Slashdot Mirror
Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight
mgh02114 writes "The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet." The Peoples Daily of China reported on Feb. 17 that two Raptors had landed on Okinawa.
Yes. Of course you're right. :-p
I've been wondering where people like you get your energy from?
"I'll assume they're adding a day"
... just as well it wasn't in the fire a mission flag byte ... or worse still, the ejector seat flag byte.
Unfortunately, its software sounds like it could have stored that day byte (or some other data), somewhere is shouldn't have
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
As far as I remember the Space Shuttle not only has redundant computer systems, but also redundant software, i.e. the software has been developed twice to ensure that software bugs don't cause a catastrophe. I'd prefer to know that systems capable of carrying weapons which can kill hundreds of thousands of people were designed with the same safety in mind.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Is it because nobody has the time or patience to put up with Windows/Linux except for friendless, sexless nerds like you?
You obviously aren't to far from the crowd that you've unfairly and wrongly stereotyped if you've got time to post to Slashdot in the first five minutes of a new post and felt the need to take a precious 2 minutes away all your sex-orgies and circle jerks with your friends to point this out.
Chris
That's one of the ugliest women I have ever seen, and she's your postergirl for Macs? Good for you, you can keep her.
doh ... missile, not mission ... I think I have a bug.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line.
I've heard of a software glitch causing a crash before, but this is ridiculous.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I've been wondering what kind of sexless dweeb thinks that girl who uses an Mac is hot.
I find it odd you find that mac user so attractive... Shes got that ugly whore look going on (too much makeup and wtf is with the hair). Maybe Mac users have lower standards when it comes to what they find attractive?
The F-22 doesn't have a UHF radio backup? I know they want to cut down the EM missions for stealth, but you think they pilots would still have an independently powered emergency radio.
The problem probably isn't with the time change. Airplanes use GMT so the local time doesn't matter. The problem is probably related to the longitude going from W179.99 degrees to E180 degrees.
I find it hard to believe that they would have lost all communication from a software glitch like this. Things like radios, compasses, radars, etc surely still worked. Hopefully this just crashed a navigation system and left the pilots able to fly the plane using conventional navigation techniques. If it brought down everything else, that's a serious design flaw, not just a bug.
Someone is going to get fired for this.
What you're talking about is called N-version programming. It's no guarantee of reliability, unfortunately. Often, the "bug" is related to mistakes in the program specification, not the implementation of that specification. Therefore, the same bug gets faithfully and correctly implemented twice.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We will happily sell y'all Eurofighters. Half the price, twice the bombs... and who the hell do you need stealth to fight anyway? Expecting the France to try and invasion any day now or something?
Beep beep.
That's the real reason why they don't want to give source code to foreign armies... They don't want to be covered in shame :)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
We have a description for women like that you know, it's called "warpig".
.. maybe its running Vista?
The answer to all these problems is very simple. For any mission critical application, use UTC and only UTC. No time zones, no date line, no converting. If the software isn't even aware of the concept of date/time localization, then it's not going to run into problems.
Oh, and while they're at it, standardize on metric too. Maybe we can save our interstellar probes at the same time we are saving our warplanes.
The Bismarck battleship had a bug also: when the main turrets would fire, the aiming radars would be disabled. That's no joke when you're in the midst of a battle and everyone of those large caliber shells counts. As I understand, the radars would be disabled by the vibrations of the turret cannons firing. Not a software bug, but bug nonetheless, and you do wonder how did this battleship pass testing.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
All times should be represnted as integer, generally 64-bit integers. How complicated is that? If you do it that way, time always moves forward and the only place where you have to deal with the complexities of time zones is right at the very end when you're get to the rendering of the View phase, or during input.
"The International Date Line - It makes time so strange."
When I worked at a high end civilian GPS equipment manufacturer, we had a test department where, among other things, a complete list of "special" dates and locations were kept on file. Any new position solution software release was regression tested against all previously known and guessed potential date/time rollovers, as well as making sure that motion across geographic coordinate boundaries didn't cause erratic behavior. Obviously whoever supplied the inertial navigation solution for the F22 hasn't quite gotten there yet... Testing in the lab is cheap. Burning a couple of tons of Jet-A and putting a bunch of people at risk is not.
Less is more.
The F-22 has a fly-by-wire control system. If there really were a crash of ALL on-board computer systems, communication and navigation would not have been the most immediate concerns!
Assuming it WAS a time issue upon crossing the International Dateline...
Design problem? Why should navigation software require "local time"? They knew they were crossing the international dateline, so they must be linked to GPS timing systems... why not just use GPS' universal time? (Sure, you want local time eventually for your displays but that's a "view" calculation, not one intrinsic to the navigation software)
Bug tracking problem? Did the testers not think of testing about a time zone change? Did they assume the above that everything would be on a universal time and therefore didn't see the need for crossing time zones?
Why wasn't this a stock reusable code module in Lockheed Martin's labs?!?
(And for a media look at this issue, check out the anime Geneshaft or the movie The Pentagon Wars)
I just want to know if this is in any way connected to the nuclear subs that lost navigation after they switched to Microsoft Windows based software. Generally, when this kind of thing happens, some external vendor is to blame.
I got to thinking if we had any decent alternatives (at least in C++). And yes there are alternatives and all of them looked equally bad to me. Looks like the F22 guys might have had the same problem finding and using a robust fault tolerant time library.
but it is a nice story anyway.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Are you telling me that the F-22 has no analog backup flight system? For gosh sakes even the F-16 has a similar system. A cursory google search that the F-22 is equipped with an "LN-100G Inertial Navigation System with Embedded GPS". It sounds incredible that the summary implies that the only way they would've made it home was via formation flying with a tanker? Can anyone with more detailed information on the F-22 clarify?
It didn't crash, a worm just caused a popup to appear infront of the navigation software, rendering it useless! But don't worry, I hear USDOD SP1 disables the service that is prone to this!
So, when is Service Pack 1 coming out?
...enineers, this women found back to the ladies parkings.
http://www.bmlv.gv.at/pool/img/231002.jpg
Look at the upper right of the avionics, there are the backup analogue instruments for navigation.
You'd think they'd have learned from this one:
http://www.f20a.com/f20ins.htm
www.sjbaker.org
You are flying to Japan, Cancel or Allow?
I bet you think Pamela Anderson is hot, don't you? Ugh.
Well, whatever the issue - which is probably something similar to what you suspect - it's now fixed. Here's the transcript from CNN this morning. Since the F-22 is fly-by-wire, it's also worth pointing out that all systems didn't crash, else these F-22s would be sitting in the Pacific. I've no doubt it affected navigation, communications, and similar subsystems, and was probably related to physical location in terms of time, position over the Earth, or both, given the nature of the issue.
>> 25 Years from development to deployment, the F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighting machine in the air. It was no match for a computer glitch that left six of them high above the pacific ocean, deaf, dumb, and blind as they headed to their first deployment. So what happened? We turn to a man that's at home in the cockpit. Retired Air Force General Don Shepperd. Let me set the scene, Don. These F-22s, headed from the Air Force base in Hawaii to an Air Force base in Japan. They were approaching the international date line, pick it up from there.
>> You got it right. You want everything to go right with the frontline fighter. $125, 135 Million a copy. The F-22 raptor is our frontline fighter, air defense, air superiority, and it can drop bombs. It is stealthy and fast. You want it to go right. On the international deployment to the pacific, it didn't. At the international date line, whoops. All systems dumped. When i say all systems I mean all systems, navigation, part of the communications, fuel systems, and they were -- they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers -- tried to reset their systems. Couldn't get them reset. Tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. Certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. Turned out okay. Fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code; somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes.
>> This is almost like the feared Y2K problem that happened to these aircraft. We should point out, the computer problems in 2000. The computers absolutely went absolutely haywire and became useless?
>> Absolutely. When you think of airplanes from the old days, with cables and that type of thing and connects between the sticks and the yokes and the controls -- not that way anymore. Everything is by computer. When your computers go the airplanes go. You have multiple systems. When they all dump at the same time, you can be in real trouble. Luckily this turned out okay.
>> What would have happened if these brand-new $120 million F-22s had been going into battle?
>> You would have been in real trouble in the middle of combat. The good thing is we found this out. Any time -- before, you know, before we get into combat with an airplane like this. Any time you introduce a new airplane, you are going to find glitches, and you are going to find things that go wrong. It happens in our civilian airliners. You don't hear much about it. These things absolutely happen. And luckily had time we found out about it before combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again, and completed the deployment. This could have been real serious in combat.
>> You had these advanced air -- not just superiority but air supremacy fighters in there, up there in the air, above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophisticated than a Cessna 152 with a jet engine?
>> You got it. They are on a 15-hour flight from Hawaii to Okinawa. When all their systems dumped, they needed help. Had they gotten separated from their tankers or weather gotten bad they had no reference and no communications or navigation. They would have turned around and could have found the Hawaiian Islands. If the weather had been bad on approach there could have been real trouble. You get refueling from your tankers and you don't run -- you don't get yourself where you run out of fuel. You
in other news: Lockheed Martin has decided to open it's sources and announce a bug-athon
check out https://repo.airforge.gov/raptor/
but don't everyone look at once - you'll slashdot the server.
I hearby nominate those pilots for the "Beta Tester of the Year" Award!
I would say that that makes each of them a Master Beta, but I shall refrain from doing so.
