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Fatal Problems Continue To Plague F-22 Raptor
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that even though the Air Force has used its F-22 Raptor planes only in test missions, pilots have experienced seven major crashes with two deaths, a grim reminder that the U.S. military's most expensive fighter jet, never called into combat despite conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, continues to experience equipment problems — notably with its oxygen systems. New details from an Air Force report last week drew attention to a crash in November 2010 that left Capt. Jeff Haney dead and raised debate over whether the Air Force turned Haney into a scapegoat to escape more criticism of the F-22. Haney 'most likely experienced a sense similar to suffocation,' the report said. 'This was likely [Haney's] first experience under such physiological duress.' According to the Air Force Accident Report, Haney should have leaned over and with a gloved hand pulled a silver-dollar-size green ring that was under his seat by his left thigh to engage the emergency system (PDF). It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer. 'It would've taken superhuman efforts on the pilot's behalf to save that aircraft,' says Barr. 'The initial cause of this accident was a malfunction with the aircraft — not the pilot.'"
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
private enterprise will totally have the technology to colonize the universe.
It hasn't been called into combat because it is a trump card. Why reveal its capabilities for others to prepare for? The F-22 is there so no major air force in the world challenges the US. In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
Yeah, it sounds like whoever made these things and charged the government billions had really screwed up. Luckily, they are never going to get another multibillion dollar contract from the government, right? I mean, if they did, that could screw that one up just as badly, and then where would we be? We're lucky that we don't live in some communist country where arms manufacturers just get fat from the handouts of the government without any real accountability.
Manned aircraft is now becoming more than just a liablity for the pilots, it's now becomming to expensive. Take down the F-22, scrap the F-35 (as it's cost is now more than double it's original plan and years behind schedule) and work on stuff that isn't going to get somebody killed even when empty.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Can someone 'splain to me why the old oxygen systems from previous planes couldn't be used? It seem like this would've been perfected by now...?
6 days ago they built the 187th and final F-22 Raptor.
None of them are safe to fly.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Deja Vu. F16 pilots were also falsely blamed when the true fault was a hardware failure in instrumentation. Wiring rubbing against a rivet eventually shorted out IIRC and pilots were given erroneous info regarding which way is up or down, critical when flying on instruments (zero visibility) where a pilots ignores his senses and puts full faith in instruments.
First thing:
"'This was likely [Haney's] first experience under such physiological duress.'"
Okay, that makes no sense to me. My understanding is that both USN and USAF pilots undergo extreme physiological and psychological duress in the course of their training, for just this reason. They expose you to hypoxia, to decompression, to high-g forces, even to having to survive and avoid capture (with most trainees end up getting caught) and resist interrogation techniques (see under 'most trainees end up getting caught').
Second thing:
"It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer. 'It would've taken superhuman efforts on the pilot's behalf to save that aircraft,' says Barr. 'The initial cause of this accident was a malfunction with the aircraft — not the pilot.'"
Okay, this is total bullshit, I'm sorry. Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs. As a method of fighting black-out, they tense their legs to tighten the muscles and help push air up into their upper body (away from where it tends to go during positive high-g manuvers). Yes, there is the flight suit that squeezes them as well, but every bit counts. And since the ring that starts the emergency system is forward and beneath the pilot, that means that they would be using their back to pull against that 40-lb resistance...which is not that big a deal if you're in shape. After a minute without air? That's what it feels like to be working out hard...and since he wouldn't have been exercising vigorously during that minute, he'd have had plenty of glucose on hand, so his muscles could easily have worked using anaerobic respiration long enough for one pull of a ring. Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies. And even if all of this WAS a tall order, that's exactly what fighter pilots are trained for; that's why so few people who apply are accepted, and why so few who are accepted make the grade in training.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It seems like this should have been automatically switched on.
Dear America,
Why are you pushing us Canadians sooooo hard to buy your latest super-jet? It is way over budget and getting more expensive by the day. Heck, it isn't even appropriate for defence of the far north, it's really only for offensive missions in countries with lots of sand and oil. We, the people of Canada, do not want your expensive military toys. It is only our prime minister who wants that (and his lips around the cock of whoever is currently in power in the US).
Yours truly,
A. Hoser, eh
My brother spent quite a long time flying around Fort Worth in the airliner equipped with the F-22 cockpit in it, working on the avionics. But awhile back he specifically got off that program to work on the F-16 because, he said, there was "way too much politics" on that program and he wanted out.
