Slashdot Mirror
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 mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
That only lasted a few days though. Then the next version of PunkBuster was released, and all those guys got banned.
You have just raised the sarcasm bar unacceptably high, approaching an art form.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Dear Hoser,
The Canadian Air Force is the first line of defense in keeping that mad bitch Sarah Palin bottled up in Alaska until the Ruskis invade and do her in. Second, you don't get much sandier and oilier than the Athabascan tar sands. I'm sure you need to protect them from the Inuit Air Force or hordes of Laplanders coming over the pole or something. Anyway, hold them off long enough for us to steal all the oil, pump it south, and leave Alberta a stinking mudhole. Really, aside from Lake Louise, it kind of is anyway. Third, all those de Havilland Beavers are going to quit flying someday. You need a replacement. Fourth, the Canadian Dollar is still worth almost as much as a US Dollar. Buying a bunch of these jets will help return the CAD to its more natural $0.74 USD level.
Sincerely yours,
A. Murican
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Not if they keep crashing all of the ones that were built... at this rate there won't be many left to upgrade...
It's just a simple reality that as we push the aircraft engineering to the edge of our capabilities that they will find areas where the body can't keep up, just like with the F-16.
There's a simple and obvious solution: replace the human pilot with an artificial intelligence which is almost 100% guaranteed to probably never go rogue and generally speaking has a low probability of wiping out the human race. It will be developed using a best-practices extreme programming rapid iteration test-driven model and we'll do our best to test it thoroughly before launch, but, well, there was time pressure, it was a bad economy, we had to cut costs and rationalise our testing plan, mistakes do happen, and long story short, we're all very sorry about what happened to Las Vegas. But the 2.0 model will be 150% faster and we'll completely rewrite the hatred module.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
To be fair, in a communist country, the arms manufacturer would BE the government, and accidents like these would be swept under the rug while you read news stories of how the glorious leadership has brought the country boldly into the technological future.
Yeah. Here in the USA the arms manufacturers have to share the government with the pharmaceuticals and banks.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Yes, but at least buying F22s puts all that money in the right pockets.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's more than twice the ENTIRE budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2011. So, metaphorically equivalent to curing cancer.
Yeah, like curing cancer is anywhere near as cool as doing mach 2 with your hair on fire in a plane with the radar cross-section of a sparrow and the armament to single-handedly take out a small city.
I mean, really, which one can you make better video games and movies about? Same thing for big particle accelerators (well, unless they're man-portable and can be used to blow stuff up; think BFG) and Mars rovers (though those are a little bit cool, 1/130th of an F-22 is about right). A manned Mars expedition might be as cool as an F-22 if it turned out there were Martians or something like that, but it'd probably be like watching the goofy astronauts make faces at the camera in the ISS. Big whoop. Watching F-22s blow up today's Designated Bad Guys on prime-time TV is guaranteed to be good, and you know that whoever is in the White House will give us that, since there's no way we'll elect that isolationist doofus Ron Paul.
</sarcasm>
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