When F16s crossed the equator, the computer would roll the aircraft 180 degrees and fly inverted:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html
Last time I checked, the F-22 is not a new plane...are we referring to the new Joint-Strike Fighter, or are we actually speaking about the F-22 that's been publicly known about since the mid-nineties?
Assuming that this is accurate (below) it does at least indicate that the navigation programming is quite independent of the basic flight-control programming. That plane, like the F-16 and F-15, is only stable with the control system in the loop. So part of the architecture/methodology seems to have worked.
I'm skeptical of the problem report, though, because of the famous problem the F-16 was said to have had crossing the equator: the plane thought it was upside down. I read that this was not caught in flight, but in the test lab, but either way it's famous and it's hard for me to believe that the IDL problem got past them. And if it did, it's probably not the change in date that messed things up but the discontinuity from high west longitude to high east longitude. (The equator problem would be a continuous switch from positive latitude to negative.)
The council will have some serious questions for Gaius Baltar about this.
I tried posting this on several sites but on March 11th, when the new daylight savingsregime kicks in for the first time there will probably be a lot of Java applications that will start having data issues because the latest Java version IS NOT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE for several three character time codes that have bee removed. Several codes have been deprecated in a way that is not backwards compatible. I could be wrong about the severity, but for he last two weeks my software team has been dealing with this issue and the interaction between Oracle and Java.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Why do you guys give +5 to someone who doesn't know for sure how the date line works, and who merely looked up which SI prefix was small enough to cause a 64-bit overflow? Most likely the bug has to do with overflow in position, not time. Even assuming this has to do with time overflow, modern GPS electronics can only measure signals to within 10 nanosecond. Using femtoseconds (10,000,000x smaller) is complete BS to make his argument work.
I think the infantile comments of the typical Slashdotters regarding Microsoft are so incredibly typical. I would doubt that the underlying O/S would be any off-the-shelf commercial or Open Source system.
Can't someone here "moderate" those immature comments? Or are only comments that point out this immaturity the ones that get "moderated"?
just fly the other way around ....
Well, a related problem shows up when drawing lines on a Google-Map.
I wanted to allow users to split a segment of a poly-line in two halfs, with the click of the mouse.
It's quite tedious to take this case (switching between negative and positive longitude) into account. But it's really not a lot of code. And it really is an integral part of the problem. See upcoming version of stephansmap.org; look at the javascript.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
You would be really surprised (and shocked) to know how many places off-the-shelf commercial or open source systems are used. Think governments, military, airlines, etc.
It's so scary, you better not think about it too much.
...not to run Windows on those machines. They HAD to upgrade to Vista because of all the cool 'features' the pilots would like to see. First we had to put more ram in and an extra video card, now this... I'm telling ya, next time Microsoft gives them a better deal because they're switching to Linux, they shouldn't accept.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Bullshit. The F-22 cannot be piloted manually, if all the computers crashed, then so would the planes.
Given this inconsistency, I am disinclined to believe the rest of the story.
"Half the price, twice the bombs"
And flies backwards, the better to retreat.
Call me in 20 years when you guy are all Muslim theocracies.
Maybe you better have a few more kids.
I recalled a similar incident affecting the F-16 fighter. The story goes that the aircraft would flip over when it crossed over the equator into the southern hemisphere.
: www.cis.strath.ac.uk/teaching/ug/classes/52.422and rew/Introduction.safety.critical.systems.doc+F16+e quator+flip&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us
A little googling got me a couple of links that stated that the error only occurred in the simulator, before the actual aircraft encountered the bug. Given this history, the F-22's bug seems like a serious error in quality assurance. This F-16 bug is a part of quality assurance lore. It is hard to imagine that any manufacturer of aircraft navigation systems would not have test cases for this kind of thing. Perhaps they included the equator, but not date line. Even if there was not a test case for the date line it should have been caught in the simulator, just as the F-16 bug was.
Here's the link of a converted word doc referring to this problem from Google's cache. Perhaps someone else can find a better link or knows more of the story.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:QMGHr9wm558J
Another serious failure to consider is the incredible investment of resources into production of this type of aircraft. This failure is one of imagination. The assumption is that we are not competent in coping with the world in a more skillful way than spending billions on this type of aircraft and contemplating using it. Our issues with North Korea are difficult, no doubt, but a military solution does not appear to exist - a least not one that have potentially grievous costs. Our (non-economic) issues with China seem to be generally limited to the status of Taiwan. Again a military solution would not be effective for the US. In the long run China can deploy a stronger military force in the region than we could ever. Given China's increase in military spending, the long term forces that may restrain China from forcibly controlling its "renegade province" must be diplomatic and economic. They would likely fear trade retaliation more than whatever military force that might be deployed there.
For those who find it fishy that there's no article link for this story, here is one: http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/02/14/21 2102/pictures-navigational-software-glitch-forces- lockheed-martin-f-22-raptors-back-to-hawaii.html
> The problem probably isn't with the time change. Airplanes use GMT so the local time doesn't matter.
Maybe they were using the time as the seed for their RNGs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can assure you that your statement about aircraft is totally false.
One link is 404 and redirects to a domain parking page, and the other is so filled with Hebrew terminology that it is impossible to parse without an intimate understanding of Hebrew language and/or Jewish religious practices.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
You so don't know what's going on.
The problem was that there was a bogey drill back in the Pentagon, and the F-22 program's budget got a little too close to the cleaver.
These incidents are a mere reminder of who they daddy.
Nah, that would be unethical; the vendor would never do that.
Forget I said anything.
Actually, I think you don't know the deal. LM isn't smart enough to pull a trick like this; they aren't smart - period.
The cost of developing the EuroFighter is about 19 billion pounds, which is roughly $38 billion.
Are we Americans getting significantly better performance for spending 84% more on developing our fighter than the Europeans spent? If the answer is "no", then why did we not save money by licensing the design of the EuroFighter and souping it up to "American performance levels"?
Tax day is just around the corner, so perhaps we should ask more questions about how Washington is spending our money. We insisted that Tokyo base its next-generation fighter on the F-16 design. Perhaps, the European Union should insist that Washington base its next-generation fighter on the EuroFighter.
The EAP prototype, from which the final EuroFighter was derived, became airborne in 1986. 1986 is the year when the United States Air Force (USAF) selected two American companies to build working prototypes, of which one would become the basis for the F-22. The USAF could have saved a truckload of money by demanding that the American companies base their designs on the EAP prototype.
The Japanese experience with the F-2 albatross (based on the F-16) does not apply in this case. The F-2 was the first major national fighter that the post-war Japanese developed. Cost overruns are inevitable during this steep learning curve.
By contrast, the Americans have decades of experience in building deadly jet fighters. The Americans could have saved money by starting with a European design.
OK - as a software development major, I have issues with this statement. I'm assuming that this is just shooting from the hip on the part of Don Shepperd, which is understandable. OTOH, if he was somehow involved (which I can't tell from the article) in the project and is stating this as a fact, then I have a bit of a problem with this. I don't know the architecture of the chips they use (motorola, or RISC based, I'd assume), but this seems like quite a bit of code. Once you get this much code, unless it is broken down over the various subsystems very well, you are asking for trouble. The fact that they fixed it in 48 hours might be due to a 'blackbox' log or some way of knowing exactly where the code dumped or that the code is much smaller than Don's saying. Anyways, a few million lines of code is very hard to maintain, (the degree of difficulty is probably a function of the language) and seems like a bit much for a fighter's onboard computers. Even if we take into account the code for handling all the geometry, HUDs, and systems monitoring, it still seems like a lot. Windows 3.1 was 6 million lines of code, according to wikipedia.
I'm only speculating since I have no idea the depth or complexity of the onboard computers. Does anyone have any experience with anything like this? Does this seem like a lot to anyone else?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
The reason for using a commercial RTOS is ... reliability. You want code that was heavily tested before. And if you write your own RTOS you will have to debug very mysterious problems for years. Better to grab code that already went through all that, and flew to Mars too. If you follow this link you will see that the good debugging capabilities of the VxWorks allowed the programmers to patch their bug remotely. A homegrown RTOS would be unlikely to have such a debugging interface just because it's out of scope; you'd need to bring the device into the lab and plug some JTAG cable in to reflash the board.
Please stop. No one is using femtoseconds for uptime.
Something more reasonable is that the nav system (presumably GPS) didn't like having the date change after aquisition. You'd think that'd be a fairly normal thing to have happen, but after the horrible crap I've seen happen with Rockwell Collins' receivers (they SUCK), it wouldn't be too surprising.
To expand on the Rockwell Collins (they SUCK) theme, we eventually got them to admit to us how to retrieve their diagnostic info, including a register that counting up floating point exceptions (yay, divide by zero!). It had well and truly saturated. On a test flight of an, in part, GPS-guided missile, it once croaked right at launch. Since we never understood that we were moving, we never turned on the autopilot. However, rocket motors don't have much in the way of an off switch, so away we went without autopilot. Boink!
So there are plenty of ways for nav systems to suck (especially if they are made by Rockwell Collins (they SUCK)) without needing something completely stupid like measuring data in femtoseconds.
Hold up, I got a few more of these:
Rockwell Collins (they SUCK)
Rockwell Collins (they SUCK)
Rockwell Collins (they SUCK)
That is all.