I loved the one a few years back where the F-22's crossed the international dateline on the way to Japan and all the software crashed and they had to follow another plane to navigate. Sounds like a great plane!
from MIG?
Yours In The Pentagon,
K. Trout, C.T.O.
American hitech is costly and fails.
Russian tech is good enough and doesn't empty your coffers.
Sure looks like the US should have bought several hundreds of SU-27 for the price of 50/100 F-22. Lol.
And don't get me started on the epic fail that is the F-35. It sure seems like the time when the US managed to sell thousands of Lockheed Starfighters to the european military when better planes were available.
This story says the crash was pilot error.
http://www.dailytech.com/Despite+OBOGS+Failure+Pilot+Error+Blamed+in+Fatal+F22+Raptor+Crash/article23526.htm
A series of engineers argue over who's fault it was.
Was it engineer A, who had to make the emergency system require 40kilos of pull to activate, due to flak that it might engage accidentally if the craft hits stiff turbulence or is kicked while the pilot is entering the cockpit?
Was it engineer B, who designed the oxygen recirculation system, and had to work within the physical space and weight restrictions imposed by engineers C and D, resulting in a suboptimal implementation?
Was it engineer C, who designed the superstructure of the figher's cockpit, for failing to fully appreciate the downstream requirements of his peers?
Was it engineer D, who designed the aesthetic and aerodynamic form of the fighter, imposing limitations on engineers A through C, and many others, for continuing the trend of smaller, faster, sleeker, and more compact designs?
Or was it engineer E, who oversaw ergonomic annd human interaction studies that led to the requirements statements fed to engineers A through D?
Was it the beaurocracies involved in construction, telling the engineers to use cheaper, more easily sourced materials so that the fighter comes out underbudget?
With all these parties in the room, bickering over who's fault it was, is it any wonder that the dead pilot, who can't stand up for himself, is the one that got blamed to save face?
Really. I work in aerospace. Many of the people in the engineering depts of major companies act like their shit doesn't stink, even when it obviously does. I make inspection blueprints, and when the degrees of a circular pattern exceed 360 degrees, or when point to point dimensions exceed total part length, and you inform them of the impossibility of these design specs, more often than not your time would be better spent talking to a brick wall.
It's like trying to have an informed discussion on computing with an ardent member of the cult of mac. All you will get back is snide remarks, or pretentious silence. You can quote rules of geometry until you are blue in the face. Quote directly from the gd&t manual for geometric tolerancing, or even play dumb and ask politely what their intentions were... result is almost always the same.
Don't you know, they have degrees, make big salaries, and are important. They never make mistakes. Just ask them.
I have been surprised a few times by polite aerospace engineers that own up to drafting errors, omissions, and flat out screwups before, and I am always cordial and polite with them. But for the most part, all I get back is silence, and derision.
(Just to clarify what I do: I make manufacturing drawings used for internal QA processes. Often times the customer supplied data is a digital nurbs representation of a part with some datum features called out, hole sizes listed and annotated, an some geometric tolerancing frames tacked on. My job is to take this data and in conjunction with the customer's tolerancing guidelines and practices documentation, create drawings that inspectors can use to validate the part was properly manufactured. This requires that they accurately convey the engineering intent of their geometry and datum choices. This is why I sometimes have to ask seemingly silly questions when they break the rules for gd&t frames, or define impossible (mathematically so) tolerances. You would probably be stunned how often I catch insane engineering mistakes because they pencilwhipped shit, and have to figure out the fit form and function myself, because they won't own up to it.)
.... or sweeping known problems under the rug because of budgetary concerns.
Or maybe because of Congressional appropriations concerns?
The F-22 was a great piece of pork for my district. And when I say that I agree that the F-22 is a cold war weapon and that it's not needed anymore, I get the a response that "we're always fighting the last war." - whatever that means.
China rising? By the time China becomes a real threat, the F-22 will be an old outdated piece of crap.
Anyway, China is too smart to get into a hot war - even if they do achieve superior military strength. The have enough economic clout to make military action unnecessary and a complete waste.
The F22 program has cost around 66 billion dollars. That's about equivalent to a mission to Mars and two copies of the Superconducting Supercollider. That's equivalent to about 130 rovers of the same type as Opportunity and Spirit (ignoring the economies of scale that would substantially reduce the cost of having a lot of them). Etc. Etc. Instead we get unworking jet fighters that are supposed to be better than our previous jet fighters which are already estimated to be better than any other anyone else has in the world. Great priorities.
