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 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...?
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.
It seems like this should have been automatically switched on.
Okay, this is total bullshit ...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...
<Tinfoil Hat Mode> "Died during training (or testing)" is a military euphemism for "Died on a secret mission". At least they didn't say he "Rolled a Jeep" </Tinfoil Hat Mode>
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Whoa buddy, don't get so riled up. You might fall out of your armchair.
First thing:
None of what you said matters. Accidents are situational. Pilots are trained in a lot of things to reduce the number of accidents, but accidents will still happen. His attention became channelized, or in other words, he fixated on a couple of tasks and that doomed him. He lost situational awareness. That's how things happen in the pilot world.
Second thing:
Hypoxia was not factor. Had it not been, you're essentially dead after about half a minute. No, you're not actually dead, but your brain is no longer able of doing anything useful. Your period of useful consciousness is over. This is not like working out: Someone who's working out still has oxygen being delivered to their brain. Someone suffering from hypoxia is running on very borrowed time. This is similar, but not the same, to G-LOC. When you exceed a certain number of G's abruptly, or do not do the G-straining maneuver properly, the brain runs on its 5-second oxygen reserve, and you will literally go out like a light once that's gone. No grey-outs, no warnings, nothing. Just sleeping.
40 lb resistance is not a lot of weight but putting all that pressure onto a coin-sized ring that could only be pulled with one gloved finger? That seems really odd to me.
Think of the last time you carried groceries nowhere near 40 lb and the bags cut into your hand, even though you were using all four fingers. Increase the weight to 40lb, then quadruple it by putting it on one finger. That's a lot of force required.
You're absolutely right. I'm totally going to believe some dude on Slashdot over a former Air Force pilot who was ALSO an aircraft accident investigator. He obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
Better than the swill called "American microbrews".
Of course, that's not saying much.
Oh for fuck's sake.
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...
Actually no, they're expected to twist and turn to reach the ring while held in place by an insanely tight harness. This ain't no Cessna. Further, they're then expected to pull the ring in a direction away from their body - it's stupidly designed in the most un-ergonomic way possible.
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.
A minute without air? I have an idea. We put a stopwatch on you and make you hold your breath while sitting in a chair. I'll put a 40-lb weight with a pop-tab on top under the chair between your legs and we'll see if you can manage to reach down, find it, then lift it a couple inches after you hold your breath an entire minute. If you're even awake still. And that test STILL won't account for the vertigo and g-forces involved in the dive and attempting a dive recovery.
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 I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
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.
Which is why, when they get into the air, they should be confident that someone has fucking sanity-checked the design of the safety features aboard the aircraft. Clearly, in this case, that was NOT done.
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
Dear Citizen,
Harper automatically assumes any US position is the correct one. This includes that of their military, politicians and representatives. This is his confirmed platform position and policy, so whenever you assume that the Americans are trying to sell us something, you can be sure that Harper had been asking for it before the salesmen even got out of bed.
Shoten,
Your first point was one of the things that came to mind - not only are military pilots exposed to things like (explosive) decompression, hypoxia, etc., they are continually tested in these environments. Similarly regarding the issue of "speed" - it shouldn't matter how fast your going to access a control or instrument.
As for your second point, I think that you are disregarding the issues of restrictive flight gear (straps, ejection seat tethers, anti-G vests and so on) coupled with poor placement of the ring which could make it impossible for a fully oxygenated person to engage the system.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Sorry but air starvation is a terrible thing to deal with. Hold your breath for a minute while doing anything that takes effort and skill and see what happens.
This system MUST BE FIXED. Breathing is not an option it is mandatory.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why are you [Americans] pushing us Canadians sooooo hard to buy your latest super-jet blah blah blah blah blah
As an American, I assure you Canadians I couldn't fucking care less whether you buy the F-22 to defend yourselves, or even whether you deign to defend yourselves at all. Actually, I think you have the F-22 confused with the F-35. It might interest you to know that export sale of the F-22 is barred by American federal law.
Seriously. It's just not on my radar. Not on the radar of anybody I know.
Sadly, it has been severely undermined by the prevalence of cheap, ineffective dollar-store duct tape.
Now try getting him to talk about the submarine deal(s) and see how much confusion THAT brings to the table.