What you state about Airbus is absolutely correct but FADEC stands for Full Authority Digital Electronics Control but many seem to remember it as E = Engine, like you do. As far as the fly-by-wire system is concerned, I might add that it has already saved at least 300+ lives - an Emirates A340 attempted to rotate with insufficient airspeed at takeoff (but past V1 so they couldn't stop either) and the FBW system stepped in and throttled up (fortunately autothrottle was on so it was permitted to do so) and rotated as soon as the aircraft had sufficient speed to take off instead of just lift and stall (and consequently crash). Emirates training got a slap on the wrist by Airbus since the crew apparently had the attitude that if there's a problem, the computer will sort it out whilst the correct procedure is to either perform maneuvers properly manually or tell the computer what you want the aircraft to do and then monitor it - even though the computer can do a lot to correct crew errors, crews shouldn't perform poorly just because it can do that. I remember an article posted on airdisaster.com in which some first officer that wanted to remain anonymous (for obvious reasons) wrote that due to the software that outperforms any human pilot, many captains he had flown with had definitely ignored the rule that whilst you should let the autopilot land if weather conditions are extremely bad, you shouldn't force it to do so if you couldn't land in those conditions yourself too because how can you judge what the limits of the autopilot are (and how close to those it is) when it is already outperforming you? I wish Boeing adopted the same design philosophy now that they've finally switched to FBW too with the 777 - there's simply no justification to let a fly-by-wire aircraft stall due to pilot error when the system could easily be programmed to prevent it (not to mention detect better how close to stalling an aircraft is instead of just giving the pilot a list of stall speeds at certain configurations).
All complex systems have bugs that need to be ironed out....
. html ...
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB10Ak05
"Keys notes, however, that the electronic spectrum around Baghdad is polluted by the myriad jamming devices that coalition forces primarily employed to thwart remote detonations of the improvised explosive devices that have inflicted 70% of all US fatalities in that war."
"The potential problem was discovered when the first F-22s were operating near US Navy ships off the Atlantic coast. Navy radars overwhelmed the F-22's automated sensors. Even now, larger, multi-station, purpose-built electronic-intelligence-gathering airplanes encounter difficulties around the Iraqi capital because of the extreme density of jamming devices."
The F-22 is a full stealth fighter, the EuroFighter is not in any way. If you cannot understand why you cannot base a stealth plane design in any major way on something that is not a stealth plane (hell, no stealth fighter has existed before the F-22) then why are you eve talking about this as you clearly have no idea about anything involved.
And yes the F-22 is likely worth 84% more than the Eurofighter in terms of performance due to stealth alone.
Incidentally since the F-22 is what the F-35 is based on that $70billion has technically led to the creation of two planes, the later of which is being sold quite widely.
"Your aircraft is attempting to crash into the sea, Confirm or Deny?"
Oh shi...
I have worked on Commercial and DoD avionics, and this type of thing is inexcusable.
Commercial avionics software of the sort described is governed by a standard called DO-178B level A or level B. The process is so rigorous that the slogan is "no-one has ever died from software failure in a commercial airliner, yet." DO-178B level A is expensive. It is virtually impossible that a software error of the nature described could get into a certified aircraft.
Having said that, the military is not obliged to follow commercial standards, but there is a trend toward using DO 178-B in military systems in part because the Europeans are starting to require commercial JAA/FAA certification for all aircraft that enter their air space. But even in the more lax military world, every line of code is typically formally reviewed and there are independent testers. The type of error described should have shown up in simulators before the first flight of the aircraft. Test flights should have stimulated the error long before a squadron ever attempted a transpacific flight.
Even worse still, avionics systems are supposed to be isolated from each other. Navigation radios typically share nothing but power with GPS or with engine instruments etc. Great effort prevents one system from disturbing the power of another too. Aircraft typically have two or more separate primary navigation systems plus inertial guidance and old fashion compass + baring/vector navigation. Military aircraft need to survive both normal equipment failures and battle damage. Military radios (including navigation) need to be isolated from other systems for security reasons too. Those NSA guarded encryption systems can not be contaminated by software that has lower security classification (like navigation)without somebody going to federal prison for a long time.
The bottom line is that something very very wrong, negligent, and illegal needed to happen for the described error mode to manifest. That makes me doubt the story.
The return on investment is HEAVILY in favor of the F-22. There is no aircraft anywhere even close. The Eurofighter is the second best fighter aircraft ever built, but it is miles from being in the same class as the F-22 Raptor.
Are these the jets that are so complex that they are only manageable to fly because of the incredible amount of work the computers do?
I'm fairly confident that the F-117 was in this category, but can't remember if the F-22 is, too. It's been a while since I saw the Discovery Channel special on these beasts.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Just take the scenic route... through Europe.
Answer .... M$ Longhorn!
M$, yet again, got a sweet deal (read insider ownership of Options by U.S. Executive Office Staff) on supplying the operating system.
The "Date-line" bug, dates back to DOS3.0, which is still a part of Vista, i.e. Vista is just DOS with a little Taquilla.
Toodles
If you're going to write software like this, then test it or simulate it at all the wierd places in the world: date line [East/West rollover], equator [north/south chnange], GMT+13 hours [NZ daylight saving time].
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hey, Anonymous Troll, you obviously haven't found the right users.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
or look at a map and think what else changes when you cross the date line and how that might affect navigation computers, with software written by monkeys...
Hey Fuckstick, it's actually harder to use a mac due to application incompatabilities.
In short,
Learn2Sex.
these planes are supposed to fly on the RealOS real-time Linux Flavor aren't they?
why would that bug exist?
these are just stupid mistakes by half-assed programmers.
They're using their grammar skills there.
My advice to F-22 pilots: 1) Superglue a handheld GPS into your cockpit. 2) Carry a backup radio. Superglue this to your cockpit. 3) Remove your cockpit, and superglue it onto an A-10. 4) Fly safe. Carry superglue.
They wouldn't have made it here. I knew there was a good reason.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
sorry Mr. Balmer, no please, not the chair, not the chair, not......
You never catch me alive
How do you really feel about Rockwell Collins?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Here is an interesting question.
In a fight between 1 F-22 and 2 EuroFighters, who would prevail? If the F-22 prevails, then the F-22 is an excellent investment.
However, the United States Air Force has never claimed that 1 F-22 can beat 2 EuroFighters. I suspect that the 2 EuroFighters would reduce the 1 F-22 into a pile of smoking rubble.
So who makes the Air Force's software? Outsourcing, or outsourcing by Microsoft?
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Ok so if the computer crash was caused by crossing the timeline, what happens if the jets cannot communicate with the GPS satellite network to figure out where the timeline is? What if some country knocks out the GPS network with a bunch of ASATs? Will that disable the entire USAF (once they're mothballed all their F-16s etc)?
Stand-alone systems FTW - distributed architecture just ain't reliable.
Mind you, the EuroFighter may greatly outclass an F-15.
I talk about stuff.
The F22 wouldn't be seen until it launched it's AMRAAM missiles at both Euro Fighters. When the first notice you have that an enemy is nearby is the radar signature from it's guided missiles, you are kinda screwed.
Would it be the new Vista F-22?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
So if Al-Queda wants to escape, all they have to do is cross the International Data Line?
Osama's in Fiji, I tell ya...
I thought I had it hard finding GOOD bata-testers. Imagine a super-secret aeroplane.
Well... when you can lock on a target and shoot with that target not even being aware you're around.....
Your ad could be here!
Well, you suspect wrong, because the F-22 would shoot both Eurofighters before they ever saw the F-22. It would not even be a fair fight. In recent Red Flag exercises, the F-22 won 250 out of 252 engagements, and the two losses were F-15s flying on the side of the F-22s. You cant shoot what you cant see. The RCS (radar cross section) of the Raptor is the same as that of a Bumblebee.
As the son of a fighter pilot, I know F22, F15, F16 pilots etc. They have all told me that the F22 is next to invincible, and that in many exercises it would maintain an X to zero kill ratio, where X is the amount of other planes it shot down. You can't kill what you can't see. The capabilities and technology in that aircraft haven't been fully tapped, and /. speculation doesn't scratch the surface of the strenghts/weaknesses of that plane.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Y2K didnt do anything but this new Y2Day but seemed to be a bit more of a bother.
What's more, one pilot tried to turn off Aero Glass -- suddenly, he lost cabin pressure.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Actually they're significantly better than the Eurofighters.
Let's look at a few simple theoretical examples.
You're flying into heavily armed enemy space at night:
- You fly in 100 Eurofighters. Your enemy has 1000 missiles. You lose 100 Eurofighters
and hit no targets.
- You fly in 1 F-22. Your enemy has 1000 missiles, they never detect you. You hit your
target and leave enemy airspace.
In this case the F-22 was better than 100 Eurofighters.
-You're flying alone into enemy territory. You spot a flight of 3 Eurofighters flying in
formation. You fall into a following position on their tail. You fire 3 missiles
simultaneously and before the enemy pilots can react. They're dead.
In the Alaskan trials the F-22s ammased 144 kills to 0 losses. That's a pretty good investment. And while they weren't flying against Eurofighters, I'm not sure it would have helped. It doesn't come down to who can turn twice as fast. It's who can fight twice as smart. During this same combat exercise Raptors engaged enemy forces out numbered 4-1 and stil came out victorious.
In previous exercises a single pilot was able to engage 9 enemy fighters, and then ran out of targets, but still had some ammunition remaining. What's most impressive is the ability for the F-22 to multiply the effectiveness of the existing airforce. In the same engagement that F-22 enabled a supporting flight of older aircraft to achieve a kill/loss ratio of 83-1.
