating under some sort of flight restriction that day, or it's not the real demo team.