Weird. I remember flying a Raptor back in 1994. Thing wrecked everything in its path, no problems. The best was when I installed the tracking gun to shoot up targets I wasn't even aiming at, to say nothing of the badass EMP cannon. Laid waste to most of the Third World with that baby.
Almost 20 years on and now it has problems? Definitely a government clusterfuck at work here.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I've been playing Novalogic's F-22 since 2001, and I've never experienced this oxygen issue. That pilot had something wrong with him.
The Northrop YF-23 is looking better and better all the time. Too bad the USAF chose the wrong plane
was a good price for a fighter jet.
Drone technology to replace the human who needs oxygen...
So it's like dealing with Space Nutters?
American hitech is costly and fails. Russian tech is good enough and doesn't empty your coffers.
How are they "good enough" when historically they lose air-to-air? Russian aircraft went down to F15s for example, and that includes F15s flown by non-US pilots, so its not necessarily pilot training and experience. Pilots of Russian and French built aircraft quickly learned to fly to a neighbor and defect rather than attempt to engage US made aircraft.
Now in a protracted total war the Russian aircraft may have an advantage in that they are easier to maintain and operate, and thereby make it into the air while less rugged US aircraft are grounded for maintenance or runway repair/cleanup. However that's not what we've seen so far, nor is it as likely as smaller conflicts.
Whatever the cause of the malfunction, and whatever the cause of the crash, the bigger question is this -- is the United States Air Force willing to offer up a dead pilot as a scapegoat to fend of criticism of the F-22? Absolutely. Every pilot knows that when you're dead, and there are no other witnesses, you become prime fodder for taking the blame. If the pilot is to blame, then no one besides the pilot is liable, and you're not going to get anything from a dead pilot. Let's allow the NTSB to investigate the crash, and see what they come up with. I'm not saying Haney wasn't at fault--maybe he was. But I'm not about to believe Haney was at fault simply because the USAF said so.
Some excellent points there.
I'd go with Engineer D - for not "continuing the trend of smaller". The F-22 is pretty much the same size as the F-15 (62ft long with 44ft wingspan for the Raptor). And still around the same size (though with a larger wingspan) than the F-4 Phantom II.
And, going back further, the F-86 Sabre was 37ft long; 37ft wingspan, roughly the same size as the P-51 Mustang.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Space nutters often cite fantasy stories as proof that their crackpot ideas will work.
Aerospace engineers simply refuse to admit that the real world can limit what they do, and that some things simply cannot be done. They refuse to accept the possibility that they could be wrong. (Not that they are wrong, just the mere possibility of it.)
More often than not, you get stonewalled rather than have your questions answered, of they direct you to a secretary that doesn't know her clevage from a hole in the ground (as far as reading and interpreting blueprints are concerned.)
As I said, occasionally I get a bite, and the guy on the other end is polite and helpful. "Oh, we did that because of FOO", etc. I always return the favor and thank him for his time. Most of the time though? "Not me!" And finger pointing.
How are they "good enough" when historically they lose air-to-air? Russian aircraft went down to F15s for example, and that includes F15s flown by non-US pilots, so its not necessarily pilot training and experience. Pilots of Russian and French built aircraft quickly learned to fly to a neighbor and defect rather than attempt to engage US made aircraft.
This is not true. During the Vietnam war the US planes were being shot down by Migs. In close combat mind you. The missiles the F-4 were carrying were simply ineffective against fighters designed by communists. The end result ? Americans had to retrofit the F-4 with cannons so they could engage in close combat, and of course pilots had to learn a long lost skill that of ACM. Thats when the Top Gun school was created.
F-15's never engaged soviet aircraft in a war. Forget about the six day war or the yom kippur war.
The arabs although having soviet equipment were not really trained at top level to use it.
Now in a protracted total war the Russian aircraft may have an advantage in that they are easier to maintain and operate, and thereby make it into the air while less rugged US aircraft are grounded for maintenance or runway repair/cleanup. However that's not what we've seen so far, nor is it as likely as smaller conflicts.