It wasn't the International Dateline, it was those damn Cylons trying to launch an attack on Humanity.
Fortunately thanks to the efforts of a small beagle and his dog house/sopwith Camel the world is safe again.
That could be the dumbest idea I've heard all day.
So... a program that's in danger of being cut back intentionally causes a significant failure! Why not just submit a proposal to cancel the program? These are not the headlines LM wants right now. When lots of money has been spent, people irrationally expect perfection. Flying to Japan participating in exercises and kicking ass would have gone much further to proving the program viability than creating false doubts of reliability!
No - The F22 has already fulfilled its mission nicely: made a lot of folk richer in the states where it was designed and built. THAT was the mission of the F22. Sort of like the mission of the ABMDS is to keep people employed in the states where senators required that pork.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
The F-15's should have headed towards the international date line....
Christ, at least learn about things before opening up your blow hole. First of all the F-22 is costing somewhere around $200 million each asfaik due to the small number ordered. Second of all its not supposed to be anything except a limited air superiority fighter to be used when you are facing heavy or good opposition. It's not there to be a jack of all trades or to drop bombs on tanks but to clean the air of every enemy plane in sight. The F-35 is the cheap alternative that does all the other jobs not involving heavy air combat, likely to be supplemented with a new bomber and the A-10s for certain ground attacks.
Stating the obvious here. Not much use as a fighter if it couldn't.
qz
So I see that I was moderated (lost a point). What a surprise! Still no mature response to the inane drivel about Microsoft!!!
I feel like I'm not getting my $400 Billion worth.
One plane's INS and avionics, I could understand. But the F20 and F16 should have been enough of a lesson. (F20 link) http://www.f20a.com/f20ins.htm
Even the F-16 'flip over when crossing the equator' problem was noted in simulation: (See below)
Once you come up with a simulator scenario, I think you should be required to repeat that test in later generation products. For now, I'd keep my F-22s in the Northern Hemisphere, just in case.
(F16 link) http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/teaching/ug/classes/52 .422andrew/Introduction.safety.critical.systems.do c
1980s:[Jan86] Janssen, B.: "F-16 Problems - Contribution to the RISKS Digest", Volume 3, Issue 44, 1986
* Several problems were experienced with the software for the F-16 fighter plane. These had the potential to endanger the life of the pilot, as well as other people in the air and on the ground.
* During simulation of the aircraft, on crossing the equator, a fault in the software caused the plane to flip upside-down. In real life, this would result in the pilot's death.
A Scottish report describes a dogfight of 1 EuroFighter against 2 F-15s. The EuroFighter reduced both F-15s to smoking rubble.
Based on these reports, we can surmise that the EuroFighter substantially outclasses an F-15 but does not quite beat an F-22. However, the cost of one F-22 enables the purchaser to buy 2 EuroFighters. The 2 EuroFighters could demolish the the one F-22.
F22 vs F-16/F-15 during a recent US mock air battle: 122 to 0. The pilots said they never even saw the F-22's. 2 Euro Fighters wouldn't stand a chance against a single F-22.
Well...a bumblebee traveling at 650 MPH likely isn't one. Shoot it down and see.
lol @ obvs. photoshops
That machine handles and fights so differently that when the engineers flew simulated combat against Air Force pilots, the engineers won. The first few times. As soon as the pilots got the hang of it the engineers were toast.
run linux?
If the Eurofighter's radar can't detect the F-22, multiple Eurofighters won't be any great advantage compared to one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"(hell, no stealth fighter has existed before the F-22)".
Immediately, I think of the F-117A. Darn, it's classified as a 'strike aircraft', with armament of an 'internal weapons carriage'. And missles are part of the known munitions stored in the weapons bays.
Sadly, no mention of air-to-air missles being hung, and not a peep that anyone other than the BBC (as if they are authoritative in this area) and a Wikipedia article (semi-ditto) saying it could carry AIM-9's. The A/F-117X would hang AIM-9 and AIM-120 AMRAAMs, but that's not going to be built. The 117 is being removed from service in 2008, priamrily because of cost of spares - F-15 landing gear, F-16 flight controls, even environmental controls from the C-130... Some of this stuff is becoming hard to maintain since the original types ar near the end of their service life. Darn.
But back to topic, the F-117 could have been the first stealth fighter, biut technically it ain't.
And I was all worked up for it to be so... Grrr...
-rick
A fighter is designed to engage other aircraft. It will have machine guns and missiles for destroying air targets, but not necessarily bombs for destroying ground targets.
My other first post is car post.
Aviation Week mentioned recently that the situational awareness is so good that war games have started keeping the F-22 on station after all weapons are expended, just to serve as an improvised AWACS.
How much does an AWACS cost?
Take the long way around!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You've been absolutely pwned twice in 44 minutes now, and no one has bothered to mod you down yet. I suggest you go back to your little blog now before things really start to get ugly for you.
Yeah... uh... you know, in the same way they simply do not and never would have the navigation system connected to the In-Flight Entertainment system in an airliner, likewise they would never slave the ejection system to anything other than the mechanical operation of that yellow handle between the pilot's knees.
As for missiles? First, they fly unarmed on ferry missions because ammo is dead weight that reduces range; and second, even if they were armed, what do you really think would happen if an AMRAAM missile was free launched without being turned on, much less having had targeting info downloaded? Drop like a stone, it would, right into the pacific. Bloop. All gone.
Say it's also a good thing water isn't flammable, otherwise fire trucks would show up to fires and only make the situation worse, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Only if stealth is a requirement. In a real dogfight, the Eurofighter likely wins because maneuverability was foremost in its design, whereas the F-22 has stealth as the foremost design priority. The thought is that engagements are likely to be fought a distance with missles, and the low observability tech will allow the American aircraft to engage long before the enemy can return fire. This does not jive entirely with engagements of the past, which often involve close range encounters to verify enemy, or orders to wait until fired upon to return fire.
Compare this to the ability to put twice as many aircraft in the sky, carrying more munitions (while the F-22 has some stealty weapons bays, maxed out with a full bomb load involves external mounts with has a huge impact on radar visibility). Point is, whether stealth is worth 84% more has more to do with your mission profile and expected enemy/target,
If your radar is picking up signitures of bublebees, then you don't have any weapons because of the Crey super computer thats proccessing all the hits to fid wich ones are doing 650 MPH.
IT would take an enourmouse amount of processing power to track identify and evalutate all the targets being returned at that size. Most radars are tuned up high enough to avoid detection of stuff like this for this reason. It is a ballence between too many hits and getting enough hits to make it usefull.
You missed a point in that story.
NASA is extremely careful with its software.
They don't fly from Dec 31 to Jan 1 because they know exactly what would happen.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
the point is that bumblebees don't show up on radar. You can't shoot what you can't see.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The fly by wire computer didn't crash, for two reasons. As far as I know, there is no manual backup to the system, i.e. there is no way to hard connect the stick to the control surfaces. Secondly, without the fly by wire computer (or an accompanying computer, I'm not sure of the system layout), the plane falls out of the sky because the F-22 is an unstable aircraft. Humans simply don't have the reaction time needed to correct the small twitches that grow into huge oscillations. Eventually, the aircraft takes on the aerodynamic properties of a rock with two jet engines. More likely, just the navigational computers (and maybe the weapons systems computers) crashed.
Do you really thing that the USA would sit by and watch while the Euro's build a better fighter? Thats not going to happen. Think what you want of us but we build bad ass airplanes. The F-15 first entered service in 1970 so talk of a Eurofighter taking them down is laughable. At some point in the future Eurofighter's will cross F-22's....come back and post the outcome of that fight. It wont be pretty for the Eurofighters. And for the cost...who cares...the last time I checked we just printed money...
If you'd actually read the article you linked to.. The F- designation on the F-117 is a curious bit of aviation history and Air Force infighting, but the F-117 is a ground attack aircraft, not a fighter, and should really have an A- or B- designation, while the F-22 is an air to air combat plane with limited ground attack capabilities. The 117's internal payload capacity is huge compared to the F-22's ground attack loads (some of which have to be carried outside, destroying the stealth capability) and it's therefore unlikely the F-22 is going to completely replace the F-117 completely anytime soon.
This
Im all for the Raptor. I have many F-22 wallpapers, and videos. I have a Raptor flight video set to music on my PSP. I like the American F-22 Raptor. But its TRUE about the report of the Eurofighter kicking the arse of the 2 F-15Es, which are Americas Top of the line WIDELY DEPLOYED fighters. The F-22 is def better, I've read how the 22 flew over the top of a 15 and the 15 didnt see it, no show on the radar, until after it went over the top.
There has been much controversy over the F-22, that the 23 was actually faster and stealthier , that it costs too much etc. And now they all "dropped out of the sky" due to a computer glitch. Its ok, you dont have to defend your "local team".
Ive heard great things about both. Both can be great. Remember the Spitfire? Im sure that most of the world agrees it was a better plane overall than the P-51. But Americans...
---
This is why the rest of the world hates America. Please stop attacking us for being "un american".
PS I love the F-22 Raptor.