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.)
"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
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
Hmm...an airforce pilot who has actually piloted fighter jets (and is an experienced accident investigator and knows the failure modes that get pilots into trouble) says it's hard, and a slashdot commenter says "bullshit, the pilot was just being a pussy". Who to believe!?
I can believe it's hard - trying to pick up a 40 pound box from beneath my chair seems like it would be quite challenging. And I'm under no stress, wearing non-bulky street clothes, and have plenty of oxygen.
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.
You fly *in* airplanes, but do you pilot fighter jets? Or do you sit back in coach on an airline and play on your iPhone? In straight and level flight at 800mph, movement is not restricted and you're not feeling any high G-forces.... but if you deviate from straight and level, start struggling from oxygen deprivation while you try to pilot the plane, then things can get much harder -- worse, you can get into trouble much faster.
.... 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.
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.
I didn't know we were trying to sell the F-22 to Canada, but if we were, the answer is obvious - the more that are made, the lower the per-unit (and spare parts) costs.
And we'd rather have you buy military hardware from us instead of other countries so if we ever needed to, we could flip the remote control switch and watch your fleet drop from the air.
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
So shouldn't you be telling your prime minister and not the readership of Slashdot?
The Northrop YF-23 is looking better and better all the time. Too bad the USAF chose the wrong plane
Drone technology to replace the human who needs oxygen...
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.
Well then here are your choices.
A) Buy from a different country.
B) Build your own.
C) Don't have any fighter jets.
A) Now if Canada buys from a different country, I would say go with the Eurofighter. It's only 17 years old and will work well against the old Soviet designs that Canada is most likely to go up against.
B) It will cost a fortune, even when compared with buying from the US.
C) Although Canada doesn't have to worry about their neighbor to the south, Canada has to worry about its neighbor across the ice.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
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.
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').
It's pretty hard to simulate a life-threatening situation without actually putting someone's life at risk. Some people focus in those situations. I don't know what that's like. Some people, like me, fall apart. I know exactly what that's like. Everything you do is wrong and stupid. Every new piece of information is overwhelming and terrifying. Sometimes you just blank out, and the next thing you know, three seconds are gone. Then you go, "OH FUCK! THREE SECONDS! I FUCKED EVERYTHING UP AND NOW I'M DEAD!" and another three seconds are wasted. Now six seconds are gone, and you only had 18 to begin with. What are you going to do, now that almost half your time is gone? You'd better do something extraordinary, because 18 seconds is barely enough time so pull super hard OH FUCK I JUST RIPPED THE HANDLE OFF
Then I'm thinking about how bad I screwed up pulling the handle off, instead of pulling the backup handle.
The thing is, the smarter someone is, the more controlled, the harder it is to get them to panic until something really, actually scares them, and the harder it is too fool them into thinking it's time to be scared. If you didn't know me very, very well, you might think I was good at stressful situations. Nope. I just don't get stressed quite as easily, but when I do, watch out, because I'm about to completely lose it. I'm guessing this guy was similar.
Go ahead. Put me through some oxygen-deprivation training. The whole time, I'll be thinking to myself, "hey, worst case, they have medical staff to revive you. They wouldn't get away with actually threatening people's lives." Even if they would get away with it, I probably wouldn't believe it. I would have to literally see multiple people die in training to actually get scared there, and until I'm actually scared, you don't know how I'll act.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
As someone who has been on an AWACS doing parabolics ( I know, it's not as sexy as an F-16, but it is still jet), I would say that even lifting your arms without an additional 40lbs is unusual and not exactly easy. Now admittedly, I was a civilian contractor on the plane but I would say that I was in pretty good shape at the time. I was no where near in shape compared to your average person in the military is, but I wasn't a couch potato either. I would estimate that I was close to 2G of force, but this is a WAG. considering your average F-16 can get to 8G pretty easily, I don't even want to imagine what it would be like in that state to move your body to find this small ring that they are talking about and then have to apply 40 lbs of force to actuate it all while under an oxygen deprived state.
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.
Dear Russia,
We have decided that we will no longer be protecting our little brother to the North. Feel free to invade, we won't stop you. Promise!