To fight in a war you need lots of aircrafts to maintain air superiority. You need easy to maintain airplanes. You need airplanes that can sustain a lot of damage and still fly (like the A-10s). In other terms you need numbers and reliability on the field. The more complex an airplane is, the worse it becomes on the battlefield. See the F-14 as an example of a whacky airplane. It flew only because the US at the time could throw money out the window like there was no tomorrow. But the design, reliability of the F-14 was just atrocious. The A-4 Skyhawk on the other hand although an older design was an excellent aircarft with the right amount toughness for a front line fighter/bomber.
Or maybe you're such an arrogant, obnoxious jerk that they don't want to deal with you.
Considering that I use an intermediate who is strictly professional, I find that unlikely. My angry tone comes about after years of habitual and institutional stonewalling tactics.
Sometimes I do end up talking to the customer's engineers directly, and I do my very best to be professional, and polite. Most of the time though, I have to deal with intractable beaurocracies, and stonewalling.
of course, I wouldn't expect a troll like yourself to consider that possibility.
Obviously I am bitter about it because I am just such an asshole that nobody likes me. Obviously.
40 lb pull tab.... sounds like a good idea, out of the way so it doesn't get kicked or pulled inadvertently; but I suspect the earlier design (a knob you turn) might have been better, 40 lbs is a simple amount of weight to pull under duress, might even be simple to pull after holding my breath for 60 seconds (and if you can't hold your breath for 60 seconds STFU) but in a plane traveling at a high rate of speed potentially pulling G's ?? I've only pulled a couple of G's in aerobatic training (prop plane, T34) but if the level of effort increased in multiples 40 lbs becomes a crazy amount of effort *AFTER* you have been without good air for over a minute. The only error this pilot made was placing his trust in those that deemed this plane safe to operate. If they can't monitor pulseox, they should auto eject, ejection at high speed is nearly fatal but not so nearly fatal as plowing in.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
WW II aircraft were fully capable of pulling enough g's to black out anybody.
An interesting feature early on was the automatic dive recovery system in the slow Stuka.
No brain, no pain.
was a good price for a fighter jet.
Presumably the people who sell them.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They used GOTO
http://xkcd.com/292/
It's pretty ironic to blame the victim for demonstrating poor judgement when one of the symptoms of hypoxia is declining judgement. If this was a properly-designed system, the backup O2 would trigger automatically.
As a MechE who is currently working in Aerospace doing design, let me tell you that those of us who know how to properly CAD stuff up and indicate the important dimensions on a drawing hate the other guys as much as you do. I can't say how many times I've opened up a part file, gone to the sketch, and found that none of the lines were fully constrained, or the constraints were arbitrary and were only tangentially related to the driving dimensions. I used to go back to the original author and ask what was going on in their head, but found it to be easier to just silently redo constraints on the features that needed it, hopefully without moving any lines. The place I'm in now is full of people who have been using NX since it was new, and yet the "guru"s in house all say that sketches are bad and want us to use solid features instead - completely ignoring that it's so much harder to change parameters when a design needs to change, all because sketches used to suck (or so I hear) and they can't be arsed to learn how to use constraints correctly now.
The fun part comes when you have to mix units - two weeks ago I had to draft up a simple adapter plate that had 4 force transducers on it, which all happened to have metric bolt patterns. Trying to indicate that the distance to the center of each group of holes was the driving dimension is fun when you don't have a feature at the actual center, but at least you can dual dimension with the nice even number in mm under the ugly inch one. (disclaimer: I hate the english system. I have to use it because that's the policy when you're .gov).
Then there's the "here's a vaguely circular bolt pattern with 28 thru holes, and the only important thing is that they're symmetric about a center point, have a minimum radius, and line up so the bolts go into a 1" grid on some table somewhere", but that ends up needing 20 dimensions and all sorts of center lines. These are times when GD&T is just annoying and it would be a whole lot easier for me to put a note on there with the intention (though that's probably because I don't know enough yet to do it cleanly and correctly).
I like it when the machinists or someone else checking the drawing tells me what I did wrong so I can fix it and not have them need to yell at me again - I just wish more people I worked with had that attitude.
Shouldn't such an advanced aircraft be capable of monitoring the pilot's O2 level, via a pulse oximeter (on the earlobe, or fingertip) and automatically boost O2 levels via the backup storage cylinder that already exists on the ejection seat? I can think of plenty of off the shelf hardware that could perform this necessary backup function without a costing BILLION dollar upgrade to the aircraft.