---
The F-22 was built to shoot down anything in the sky for the next 20 years - period. It's the most maneuverable machine known to man and can do maneuvers that were physically impossible before it was built and tested. Its vectored thrust is ridiculous - the thing can fly at something like 25 degrees from vertical without stalling. Its stealth beats the B-2 and F-117A by a generational advance. Its avionics and radar can pinpoint targets outside the range of most missiles. You don't need to put more in the sky. A squadron of Raptors would scare the crap out of any air force in the world, if they even had the chance to tell they were up there. Of course, they are a bit pricey, so a squadron at a time will be a lucky thing to have, but anyway. The Eurofighter will compete with the F-35 (thus why many in the F-35 program are considering abandoning it for the Eurofighter), but not the Raptor. We're sharing F-35 with a multitude of countries, including those working on the Eurofighter, but no one's getting the Raptor. That should speak volumes.
Anyone else remember the incident where the US Navy tried to automate a warship with Windows NT and it crashed shortly after leaving port... Divide by Zero error left it dead in the water... Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water The US Navy's so-call "Smart Ship technology" left the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown dead in the water off the coast of Cape Charles, Va. for several hours. The shutdown of the ship's propulsion was credited to a database overflow in a Windows NT system. The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero. Said Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, "Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor." The Navy is still expected to spend $138 million expanding the "Smart Ship" program to the entire Aegis class, and to other ships in the fleet. (Government Computer News, 13 July 1998)
Luckily they found it during simulations of the F-16. A bug in the fly-by-wire software caused the plane to think that it was upside-down whenever it crossed the equator. It would try to correct the problem immediately -- A maneuver that the plane could probably survive, but that would probably kill the pilot had it occured in real life.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Not quite the Eurofighters likely have RWRs so if you are using radar guided missiles they will likely detect your search, and targeting radars. So even with the newer harder to detect radars installed on the F-22 there is still a chance that they detect you from your radar emissions.
The F-22 is a fantastic aircraft, and is the best aircraft flying, but it isn't a perfect aircraft, and it doesn't have the capabilities that some people exaggerate it having. The Alaskan trails were set up by the fighter mafia at the Pentagon trying to justify their decisions in trying to keep the F-22 orders as high as possible.
It's not the first time that they have done this, during the training maneuvers against against the Indian Air Force they sent outdated aircraft and crippled the ROE and engagement envelopes of the AIM-120s. While the IAF didn't have such restrictions, at least none that we know of.
It's completely wrong analogy! It's not a space ship against a plane. The analogy would be as to have machine gun against enemy's rifle.
Yep, the "F"-117 is actually a small bomber, but "B-117" just doesn't have the sex appeal that "F-117" has. Cognressmen are stupid, and the contractors and the Air Force wisely names teh craft f-117 so they craft could get secret funding in secret appropriations hearings. More ninja like.
The F-117 just went in and knocked out air defenses and communications and maybe a few really crucial surprise targets. That's really its role. Then the bigger bombers can fly in (more) safely.
But it's no fighter. I know an F-117 shot down that President in season 4 of 24, and I've shot planes down in my F-117 on my playstation, but no F-117 has actually shot anything down in real life. The F-22 is so superior to any other fighter because it actually is like a ninja, unseen. The new russian and european fighters are more maneuverable, but they really have no chance when they learn of the F-22 by the missile that's closing in. that stealth and supercruise are worth what we paid. I just hope we don't sell these planes to the extent we have in the past (Iran still has a few F-14's, a very lethal interceptor and one reason we might need a "counter-interceptor").
May not help much in Baghdad, but it makes a difference at the diplomatic table. China, Russia, Iran, France. None of these countries really want to fight the USA, but this sort of thing keeps that proposition safely moot. And that superiority probably saves lives. The US has a lot of detractors in the world, and I imagine our constantly new abilities have prevented at least some conflict.
Could we test crossing the equator on the north pole?
Keep in mind that these fighters are often tested in comptuer simulations together, and the US has a long standing tradition of drastically cutting back its capabilities. I recall one international military simulation I took part of (not airforce, but Army). and the range of what I did was cut back ridiculously. Nearly 90% reduced range. It much harder to win, I guess.
Also remember that experience counts. The US Air Force has experience rivaled only by Britain. Our Pilots in our planes would simply not make the mistakes other nations would. When will the eurofighter be flying over the international date line? Never, probably. The US is stretched throughout the world and fighting some hard fights every day. Maybe it's a lousy policy in general, but we work our kinks out of our weapons a hell of a lot faster than most others.
The F-22 is more than stealth. It has the capability of obfuscating radar signals in general, making it difficult for enemy fighters to use their radar at all. They don't know whose their friend or foe, they don't know that a missile is approaching, etc. Few really know the full maneuverability of the F-22, and it has more control surface than the eurofighter or almost any other aircraft save drones so the widespread stories of its low maneuverability are probably not confident stories.
"Two typical American Knee Jerk responses. "but but but the F-22 hasnt been up against the Raptor". Indeed."
Typical euro knee jerk response...getting the facts wrong.
The F-22 *is* the Raptor.
A little history to maybe correct a misunderstanding or three.
The F-117 is NOT a fighter, in spite of its 'F' designation -- it's an attack aircraft. It has no air-to-air offensive capabilities at all. Discovered aloft by any modern fighter, it's toast.
Second, there were several major design criteria for the (Y)F-22 and the other candidate in its design contest (the YF-23). The criteria for stealth were fixed, and both the YF-23 and YF-22 met those criteria. The YF-23's stealth characteristics were in fact somewhat superior, but it was not nearly as maneuverable.
If they discover the holes at the poles to Pellucidar or have to attack the Nazi UFO bases, then it could happen--Better test them all!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You don't seem to understand.
The F-22 cannot be touched by anything currently out there. In fact its biggest drawback is low range which makes it very dependent on tankers that have to stay up a few hundred miles from the battlefield. Do you understand what "stealth" means? The Eurofighter will not be able to target the F-22, because it won't be able to see it, much less get a weapons lock. The F-22 on the other hand will be able to see it beyond the horizon, pass its targeting data to everyone else, and shoot it down at any range (I don't think the Eurofighter can evade current-generation Sidewinders...) The only area where Eurofighter comes close is maneuverability, but even if it can do a tighter turn than Raptor, does it matter if it's blindfolded?
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
"No - The F22 has already fulfilled its mission nicely: made a lot of folk richer in the states where it was designed and built. THAT was the mission of the F22. Sort of like the mission of the ABMDS is to keep people employed in the states where senators required that pork."
Something wrong with keeping people employed? I would think you bleeding heart euro liberals would be all over the idea of giving people jobs just for the sake of having them work...that's pretty much how you guys roll.
Recently I read a news article saying that the Royal Navy were considering outfitting their next generation of carriers (which will actually be proper carriers rather than "through-deck cruisers") with French aircraft instead of the F-35B, due to the US's refusal to grant access to the source code for the F-35B's software. Anyone think they're going to be a lot more eager to get their hands on the source code now?
In the theorized engagement where an F-22 is engaging 3 fighters (Eurofighters or not) from behind, undetected, there would be several ways to arrange the attack in such a way that would reduce or eliminate the effectiveness of the defenders' RWR systems. One would be to launch AIM-120s (even beyond visual range, though the optimum aspect for such an attack wouldn't be a tail shot) using data from an AWACS. In this scenario the Raptor would never use its active radar system and the AIM-120s wouldn't use their built-in radar systems until the terminal phase, where any evasion or spoofing would be too little, too late (supposedly, once the missile closes to this range unmolested by countermeasures the chances of a kill approach 90%). Another option would be to close in and use AIM-9 Sidewinders which, again, would permit virtually no time for any countermeasures to be effective.
Of course, even if the first volley didn't take care of the situation, the single F-22 would still have the advantage as long as the battle isn't allowed to become a close-in, visual dogfight where are more maneuverable fighter could gain the advantage. Considering the speed of the plane (particularly its ability to "supercruise" past Mach 1 without afterburners), the F-22 could likely still survive such an engagement, living to fight another day when, hopefully, its missiles work better.
That sound you just heard, the one right over your head? It was not an F-22 returning to base.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I'd like to mod it +1 hindsightful.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
ian
Real dogfights are not like top gun, nor like WW2. They are over long before you can see the other person.
His comments are based on a post-incident report that's been making the rounds on teh intardnet. I'll just paste it in here, if anybody's still reading. I don't vouch for its authority, other than A) I got it off the net, and B) it came with a note saying it was unclassified. Oh yeah, and it matches what the talking head says -- the navigation system brought down all their avionics. it also states what the QA process was that led to the problem:
Date: 12 Feb 07
To: CC
Info: CV, DS
Narrative:
1. A 1st Fighter Wing AEF 6-ship (Petro 91) departed Hickam AFB enroute to AEF location on 10 Feb. Approximately 4 hours into the mission and coincidental with crossing over the International Date Line, all six aircraft experienced a significant avionics failure including:
Both GINS 1 and 2 Fail
FLCS Degrade
Radar Fail
Fuel Degrade
Loss of all attitude references
Loss of Flight Path marker
Loss of all navigation aides (TACAN, ILS, Computed, etc.)
Loss of all heading indications
2. Aircraft communications were available via backup radio only. Only navigation available was via cockpit airspeed and altitude indications (both deemed accurate). All other aircraft systems, to include engines, electrical system and air refueling, were nominal.
3. Flight Lead, Lt Col Tolliver, initiated via the tanker a CONFERENCE HOTEL (CH) call with LM Aero. All CH team recommended workarounds (avionics restarts, date and time resets, etc.) did not resolve the problem.
4. Lt Col Tolliver assessed pressing to the AEF location but decided to turn back and return to Hickam. He also directed the second deployment cell, a 2-ship approximately one hour behind him, to return to Hickam. NOTE: This 2-ship never crossed the International Date Line.