- America
PS - They have lots of oil, and wood. Did we mention they have lots of wood, and more wood. And wood...and CARIBOU!!!!
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.
You probably haven't been playing it at the same altitude.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
was a good price for a fighter jet.
Presumably the people who sell them.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Now do it with your brain on no oxygen. (Kind of like now do this with your drain on drugs.)
Yes, this all points to a need to retrofit the fighters. And give Hany a post-humous medal for his discovery of a critical design flaw.
They used GOTO
http://xkcd.com/292/
uhmmm, you mean like when Canada developed the Avro Arrow which was the the most bad ass fighter jet of the time (and competed with US made jets) but only to cancel the program and have all those engineers move south to NASA and take important roles in the Apollo program?
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
It's called blaming the dead guy and it's common at all levels of government (and elsewhere).
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.
Click the link to the PDF and read section PE204, which starts on page 25. There are actual pictures of the EOS ring and its position on the seat. It's much more reasonable than the summary make it sound.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but my recollection was that the seat was not installed in an aircraft. Once installed it may not be reachable from the direction the photograph was taken.
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
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 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.
The F-104 "Zipper" was a very fast and capable aircraft, but also demanding to fly.
The US bought the vastly more complex Phantom, but needed a fighter-bomber and not a point-defense machine.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"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
Because of course, without the USA valiantly killing brown people, every country in the world would simultaneously invade every other country in the world. Thanks for protecting us Uncle Sam!
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Too late! She escaped to Arizona. Better call the Mexican army.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
Let me take a wild guess...You haven't spent much time at high altitude, have you?
I used to scoff at the charts that show what the FAA euphemistically calls "useful time of consciousness" at varying altitudes. I mean, c'mon...if I try, I can hold my breath for 2 minutes or more, and I'm not nearly in as good shape as I should be. How can a pilot at high altitude have a useful time of consciousness of 30 seconds or less? It's trivial to hold my breath that long, even if I don't prepare for it beforehand.
Then one day, I got a revelation: It's trivial for me to hold my breath for 30-60 seconds and possible to break 120 seconds because the air in my lungs is under full atmospheric pressure. However, if I am at 25,000 feet of altitude, and my cockpit explosively decompresses (or, as in the case of a fighter pilot, if I am at lower atmospheric pressure and my pure oxygen supply is suddenly removed), I no longer have near as much oxygen in my lungs, and consequently, my body will go hypoxic much more quickly. You might think losing his oxygen supply for a full minute would be "like...working out hard", but you'd be wrong. I haven't read TFA, but if he was above about 15,000 feet MSL (and especially if he was above 25,000 MSL) it was much, much worse than that. His muscles might have been functional without oxygen, but I guarantee his brain functions were degrading rapidly.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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.
You are giving him too much credit. Holding your breath at sea level is not at all like losing your oxygen supply at altitude. The partial pressure of oxygen in your lungs at altitude is much, much lower than at sea level, so you don't have the oxygen reserves in your lungs to continue supplying your brain and vital organs like you do when you hold your breath at sea level. It's more like filling your lungs with the exhaust from your car, THEN hold your breath for a minute (kids, don't try this at home!).
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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 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?
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.
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!
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.
Any semi advanced country can produce the fuselage and overall geometry and ability to obscure heat exhausts to create a stealth fighter. The Germans had a wooden prototype designed back in the WW2 that had the same geometry that is similar to today's modern stealth planes. They just did not have the other necessary technology to make it feasible and in the end they ran out of time to pursue the project. The radar absorbing materials can also be created by others. These characteristics can be deduced by analysing pictures and have not really been a secret ever since the F-117 was first used in combat. But the F-117 was vulnerable to radar defense systems because the ECM capabilities were iffy. In the first Iraq war their flight plans needed to target the edges of the overlapping radar coverage air defense areas and relied on radio silence amongst the planes during the operation. They also relied on other assests launching simultaneous attacks on the radar systems to over load the detection systems. The F-117 downed in the Balkans happened because the aircraft was flying at a very low altitude and became visible by eyes on the ground. Stealth does not mean invisible to the naked eye, YET. Despite being described as a "fighter" it did not possess the maneuverability or defenses to avoid air or ground based missile attacks if they were detected. What the F-22 excels in is it's ECM and computer technology which not be deduced from a external pictures. Without advanced ECM and C&C capabilities the radar systems and missiles can theoretically detect a stealth craft even though it would not be easy.