The information in this report is really old, they seem to be repeating the same news over and over without any apparent effort to find any new information.
Opponents of the F-22 keep screaming about how it has never been used in combat, despite three conflicts having occurred since they entered active service. Problem is, neither Iraq nor Libya had a functional air force that actually tried to fight AND posed a serious threat to our aircraft. The Taliban doesn't have an air force, and at the start of the war in Afganistan (prior to the F-22 achieving active status) Afganistan's air force was basically rusting hulks. This is an air superiority fighter. It isn't meant to bomb things. It is a predator, built to hunt and kill fighter aircraft, nothing more. That role justifies a lower overall number of aircraft, but the aircraft still needs to exist. In a conflict with a country with a formidable air force, such as China or Russia, or at least a functional one like North Korea or Iran, this aircraft would be invaluable. It could mean the difference between victory and defeat. I for one am glad it hasn't seen combat yet. That said, it looks like they need to fix the emergency O2 system. Might not be a bad idea to find a way to provide a graceful failure of the primary system, too, or automatically activate the backup. Either way...fix the damned thing.
Uhh....bullshit. They haven't flown in combat yet (because there has been no need for strict air-to-air combat since they came in service), but they are a part of the air defense system and have intercepted russian bombers near the arctic.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Complex projects have a lot of bugs. It's inevitable. But works if you have a small and smart team that is not afraid to ask dumb questions, and keep the common sense. I work at one of LHC detectors. Safety is handled by special organization. Detector safety by a separate system. Everything else is under the domain of "expect bugs", prone to failures and takes effort to bring to a desired state.
Sounds like you and I would get along great.
I am a stickler for model quality. I've been called on to design tooling and fixturing for manufacturing purposes, and really, not constraining your sketches, or using sane build parameters is writing a recipie for disaster later on when you need to make a revision. Cad software these days can let you make some truly beautiful design models that are built to resist breaking in amazing ways. (Catia's knowledgeware comes instantly to mind. You can do some really crazy stuff with the knowledge workbenches.)
That said.....
I have seen some of the worst models in the history of aviation come out of gulfstream. For confidentiality reasons, I won't name my employer, or the part series, but the models for a series of wing support bulkheads they sent us for manufacture had the following things wrong with them:
They pencil whipped the floor fillet information into the parts list. They did not model the floor fillets into the digital models. The filletless models were used for the stress and weight metrics in other engineering depts.
The geometry that was supposed to be filleted would result in impossible geometric configurations with the fillets in place.
Full radius fillets in slots that have non-normal walls were done in such a way that the models had a jagged edge where two discrete fillets failed to propery merge.
Location authority for holes was not given to the solid model, but to a pencil whipped cad drawing going to two decimal places (inch), with tight tolerances beyond two places.
Geometry was "boolean split disco fever" in nature; featues that should be nominally parallel were angled by .000000X degrees instead, poor surface tangencies were extant everywhere, and surfaces did not align cleanly.
Long story short, I had to spend an entire month cleaning up and interpreting the data they sent us, just so I could ultimately rebuild their models in a sanitized and useful format for our CNC programmers.
Seeing shit like that makes me hope to god that I never have to fly in one of their planes.
I've taken the F-22 up past max ceiling in the game and I've still been fine. Fine enough to plow through all the missions. Maybe I shoulda been hired instead of this dead pilot?
Doesn't sound like the system is any radical departure from what is already flying.
This is beginning to sound like the American automotive industry story.
They can't make a reliable vehicle to save their lives. Nor to do it on budget.
I read with interest the many knowledgeable comments in this thread, and understand that it takes awhile to get bugs out of a new airframe, and testing a new plane is not conducive of a long and happy life.
But I have to ask; the F22 came out in 1997. It's been out for more than a decade. So they're still finding ergonomic issues in the emergency systems?
Looking at this and at the shambles we've made of our manned space capability, and I have to wonder if a government at some point grows so bureaucratic that it can no longer successfully do the big projects.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"I find the cause of the mishap was the MP's [mishap pilot] failure to recognize and initiate a timely dive recovery due to channelized attention, breakdown of visual scan and unrecognized spatial disorientation."
- President of the AIB, Brig. Gen. James Browne
[TRANSLATION: "Yuri Gagarin was not the first Russian in outer space. However, we do not mention the other for he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when the oxygen recycling system failed."]