5. Enroute back to Hickam, after crossing back over the International Date Line, avionics restarts were unsuccessfully attempted.
6. All aircraft successfully recovered at Hickam, shut down (cold iron), restarted engines and all avionics malfunctions cleared.
7. An F-22 Crisis Management Team (CMT) has convened. Two telecoms (1300 and 1700 EST) were conducted on 11 Feb. Participants included F-22 Program Office, LM, Boeing, NG and A8F personnel.
8. The F-22 Program is working 24/7 to resolve this issue. Both F-22 avionics integration labs (RAIL and AIL) have successfully duplicated the problem. The problem resides within the GINS software when the aircraft transitions between East/West Longitude. NOTE: Most RAIL and AIL testing simulate GINS inputs and past testing discovered no issues with over flying the Dateline or Poles. It took testing this weekend using actual GINS hardware and software to duplicate this problem.
9. A fix for this software problem has been developed at NG and currently is being evaluated in the RAIL. We should find out at our 1300 CMT telecom today if this fix works.
10. This fix will require an OFP update to be loaded on the aircraft. Currently no IMIS OFP loading support is on-site at Hickam. 1 FW IMIS was previously deployed to AEF location.
11. F-22 Program currently expects software fix, OFP loading hardware and LM support team in place at Hickam by mid-week. Aircraft possibly will be able to depart Hickam for their AEF location by the end of the week.
12. Updates to this issue will be provided as additional information becomes available.
Translation: The navigational system (Global Positioning Inertial Navigation Systems (GINS)) had never been physically tested crossing the date line, but only on simulated real-world inputs. When it crossed the date line for the first time, it crashed, as did the backup, bringing down with it all navigational systems and much of the aircraft's instrumentation, leaving them with backup systems reminiscent of a Cessna 172 (without the navigational stack).
In a real dogfight, the Eurofighter likely wins
Hahahahahaha. Hahahahaha. Hahahahaha. Oh man, I'm tearing up. Stop you're killing me.
You could switch into a passive radar mode, use AWACS. Then engage with an IR weapon such as the AIM 9.
Yeah right.
One word. Sukhoi.
What can I say, when NATO gives a plane the designation 'Terminator' ?
If a Sukhoi gets to visual with any western fighter, it's the Martin-Baker, not 'oooooh, scarey stealth' technology that's going to get exercised.
If you want proof: Check out youtube for raptor videos - "F-22 banking sharply". wooo.
Do the same for the super-flanker videos: CONTROLLED FLAT SPIN !? 'Stalling flip' (I'm not even sure that there is a non-russian word for this move?)
The super-flanker family puts the pilot firmly back as the weakest link.
Ha,
You tail one Sukhoi, when you fire you give away your position to the rear-facing radar, and the Sukhoi pilot acquires and throws 2 missiles 'over the shoulder' at you, chaffs and flares and avoids your missile.
Now you'd better hope that you can run away before the Sukhoi gets a visual/thermal on you - because at visual range, you can't ever engage him before he engages you. ever.
A whole bunch of comments gettings 5s, which are totally offtopic? And no, I'm not new here.
It's not the first time that they have done this, during the training maneuvers against against the Indian Air Force they sent outdated aircraft and crippled the ROE and engagement envelopes of the AIM-120s.
That argument is not such a good example. The IAF were using Mig-21 Bis along with older Jaguars and Mirage 2000 fighters. Even if they had some Mig29s and Su-30s the Mig21s were the ones that gave the American pilots trouble. If you have a 50 year old aircraft that can beat the crap out of the slightly not so modern F-15Cs you'd better sit up and take notice.
Perhaps a functional programming language would have caught the problem at compile time.
This was actually put in on purpose to keep the Americans from taking their fighter jets out of America.
There should be multiple independent layers of complexity in software for planes - for example, even if the navigation computer crashes, it should be possible to restart it and to use some minimal setup of the system at least.
:-)
Multiple layers could be organized like...
* Basic layer: Just show the pilot a map
* Next layer: Show the same map, but with GPS calculated position of the plane
* Next layer: Show terrain info... etc.
It could even be designed as modules (instead of hierarchical layers), so if one module fails, other modules can still be used.
That's how software can be designed to be highly available, and it really SHOULD be like that in a plane, because it is probably NOT a very fine situation to experience a total computer blackout at 10000ft @ 800mph.
BTW, not getting a timer function right SUCKS. I have written timers for controlling DAT recorders in recording studios, and there is certainly no realistic condition such a timer could ever crash (at least not until 2^64-1 milliseconds after 1996, which is roughly 500 million years from now, hehe
I can find no mention of the "turn back, follow the tankers" news
Everyone knows you shouldn't test drive new software until at least Service Pack 1 is out. Preferably Service Pack 1a because Service Pack 1 usually doesn't install properly on some systems.
The F-22 SR1 release of this fighter will be fine. It will also be quicker to get in the air in an emergency as you won't have to install so many critical updates when you run Fighter Update.
This is precisely why I felt, long before it entered service, that the Raptor's "millions of lines of code per second" computer systems would be its downfall. Surprise, surprise, it almost cost 12 aviators their lives.
What would happen if that same central computer was damaged in combat? Would the pilot have to eject because his otherwise-OK aircraft had no communications nor navigation?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Do you have any links as to what software it uses. The 'half-assed programmer' should have allowed for crossing the IDL. That's what you should do if you are designing a navigation system.
F-22 Raptor swallows pilot
davecb5620@gmail.com
All times in systems like these are based on ZULU. The on-baord computers on military craft (planes, ships, etc.) don't give a rip if they've crossed over the date line. As far as they're concerned, it's 'such and such time' ZULU. Not only does this story sound unlikely, it sounds downright silly.
mod parent up!
"To conquer, we must destroy our enemies. We must not only die gallantly; we must kill devastatingly. The faster and more effectively you kill, the longer you will live to enjoy the priceless fame of conquerors." -- George S. Patton
It's all about killing theirs before they kill ours. Anything that gives our boys an advantage is, IMHO, priceless.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
With the operating system you have, not the one you wish you had.
-Donald Balmer Rumsfeld Gates III
a return of investment? how the hell? all a weapon does is destruction, no cash ever gets generated by weapons. i even venture to say that weapons are just designed to be destroyed, that is what brings the big money - to build weapons, sell them and USE them in a conflict.
Unless one of those AMRAAM missiles fails.
Stealthy is a great feature, indeed. But I'm not sure if it is "iddqd" as people is stating here. Nobody says here that there exist anti-stealth technologies on going which could eventually make all the stealthy worth nothing.
Does anyone know if this used ADA? I thought this was developed to prevent these sort of error(s) from occurring.
I smell a lot of "likely" coming off this thread - mostly from Amurricans justifying the F22.
Has anyone seen the results of exercises btn the F22 and Eurofighter? I thought not. Most of the combat exercises people have mentioned have been btn F15s and F22s, and even then under test conditions. Give it a more agile opponent, the F16 or a more modern opponent, and a mixed-mode operation.
Remember, expensive is not always better, specs don't always relate to combat. Interesting that the Eurofighter's turning circle is tighter, but the ability to sneak up is good. Costing less is also good, as are the training costs. With extra fuel and more weaponry - always an addition in war - I reckon the stealth capabilities will be shot. I suspect there will be difficulties with maintenance as well, particularly with repair facilities operating at a war-time standard, sometimes %50 of peacetime. Stand-off is *BAD* as IFF is always assumed to be good - which it never is - so the F22 could end up a friend-killer if used as stand-off. Politicians always see missiles as a cost-saver, which they never are, so I'm thinking most of the figures I've seen as responses are DOD-minted bullshit. I figure close-combat (the place where fighters are judged) is this aircrafts weak point.
Given that, after 25 years of development, the USAF and their contractors failed to foresee cross the meridian as a problem - yuck, yuck, yuck. The Chinese Airforce must be pissing themselves laughing. This from the only world super-power?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
How much does an AWACS cost?
Two cents^H^H^H^H^H words: A LOT
Modern fighter jets are aerodynamically unstable by design. A human can not fly them alone, the computer has to correct the flight path hundreds of times a second.
The flight control software thus most certainly *does* have to keep the plane "stable".
Remember the Spitfire? Im sure that most of the world agrees it was a better plane overall than the P-51. But Americans... :-P (and Spitfire was a beautiful plane)
Well, P-51 was superior to Spitfire in many aspects for instance in range.
P-51 was far more beautiful as well
Mind you, the EuroFighter may greatly outclass an F-15.
Oh, it does.
The Sukhoi isn't significantly more maneuverable than the F-22. More importantly, modern air engagements are not decided at ranges where maneuverability matters. The F-22 will see the Sukhoi, while it won't see the F-22. The Su's avionics suck, because Russians have invested next to nothing into their electronics industry in the past 20 years and were behind to begin with.
I like both the Raptor and Su's, but nothing can stand up to the Raptor.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Who's cracking the nulidity jokes now haha
Why wasn't this a stock reusable code module in Lockheed Martin's labs?!?
I wonder what language the reusable code is written in. Ada? Some years ago, DOD finally removed the requirement to write mission critical code in Ada. It could now be C++.Infrared missiles are passive, no radar needed, scratch 3 euro fighers. Sure the EF's might pick up the missles as they drop from the F-22, but then they have only a few seconds to do anything about it.