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.
"After a minute without air? That's what it feels like to be working out hard"
Try this experiment. Breathe all the way out. Now hold your breath that way. How long can you do it? Most healthy people make 20 to 30 seconds.
I can hold my breath for almost three minutes with my lungs full, but that's not the situation when you lose air pressure.
It's easy to simulate. Just exhale all the way and hold your breath like that. If you make more than 30 seconds you're ahead of most people.
Yeah, game are identical to real life. Now excuse me while I steal a cop car, run the cops over, and then hide out in an alley for 30 secs to get my 3-star wanted level to fade away.
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
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.
True. I guess people do not understand that flying a jet fighter is hard. Simple truth is that their are no bad F-22 pilots. If you are anything less than extremely good you just don't fly the F-22.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually, the Canadian dollar is worth 3% more than the US dollar.
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.
Actually, the Canadian dollar is worth 3% more than the US dollar.
Nope. You're reading the table backwards. One dollar US buys you 1.03 Canadian today. So the CAD is worth 3% less than the USD. See Bloomberg for example.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You still have oxygen in your lungs at atmospheric pressure, so no, it's not a good simulation. Take a look at a Time of Useful Consciousness chart. At 35,000 feet (FL350), you have 30-60 seconds of useful consciousness; after that, your brain has become so oxygen deprived that it is essentially incapable of problem solving, even if you aren't quite unconscious yet. At FL500, that drops to 6 - 9 seconds. I don't care how hard you exhale at sea level, you aren't going to slip into unconsciousness after 6 - 9 seconds by holding your breath. Therefore, your "simulation" is flawed.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Yes, it is a reasonable simulation. It's not perfectly accurate, but it's about the best you can do on the ground, and successfully demonstrates that your time of useful consciousness is a LOT less than you might think. The effect isn't due strictly to the pressure of the air. Having a little bit of high pressure air in your lungs isn't that different than having a lot of low pressure air.
If you get a good exhalation and don't cheat, you'll be able to hold your breath for a lot closer to 30 seconds than 60. No, you probably can't simulate fifty thousand feet, simply because the end tidal volume in your lungs is too high, but you can do a pretty good job of thirty-five, which demonstrates nicely that holding your inhalation for two minutes at sea level is very different from the low pressure situation. And all without taking a ride in a fighter jet. You can't simulate 300 km up accurately with a breath hold OR a fighter jet ride... so what?
Feeling a little contrary today?
If they want bleeding edge, they should talk to these guys.
The F22 is more like bleeding edge for making money.
It's not perfectly accurate
No, it's not. It isn't even remotely accurate.
The effect isn't due strictly to the pressure of the air. Having a little bit of high pressure air in your lungs isn't that different than having a lot of low pressure air.
Uh, yeah, it is. There's a vast difference between having 14.7 PSI in your lungs and having 3.5 PSI in your lungs (at 35,000 feet). Go to your local library and check out a physics or chemistry text book, then look up "partial pressure". There comes an altitude at which the air pressure is too low to supply sufficient oxygen to your body, even if you are breathing pure oxygen. You can't simulate that on the ground by simply exhaling and holding your breath. Period.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
You're right, it's not exactly the same thing, but not for the reasons you're giving.
Holding an exhalation triggers your breathing reflex because your body can't get rid of enough carbon dioxide. Having lungs full of low pressure, or low oxygen content air causes a lack of oxygen, which doesn't trigger your breathing reflex. You don't feel like you're suffocating.
So the feeling is different, but the amount of time you can function in either state is similarly different from having full lungs with sea level pressure. In other words, more than sufficient to demonstrate to the OP that it's quite possible to lose the ability to function in less than the two or three minutes it takes while holding your breath at sea level. Which is the situation for which I suggested the experiment. Not perfectly accurate, but a hell of a lot better for the purpose at hand than yours.
I think you've been watching too many bad movies (perhaps Stealth?). drones can't even come close (yet) to what fighters can do. I'm not saying it won't happen at some point in the future, at our military will be even better, but that point is not even within a generation of now.