The point is not to make fighter aircraft. The point is to make money. The aircraft is an incidental byproduct.
Deleted
You work with the lhc?
Great, somebody I can point this out to!
While looking for documentation on catia's programmer interface, I stumbled upon an internal lhc website with truly terrible security set. I am positive that this web server is not meant to be publicly viewed, since it contains a fullblown and live installable copy of catia v5 64bit, as well as engineering plans for the atlas experiment.
It was the live catia install files that returned the google search result, since it seems google's search robot crawled and indexed it.
The server is "atlas-muonstructures". I don't want to give the full dns name. I want to be discrete about it. It DOES return in the top 10 search results for that string.
Could you talk to your IT people, and see about restricting it a little better?
I work in aerospace and I see this a lot, too. The younger engineers are pretty good about it but, as you know, 80-90% of the crowd in aerospace is 40+ and I certainly get a lot of "you're not an Official Aerospace Engineer, what do you know?" kinds of things from them.
It's obnoxious, counter-productive, idiotic, and pretentious.
This is really something that engineers should focus more on, and, as an aside, attitudes like that portrayed XKCD certainly don't help. The whole "I'm an Engineer, I know everything, I'm so clever" crap doesn't work when you're talking to your peer with several advanced technical degrees, who, btw, is only talking to you because your POS design sucks and broke, usually just because you didn't bother to ask around for suggestions about your design, and who you're now coming to for help.
if troops were treated with as much respect as 'the customer', they would get experimental shit rammed down their throats, and then told its their duty to die for the glory of some corporation.
dying in the f22 crash did not 'keep america safe'. it did not protect freedom. it did not have to happen.
this is the same fucked up attitude by the managers who think that somehow because of the two shuttle crew losses, it means space is 'inherently dangerous'. well if you ignore your engineers and only care about bullshit like politics and money, yeah, space is incredibly dangerous... its so dangerous that you can continue making exactly the same fuckups for years, without getting punished, even though your decisions cost the lives of people.
if someone is willing to die for their country, it takes a really low bellied sack of shit to believe to take that willingness for granted, and chalk up their death to inevitable accidents, which, upon further investigation, typically prove to have been completely avoidable, if it wasnt for some fucked up shitbag pencil pushing ass lick managment douchebag who will never get any punishment or reprimand for his negligence and stupidity.
then let them see how fast that problem gets fixed.
which is inherent in a military that is more like a gigantic welfare-jobs program than an actual fighting force (minus, of course, the actual fighters)
This neverending boondoggle is fit to destroy only budgets. Long before the bank-puppets in Washington threaten to cut Social Security (which doesn't create debt, but rather loans to us) or Medicare (which is far better at paying for our healthcare than the profiteer insurers), we should drop this F-22 ripoff. Like right now. Social Security and Medicare actually protect the lives of many millions of Americans, a far better investment of defense money.
--
make install -not war
exactly? because to me heres what it looks like
system X has worked fine for decades. but they decide it costs too much and replace it with something else.
plane Y costs 145 million dollars a pop, even though old planes cost 30 million or 50 million.
did i mention that System X was part of the life support system for the pilot?
how can the average taxpayer agree to pay for bullshit like this? why should we?
airplane's have been supplying oxygen to pilots for decades without problems, during all sorts of bizarre failures.
whoever was the dipshit who decided to institute this fancy bullshit system instead of the old simple crap is to blame. not the pilot.
it can outmaneuver it, it can be loaded with missiles that destroy it easily, etc etc. piloted warplanes are fucking stupid, and the whole industry is a gigantic welfare program that needs to be shut down before this country goes completely bankrupt.
and then covering it up, in order to protect the rich fuckbags who run the aviation industry.
don't believe me?
United States v. Reynolds
Janet Harduvel vs General Dynamics
and on and on and on.
apologists for the air force need to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. you arent worth the tiniest piece of ash left over from this pilots body.
it was, in fact, entirely preventable, by proper management and engineering, both of which failed on an epic scale. how do you make a 145 million dollar aircraft that does not do basic life support functions to the same quality of an aircraft built in the 1970s?
its unbelieveably fucking ridiculous. military men are not willing to die, that doesnt mean you can waste their lives with stupid decisions and cost-cutting back room political bullshit and get away with it.
ultimately, the taxpayers are the customer here. and i doubt many of them, in a jury, would find the managers and air force innocent here.