And how many Su-27s with this technology are up and active and where are they flying? Making an argument about the superiority of Russian fighters is bunk since the good stuff they have is in such limited numbers,rarely is flown (lack of maintainence and fuel). The typical Russian pilot about to retire has the same number of hours as a USAF pilot who has been flying for about 5-7 years because of this. The Russians may be making some impressive technology, but under your argument they wouldn't have time to react to that extent anyway.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
So you say. But if you think sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads are scary, imagine sharks with fricking' AMRAAMs.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Don't forget crossing sea level... both ways.
So, if they cross the dateline every 90 minutes, then they are going into the future 16 days for every day that passes on Earth. So, a 5-day mission would result in jumping 80 days ahead (Around the World in 80 Days! Man, Verne was right about everything!) and then return to Earth only 5 days after they left? John Titor was right?!
Say it's also a good thing water isn't flammable, otherwise fire trucks would show up to fires and only make the situation worse, right? But they do!
(reference 'Fahrenheit 451')
Another illustration why you don't use computers for voting, for gambling, for running battleships or flying planes. Computers are infinitely malleable machines. There is no telling when or how a series of programs will fail or be manipulated. There is no way to make them bulletproof, as the totality of the system is beyond any human's capacity to understand. You don't even know what code is actually running at any given millisecond.
When lives are on the line, when democracies are on the line, you don't give control over to code. Keep control on a macro, human scale whenever possible.
Yeah, because a glitch capable of dropping a missile could never arm it, aim it, and drop it.
Sure, nav systems are separate from flight systems. Except that they're not really because as the in-flight-entertainment crash showed, even systems that aren't connected are.
This is exactly what you get if you hire a bunch of hacks who live in their parents' basements - critical software that obviously doesn't have a test plan.
I'm a little surprised that they've never simulated this, or their simulator isn't. Either way it's laughable.
You're placing a lot of trust in design principles that, if they really were followed, would have presented the failure just witnessed. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to shake your faith.
I seem to recall this, or something very similar, happened with the F-14 (or maybe it was the F-18) when it crossed the equator. It's really encouraging to see that your new, global military, still isn't thinking globally.
Unless this was a secretly planted bug to stop the Chinese from stealing a Raptor and flying to to Beijing. I mean, it is 2007, so Firefox (the movie) should have just made it to China...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Pilots are expensive and difficult to train. Over the course of a prolonged conflict, your pilots die. You are unable to train new ones fast enough, and soon, the most productive use for them is as human guidance systems for cruise missiles. This is what happened to the Japanese. Militarily and politically, reducing pilot losses is essential. If you can deploy an F-22 wing and utterly destroy the air force of an entire nation without taking more than token losses, the F-22 has served its mission.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Someday, when a Sukhoi pilot least expects it, his precious maneuverable Sukhoi will have to outmaneuver a batch of missiles from an airplane he never saw. Then his precious Sukhoi will be destroyed, and he will be dead. And the country he was tasked to protect will be pulverized by the shock and awe of American bombers, just because their highly maneuverable Sukhois never saw the planes that killed them.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Me thinks Isreal would certinaly dissagree with that, their fighter pilots have been among the best in the world since the late 70s
Anyone who thinks this should be tagged as "ha ha" is simply masochistic.
This is serious business.
You want to live without defense from some serious bad guys? (Ref: 9/11)
I think we need better sourcing on this report.
It may be me that's dumb, but I read an article recently that said disconnected sytems are indeed, well, disconnected from each other.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Go look up how many F-117's have been shot down during deployment, and you have a clear answer about stealth, and how great of a feature it really is.
A concentration camp is by no measure genocide. You're a fucking retard for even attempting to equate the two.
God what the fuck is wrong with some of you idiots? Saying ANYTHING in order to win (in your measly little brain) an internet webboard argument.
He was paraphrasing the knee jerk Wank reply. :)
It was the toss-job that got it wrong.
That would be about all the research that hollywood writers put into that kind of thing.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Perhaps you would be better served by quoting someone other than one of the least competent generals of the last century?
Nobody says here that there exist anti-stealth technologies on going which could eventually make all the stealthy worth nothing.
Right as of yet no one has figured out a way to beat stealth.
When they do the bar will be raised.
Until then the F22 is invisible to radar.
And as far as a missile failing fine the pilot of the F-22 just slides in below and behind and hits with a simple AIM-9 from it optimum position.
Kill ratio 90% or better when fired like this.
And even if by some chance it misses or fails you have enough time for a follow up shot before retreating out of LOS to take another shot. Not sure on how many 90% or better shots you are trying to say MIGHT miss.
As of right now on one can beat stealth and you can't hit what you can't see.
It really is that simple.
Full stealth fighter? As stealth as the F-117A Nighthawk, which anyone could locate using several radars? lol...
http://politicalgrind.com/2007/02/20/more-on-f-22- problem-in-hawaii/
posted it when I got the news from a friend on Feb 20th. Anyhow the problem with the software/gyros has been fixed on the f-22's.
The real question is:
HOw many suicide bombers can you buy for $100 Million?
How many IED's can you buy for $100 Million?
And given the political asymmetry (love it or hate it) of such an engagement, who would spank whom?
You need to then consider the industrial infrastructure backing up that $100 Million, and how its flowing, whether it's from taxation, or voluntary donation by religious fundamentalists.
The F-22 AND the Eurofighter were designed to fight a war that will most likely never happen.
Our side has no effective weapon against today's WW III. Because an IED is more of a political and economic weapon, despite it's primary effect of killing/wounding whomever was unfortunate enough to stray close to it.
What is our weapon against a political climate that accepts insurgent tactics as justified, and nearly any effective military countermeasure as a war crime?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Thanks for agreeing with me that the Spitfire is beautiful though, I dont post much on /. because of the trolls who hunt me down, like the guy on my last comments!
---
What's most impressive is the ability for the F-22 to multiply the effectiveness of the existing airforce. In the same engagement that F-22 enabled a supporting flight of older aircraft to achieve a kill/loss ratio of 83-1.
That's why the much-maligned F-35 is called the "Joint Strike Fighter" - what may appear to be a weak plane, on its own, was actually designed to fulfill a wide range of roles - and be used in combination with other support. The technology of the F-35 was expensive, but it was a lot cheaper that it otherwise would have been had they designed 3 separate planes, that each was to be the end-all. That's why JSF is not an "Air Superiority" fighter. The F-22 is.
However - when I hear all this F-22 boosterism, I'm reminded of the arrogance and hubris that surrounded the F-4. The F-4 was designed as a long-range missile platform, because dogfights were supposedly a "thing of the past" - and the F-4 had no gun. When it was first deployed in Vietnam, it got massively spanked by larger numbers of inferior planes. (same way the US spanked the much-feared German Tiger tanks with larger numbers of smaller, less capable tanks, in WW II).
The DESIGN of the F-4 was the strategy. This strategy was hard-coded in the platform. And when the US had to adjust their air combat strategy because it didn't work as planned, they had to come up with some really awful hacks to compensate. (Like an external gun-pod, which also proved pretty worthless in dogfights). In the end, the F-4 turned out to be a pretty worthless plane in that environment. The problem was, is that this plane was SOLD to commanders as a solution to a problem, using a strategy that did not work in real life.
I'm worried that the F-22 may be the same thing. The strategy is Stealth. And yes - we've proven that this strategy works very well. In Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, and again in Iraq. The F-22 is yet another plane, whose strategy is hard-coded into the platform, with very little ability to be flexible and adaptable. It's a very risky investment. If some Iranian electrical genius figures out how to cheaply modify an off-the-shelf Russian radar system to see F-22's somehow - and say it's a $50,000 modification, then that would make the F-22 pretty much obsolete. Is such an occurrence likely? No. But the consequences of this unlikely occurrence are pretty dire. Personally, I don't think it's worth the risk. A potential computing or electronics hack against a costly integrated system like the F-22?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Then theres the picture of the Mustang
Those are Wikipedia's main photos of the respective planes. A black and white of the Spitfire is better than the colour Mustang :)
Have a great day
---
Mustang link didnt work, sorry! Mustang
---
And then, how much sense does it make to blame the airframe, when the F-4 didnt change, yet after TopGun, the Navy increased its kill ratio to 12-to-1?
Logic suggests that the airplane was fine, but tactics and training are what needed to change. True about the Gun Pod, but it was never meant for AA combat to begin with, as it had no slaving to a gun sight.
The first F-4 with a gun was the F-4E, which had the Vulcan cannon mounted in the nose. When the Air Force followed the Navy with the inception of the Fighter Weapons school at Nellis Air Base, their kill ratio improved just as had occured with the Navy.
The F-22 Strategy is NOT stealth as you claim, but speed and power. The supercruise factor is much more important to survivability, because regardless of stealth, there is no other aircraft in any nation's arsenal that can manuever with the Raptor anyway, much less keep up with it if it decides to just run away.
The Physics behind RADAR are pretty hard coded as well. If you cant get a return, you are screwed regardless, and the kind of RADAR that would be necessary to screen out all the clutter contained in any return you might get from a Raptor would need to be the size of a house.
Take stealth way from the F-22, and you still have the worlds best fighter by far.
Uh, you do realize that the US was fielding aircraft in WW2, right? He was talking about a historical perspective. In terms of sheer man-hours of flight time I'm sure the US is well ahead.
