The F-22 Belly Landing, the Koren Kolligian Trophy, and the Decision That Saved an Irreplaceable Jet

An F-22 Raptor pilot has been awarded the Koren Kolligian Junior Trophy - the United States Air Force’s highest flight safety honor - after successfully landing a disabled aircraft following the loss of a main landing gear wheel during flight. The aircraft survived intact, the pilot walked away uninjured, and an irreplaceable jet returned to service. The decisions made in that cockpit offer lessons every pilot can use.

Why the F-22 Makes This Especially Significant

The F-22 Raptor is the Air Force’s premier air dominance fighter, and its production line is permanently closed. 187 operational airframes were built. There are no more coming. With procurement and program costs factored in, each aircraft runs well north of $150 million. When the script says “irreplaceable,” it is a hard statement of fact about American air power, not a rhetorical flourish.

Any loss of an F-22 is a permanent reduction in fleet capacity. That context frames everything about how this landing should be understood.

What Actually Failed - and Why It’s Harder Than It Sounds

The pilot didn’t face a standard gear-up landing. The landing gear was present - the wheel was gone. That distinction is critical.

A full gear-up landing is a scenario that has been extensively simulated and prepared for. The aircraft settles onto its belly, skids, and the airframe absorbs the energy. It’s survivable when executed correctly. What this pilot faced was a partial gear failure with asymmetric ground contact - one side with a wheel, one side without. At F-22 approach speeds exceeding 150 knots, the moment the aircraft touches the runway, asymmetric forces fight for control.

The F-22 compounds this further. It is aerodynamically unstable by design. The fly-by-wire flight control computers make thousands of corrections per second to keep the jet flying normally - that instability is what gives the Raptor its agility in the air. On the ground, during a degraded gear rollout, those same systems are managing a scenario they were never designed to encounter. The pilot cannot lean on the computers. The pilot has to be ahead of everything.

The Three Decisions That Defined the Outcome

Decision one: declare the emergency early. The emergency call set the entire system in motion before the aircraft was anywhere near the runway. The field was cleared. Crash, fire, and rescue crews were positioned. Air traffic control was fully focused. Every resource available showed up because someone in the cockpit made an early call under pressure - and understood that making that call is airmanship, not weakness.

Decision two: work the checklist. The F-22’s abnormal gear procedures exist because engineers, test pilots, and safety teams spent years thinking about exactly these failure modes. The pilot’s job is to trust that work and execute it - not improvise around it.

Decision three: fly the aircraft all the way to a stop. Not to touchdown - to a stop. At high speed, with a yawing tendency and a jet trying to depart the centerline, the rollout demands the same focus as the approach. Relaxing at the wrong moment is how a successful landing becomes a runway excursion.

The outcome: aircraft intact, pilot uninjured, no fire, no runway departure. On a jet the Air Force cannot replace.

About the Koren Kolligian Junior Trophy

The award has been presented annually since 1959. It is named for First Lieutenant Koren Kolligian Jr., an Air Force pilot who disappeared in 1955 while flying a T-33 Shooting Star trainer off the coast of California. His aircraft was never recovered.

The trophy goes to an Air Force member who demonstrates extraordinary airmanship in the face of a life-threatening emergency - someone who brought the aircraft home when it was working hard against them. Previous recipients have managed catastrophic engine failures, severe in-flight structural damage, and loss-of-control events. This F-22 pilot earned that company.

Why This Matters Beyond the Flight Line

Aviation accident research consistently identifies the same pattern: pilots often have the skill to handle an emergency but delay the decision to treat the situation as one. Optimism takes over. It’s probably nothing. I’ll figure it out on the ground. Declaring feels like an overreaction. By the time the situation is taken seriously, the options have narrowed.

This pilot declared early. That is the transferable lesson, regardless of what you fly.

The moment a pilot has information suggesting something is degraded, the job is to start managing it - not waiting for confirmation, not hoping it resolves. Declare the situation to whoever needs to know. Get the field in sight. Run the checklist. Make yourself deliberately busier, because a pilot with a plan is far safer than a worried pilot waiting to see what happens next.

Using the System Around You

The F-22 is a single-seat aircraft. No copilot, no second voice on final, no one to catch a missed checklist item. And yet this pilot performed as though supported by a full crew - because they used the crew that was available: the tower, the crash teams, the entire infrastructure that activated the moment the emergency was declared.

That mental model transfers to every cockpit. Controllers want to help. Crash and rescue crews train for exactly these moments. Mechanics can inspect the aircraft the second it stops rolling. None of that help is accessible if no one has been told there’s a problem.

The Air Force recognized this pilot not for heroism, but for safety - for making sound decisions, managing a dangerous situation without escalating it, and returning an irreplaceable aircraft to a condition where maintainers can fix it and fly it again. That framing matters. The quiet story - pilot sees the problem early, declares, works the procedure, puts it on the runway - is the one worth studying, because that approach is what a long career looks like.

Key Takeaways

An F-22 Raptor pilot received the Koren Kolligian Junior Trophy after successfully belly-landing the jet following loss of a main landing gear wheel, with the aircraft surviving intact
A partial gear failure creating asymmetric ground contact is significantly more complex than a standard gear-up landing - especially in an aerodynamically unstable fly-by-wire aircraft
Declaring the emergency early activated every available resource before the aircraft reached the runway; that early call was itself an act of airmanship
Aviation research consistently shows pilots get into trouble not from lack of skill, but from delaying the decision to treat a situation as an emergency
The award recognizes disciplined decision-making, not dramatic improvisation - a useful corrective for how aviation culture tends to frame heroism