"Captain Theodore T. Harduvel's widow, Janet, was the focus of the production and her assistance was paramount in presenting an accurate portrait of the struggle to clear her husband's memory and legacy.[5] In 1987, Janet Harduvel won a $3.1 million dollar jury award against General Dynamics Corporation, alleging a flight instrumentation malfunction due to a short circuit caused by frayed ("chafed") wiring, led to his crash.[6][7] The verdict would "ultimately be overturned, not on its merits, but on the basis that federal defense contractors enjoy blanket immunity from such lawsuits."[1] A subsequent defeat on appeal followed.[8]"
1 ^ a b c Posner, Gary P. " "Star Goddess Janet Sciales." St. Petersburg Times via Tampa Bay Skeptics, Vol. 15, No. 1, Summer 2002. Retrieved: November 6, 2011.
5 ^ a b Schindehette, Susan. "For Love and honor." People, Vol. 37, No. 21, June 1, 1992. Retrieved: November 6, 2011.
6 ^ Murray, Frank J. "High-Flying Troubles." Insight on the News via FindArticles.com, January 3, 2000. Retrieved: November 6, 2011.
7 ^ a b Aleshire 2005, p. xvii.
8 ^ "878 F.2d 1311: Janet Harduvel." justia.com, July 31, 1989. Retrieved: November 6, 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterburn_(film)
so i guess if your Chevy SUV suddenly loses all braking capability on a tight right hand curve above Dead Man's Canyon, its your own fucking fault that you and 5 kids and a nun died, am i right?
This is a very simple thing to solve!
There is only one problem here:
Everyone blames everyone instead of thinking on how to solve things and prevent them in the future!
Because nobody gives a shit about anything except his own ass.
Blame the "culture" if you will, but this is just fucked up.
You're a TEAM! WE are a team! Let's fuckin be EPIC!
I had to roll my eyes at this little gem. Yes, it's never been called on despite the small wars we've fought over the last decade. Because it's an air superiority fighter. We haven't fought anyone who could challenge the decades old F-16, let alone the F-15 or the F-22. Shall we use a screwdriver to pound in a nail because it's a really expensive screwdriver?
If we actually use the F-22 for anything more than a glorified test of its pitiful strike capability then something really bad has happened, because it means the US is at war with a country like the UK, France, Russia, China, or India.
The panel in my experimental aircraft has two red buttons on it, about a hand-span apart. Pressing both at the same time and holding for 5 seconds does this:
1) Sets autopilot direct to the nearest VOR
2) Sets altitude hold to MSA based on GPS location of VOR
3) Sets vertical speed to -2000
4) Sets airspeed hold to Va
5) Squawks 7700 (unless in test mode)
6) Sets COM2 to guard
7) Activates an alarm in the cockpit
I would like to meet the engineer who decided that it was a good idea to require an oxygen-starved pilot to maneuver his hand into an awkward position and exert 40 lbs of force in an odd direction. I'd love to be able to punch him right in the face.
World War II taught the world a valuable lesson: it is not the best technology that wins wars, but the most industrially effective nations. The Japanese torpedoes of WWII were faster, had a longer range, and a larger warhead than their American counterparts. Their fighter - the Zero - was more agile and had a longer range than its American counterpart. Their Navy routinely won tactical victories against the American Navy well into the second year of the war.
Neither the F22 nor a spitfire can outrun a missile. Neither can fly higher than the reach of modern AAMs. Ultimately it comes down to who has the better radar.
In such a contest, the spitfires would be more or less airborne AAM batteries. The F22 pilots would have a choice: avoid areas where spitfires are known to gather, or take their chances. With just 4 AAMs per spitfire, that's 600 missiles against the F-22's handful.
In WWII, the much less agile F4F Wildcat bested the much more agile Japanese Zeros by utilizing the Thatch Weave. Even though the Zero was far more agile than the Wildcat, it couldn't engage one in a Thatch weave without coming within the crosshairs of its wingman.
In a similar way, even spitfires equipped with modern missiles would be more than a match for the F-22 in sufficient quantity.
How are they "good enough" when historically they lose air-to-air? Russian aircraft went down to F15s for example, and that includes F15s flown by non-US pilots, so its not necessarily pilot training and experience. Pilots of Russian and French built aircraft quickly learned to fly to a neighbor and defect rather than attempt to engage US made aircraft.
