Those Herbst maneuvers are really cool. The F-22 demo team does them as a standard thing, and I really enjoyed the F-22 demo I saw in 2008 at Andrews AFB. The

Those Herbst maneuvers are really cool. The F-22 demo team does them as a standard thing, and I really enjoyed the F-22 demo I saw in 2008 at Andrews AFB. The problem with the Herbst maneuver, as the energy maneuverability wonks will rightly say, is that when you're done with it, it leaves you in a low energy state. So you (as an F-22 pilot) must then give up some maneuvering for a short time while you regain some energy. So if you need that maneuver to get a kill, you need to actually get the kill, or else you've put yourself in a troublesome spot. Where the capability to perform such maneuvers comes in handy is that being able to do such things means that your controllability at high angles of attack is superb. You can outturn your enemy in a wider portion of the flight envelope, in an area where fighter aircraft were traditionally not the greatest.