... may be a good plot. See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/02 /bugs_in_the_air.html
Bye,
Oliver
The P-51 used the same Rolls-Royce engine that the Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane used.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P51:
The initial version of the P-51 was powered by mechanically supercharged Allison V-1710 engines, which proved inadequate. The Mustang became a legend only when subsequent versions, at the insistence of the British, used the RR Merlin engine which was used on the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Beaufighter, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
Also the distinctive P-51 "bubble" canopy, which gives P-51 its excellent visibility, was introduced to the P51 after first being developed by the British for their late-model Spitfires, Typhoons and Tempests. This led to the production of the P-51D model, considered the definitive Mustang and what most people have in mind when thinking of the Mustang.
Lol, go read exactly how "easy" the F-117A was to detect or shoot down, keep in mind that they were shooting at essentially a decades old flying brick. The F-22 is quite a bit more advanced than the F-117 in terms of stealth and has much better performance to boot.
...plan your next attack for February 29, 2008. Half of the U.S. systems will be out of action.
I am an aerodynamics guy, not a software guy, but I am pretty sure you could sneak a small change in, given how disorganised everything was at the engine company that used to employ me... I know it could happen with airfoil shapes... What was designed, wasn't what was tested, but was what was built was a common occurance...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I don't know if the EuroFighter is more maneuverable than the F-22.
The F-22 has a higher cruise speed than the EuroFighter so it will tend to start a fight in a higher energy state than the Eurofighter.
The F-22 has thrust vectoring the EuroFighter doesn't.
The F-22 has a higher thrust to weight ratio than the EuroFigther.
Until they have a fly off it would be hard to say.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I wrote and shipped some software once that worked fine for almost 6 months, then on April 15th (as I recall) started failing for no apparent reason in Korea only. It turned out to have a bug with Daylight Savings Time in the eastern hemisphere. That hurt. It gave me a heck of a lot of respect for calendar code ever since - I try to minimize it and then test the heck out of what's left.
Further, you've got some crazy ideas about how missiles are held onto planes by the pilots good intentions and leprechauns. Any glitch capable of causing unintended behavior could cause any unintended behavior in the system. If the system can arm, aim, and launch a missile, it could do it by accident. A different accident, six smaller accidents, one "shouldn't have been an accident but he was in the wrong place", or whatever. You're so sure that a target could never be taken from the ones the jet is currently tracking, the armed missile (the are war planes) could never be given the wrong target, etc.
Yes, these are systems to catch these things. That's good, or planes would be launching fully armed missiles while being fueled. I know. But you've got the idea that the systems could never fail.
I did. Or their simulator isn't [a simulator].
But they could also just have never tested flying the plane along that route. Seeing as the plane is still under development they should have simulators running that they pre-test all missions in, and one that they play the plane's black-box into later and test for exactly the same output results.
Frankly, if six planes lockup at the same time and place, this error is obvious enough to have been caught during testing, especially as this is the place that nav systems tend to fail.
This is worse than a programmer who makes an array with ten elements and doesn't test trying to put eleven in.
As for the failure itself, of course we never know if a news article is accurate, but it did claim that the systems did not come back and that the pilots were required to follow their tankers back to base. I assume this is an exaggerated, as an armed-forces pilot should be able to navigate with manual means, which they should have had - but it definitely would have scrubbed the mission, as you say.
I am a developer. I know how bugs happen and that I'll never get rid of anywhere near all the potential bugs in my code. But I try to have test suites that simulate full usage of the program for all cases (impossible) but I do make sure that I have a specific case testing anything I claim the program could do. If it could "fly around the world" I'd have a test run that flew both ways, at least once.
I'm actually really unimpressed with the government on safety. The space shuttle was developed with the same sort of procedures as the F22 and Richard Feynman had a few choice words to say about its horrible safety and design. (Criminal - if it were a civilian matter people would have been in jail.) Too many people said things like you, "a missile launching on it's own is 1/10,000, arming on its own if 1/10,000, etc, for a total of 1/1[lots of 0s]." But these failures aren't unrelated, so the 1/10,000 chance of something happening is more likely to at least put untested load on the rest of the systems, etc.
I believe that it was actually the F14. About 1987. And it was during a Carribean area exercise that a F14 Tomcat, while on autopilot crossed the equater. During the programming of the little idiot cpu in the autopilot the data type used was unsigned. Apparently it was quite a surpise to the pilot & nav when they suddenly found themselves upside. The problem was reproduced in the simulators in Indianapolis and a fix was delivered just about as fast as the drink that pilot and his nav probably needed. MichaelG
Here's the first relevant looking article I found.
1 4/ai_58946883
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_4_
It's not proven, but the assumption is that while the entertainment computers weren't on the same networks, etc, as the flight computers, their components traveled through the same conduits so an unexpected electrical fire took them all out.
My point isn't that this did happen, but that while the "rules" are good practice, they are no real guarantee of safety. They keep evolving after crashes.
Stealth was not the primary design goal of the F-22, and its maneuverability-over-stealth design philosophy was the primary reason it was chosen over the Black Widow II.
See Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-23_Black_Widow_II
The question is... has someone tried it?
For instance, just imaging: real time image processing (i.e. changing radar by direct image analysis as taken by a fish-eye camera) might eventually make stealth mean nothing (except for night and/or adverse weather conditions). CPUs are quicker and smarter, and software is as well. Imagine the cost of F22 invested on developing that technology.
I have the feeling that stealth technology development is far more expensive than alternatives to fight it. Probably I'm wrong, but no one is nowadays in condition of wasting such amount of money just to avoid USA fighters - the ones who have such money are allies.
Also, with the oil radiator under the fuselage there is somewhat a parallelism with the F-16 (IMHO the coolest looking aircraft except YF23(*) and A12 which were even more beautiful). Elliptic wing is a point for the Spitfire, but personally I like more the P51. But opinions are subjective, aren't them?
(*) This is the real reason I hate F22 :-P
Doesnt the US army run on Zulu time? Why would the navigation or communication software care about international time zones?
In the second World War, the Bismark was the most powerful German battleship ever to face the Royal Navy. It tried to get into the Atlantic, by going North of Scotland. The British Admiralty sent the famous command 'Seek and Destroy Bismark' (or something very similar).
Its anti-aircraft guns were radar controlled, but they were designed to shoot down 'modern' aircraft that flew at least 100Km per hour. However, the Royal Navy sent in Stringbags(nickname for biplanes that carried torpedoes) that travelled a lot slower when they flew against a howling gale! 6 Stringbags attacked. One torpedo (at least) hit the Bismark, causing an oil leak, and damaged a rudder - this made it easier to track.
Later British surface ships attacked, and eventually the Bismark's captain scuttled the ship to avoid capture.
-Nivag
I agree entirely about the F-16 and YF-23, they are 2 of the nicest looking planes ever built. The F-16XL was cool too.
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
What on God's green Earth would make you think that the planes are adjusting for time zones literally on the fly? Why introduce the havoc in the system logs should you find yourself bouncing back and forth across a time zone in a dogfight? This just simply will never be the case. All system clocks are going to be synced maybe to the local time of their home base, but more likely GMT or UCT.
My guess is somebody forgot their basic map stitching rules and the sudden jump from -180 to 180 Lat had the nav systems believing that the plane had suddenly zoomed the long way across the dateline in a fraction of a second, and they're probably programmed to shut down in the event of an error condition rather than muck things up further.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
I think we're OK, as long as the sharks don't have anyone to tape the AMRAAMs to their heads.
That's a totally different thing to a software bug and to compare them is stretching it a bit. Had you mentioned the relevant word "fire", I probably wouldn't have assumed you were one of the people who read this or one of the much greater number who didn't, but still commented on it.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I really like the SR-71, sometimes when I see a modern day picture of it it looks dated, the engines etc dont look current, but its still a great design.
But the Spitfire has to be THE nicest looking plane ever built :)
---
The issue was discussed in that thread, but no, not the trivial crash assumed to cause the airplane to fall like a y2k brick.
But still, that's my point. All the systems were properly isolated and yet a failure (overload and overheating is a failure) in one destroyed the others.
Well, SR-71 is by far the most beautiful plane ever made. I thought we were restricting to fighters :-P
SR-71 is the perfect combination of smooth lines of the wing-fuselage blending with the brute force of the powerplant (in both means of power and visual impact)
Well, I'd still put the Spitfire above the SR-71 myself! What about the B2 Spirit bomber, you know that little thing that costs $2 BILLION of your dollars? Its pretty nice, the vents and windows ontop of the flying wing. I also like the F-117 of course, I like the angles. My top 3 would be
1 Spitfire
2 F-22/SR-71
3 F-14
---
Unfortunately software bugs happen in a lot due to date/numbers conversions. Whole systems can crash because of this. Just shows the importance of testing.
Visit http://www.kaizenlog.com
I would think that a decent pilot using only a magnetic compass and a rough altimeter should be able to navigate to Japan. Especially if the pilot is in radio contact with anybody. The Sprit of St. Louis flew across the Atlantic without all the fancy instruments that we have today. You need a map, clock/wrist watch, compass and you should be able to get where you want to be.
I've spent a ton of time in various fighter simulators practicing on what you do if various systems fail. That's what the simulators are for - to teach you HOW to manage when all hell breaks loose.
Now if the F-22 doesn't even have a magnetic compass, I would seriously consider buying a magnetic compass or a Garmin GPS to carry with me if I were to be flying one of those.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
No one is using femtoseconds for uptime.
Insert obligatory Microsoft jokes....//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.