This is not true. During the Vietnam war the US planes were being shot down by Migs. In close combat mind you. The missiles the F-4 were carrying were simply ineffective against fighters designed by communists. The end result ? Americans had to retrofit the F-4 with cannons so they could engage in close combat, and of course pilots had to learn a long lost skill that of ACM. Thats when the Top Gun school was created.
You conveniently change the topic from F-15 to F-4. As others point out the F-15 was designed with exactly these lessons in mind.
More importantly, despite all the problems you point out the most flawed versions of the F-4 still had a 1.5 to 1 kill to loss ratio over Migs. After minor changes and some retraining the F-4 got up to the target 10 to 1 ratio.
If my oxygen stopped I'd roll onto my back and point it straight down.
Probably take you 10-20sec to get down to 10,000ft.
I've heard MiG-29s have a panic button built-in that when hit automatically takes the jet down to a "safety" regime.
But we're so much more advanced than the MiG-29s.
Why doesn't the USA just buy Sukhoi 35B, or PAK-FA or whatever the latest model is, and in the spirit of cooperation make the world a better place: Everyone buying war equipment from each other, what could be better? Surely Christmas would be a fantastic time to announce this deal!
This could have been a hot story.
One of the problems is that nobody seems to understand the difference between NRE (non-recurring expenses) and RE (recurring expenses). A lot of the budget disasters we see in government are because the NRE is significant. Designing and testing the F-22 was hugely fscking expensive. There's a ton of new technology on the plane. You pay for that if you build one plane or one hundred planes. Every time Congress cut the planned order count to "save money", all they ended up doing was making each plane cost more. And they were surprised each time.
Morons.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Guess again, support and upgrade contracts can surpass construction contracts significantly - it's where most companies look to make the bulk of their profits in this arena.
My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Really. I work in aerospace. Many of the people in the engineering depts of major companies act like their shit doesn't stink, even when it obviously does. I make inspection blueprints, and when the degrees of a circular pattern exceed 360 degrees, or when point to point dimensions exceed total part length, and you inform them of the impossibility of these design specs, more often than not your time would be better spent talking to a brick wall.
(Just to clarify what I do: I make manufacturing drawings used for internal QA processes. Often times the customer supplied data is a digital nurbs representation of a part with some datum features called out, hole sizes listed and annotated, an some geometric tolerancing frames tacked on. My job is to take this data and in conjunction with the customer's tolerancing guidelines and practices documentation, create drawings that inspectors can use to validate the part was properly manufactured. This requires that they accurately convey the engineering intent of their geometry and datum choices. This is why I sometimes have to ask seemingly silly questions when they break the rules for gd&t frames, or define impossible (mathematically so) tolerances. You would probably be stunned how often I catch insane engineering mistakes because they pencilwhipped shit, and have to figure out the fit form and function myself, because they won't own up to it.)
Don't get ballistic over what I'm about to tell you, but you should be a Design Rules Check computer program and they should be made to use computers instead of pencils. What you described is wasteful, slow, and dangerous.
Stop spamming /. with your shit. I have already seen this comment under another story.
A series of engineers argue over who's fault it was.
Was it engineer A, who had to make the emergency system require 40kilos of pull to activate, due to flak that it might engage accidentally if the craft hits stiff turbulence or is kicked while the pilot is entering the cockpit?
It wasn't 40 kilos, it was 40 pounds. Normally I'd let this go, but you're in aerospace! :)
Defense contractors: money first, safety second
Although I like your idea, there are too many people with too much invested in killing people to think it can all stop that easily.
Don't lose hope. There will come a day when nobody will build aircraft to kill people. The question will only be why: because we finally got over it or we exterminated ourselves.
It is _always_ pilot error. He should have prayed faster and harder.
And reviewed his anoxia mantra.
An unconscious test pilot should be asleep in bed.
Otherwise you are testing the wrong thing.
--
I could fly in my dreams, but the passengers wouldn't like it.
I can't say how many times I've opened up a part file, gone to the sketch, and found that none of the lines were fully constrained
I get the same feelings about code when -Werr wasn't turned on when coding began
If they want bleeding edge, they should talk to these guys.
The F22 is more like bleeding edge for making money.
And there is probably no proper way around that approach.
if he could have pulled the lever to engage the "emergency system" he would have just pulled the lever to engage the "ejection seat" instead?