Air Force Foresaw Fatal F-22 Problems; Rejected $100,000 Fix As Too Expensive

McGruber writes "The Associated Press is reporting that years before F-22 stealth fighter pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit, before one struggled to breathe as he tried to pull out of a fatal crash, before two more went on the '60 Minutes' television program to say the plane was so unsafe they refused to fly it, a small working group of U.S. Air Force experts knew something was wrong with the prized stealth fighter jet. This working group, called RAW-G, was created in 2002 at the suggestion of Daniel Wyman, then a flight surgeon at Florida's Tyndall Air Force Base, where the first F-22 squadron was being deployed. Wyman is now a brigadier general and the Air Combat Command surgeon general. RAW-G proposed a range of solutions by 2005, including adjustments to the flow of oxygen into pilot's masks. But that key recommendation was rejected by military officials reluctant to add costs to a program that was already well over budget. Kevin Divers, a former Air Force physiologist who led RAW-G until he left the service in 2007, believes the cost of adjusting the oxygen flow would have added about $100,000 to the cost of each $190 million aircraft."

Comments

Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway the days of manned fighters is coming to an end.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[bhcompy]

I doubt it. I think you're looking more at what we saw in Stealth. Unmanned fullsized fighter jets with advanced AI with the potential to house a man if desired. Unmanned drones aren't going to dogfight, and there still is a ton of need for more than an unmanned drone can provide, particularly since there are still uses for close combat air support vehicles like helicopters, A-10s, etc.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a couple aircraft generations. There's no drone which even comes close to being able to go head-to-head with actual in-aircraft pilots yet. Air-to-ground attack is one thing. Air-to-air is not so easy.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Overzeetop]

Send up 100, $1,000,000 drones with a single missile for each $190M fighter aircraft and see who wins. It's the air version of the disposable boat gambit in naval surface warfare.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[YrWrstNtmr]

Send up 100, $1,000,000 drones with a single missile for each $190M fighter aircraft and see who wins.

The guy who takes out their ground control stations wins.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Overzeetop]

True, but then you'd have to get through 100 drones per attacking aircraft, wouldn't you!

(And who puts control of a fleet like that under a single command location. I mean, except for the Empire.)

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but that also assumes the stations are anywhere near the battlefield

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is such as thing called latency. It is pretty well known for any online gamers. Have fun trying to control stuff interactive half way around the world with 100+ms latency.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, slashdot military threads. All the video game-playing armchair expert neckbeards pipe up and tell how it really should be done. Protip: You Have No Fucking Idea What You're Talking About. HAND.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[houghi]

100+ms latency? Who cars when you have robots on mars that you control.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[YrWrstNtmr]

True, but then you'd have to get through 100 drones per attacking aircraft, wouldn't you!

That's what the initial wave of cruise missiles is for.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[binarylarry]

I see you $100 million dollars in drones and raise you a signal jammer.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Rytr23]

How would a jammer be effective against autonomous drones? If you had said EMP....t.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

They just need better net code.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just 100 missiles with fuel tanks that can fly around in circles and loiter to wait for a target.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[TooMuchToDo]

If you can write code to drive a car 300K miles without any human intervention, you can write code to have an armed aircraft engage other aircraft.

Ground stations are for the unprepared.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[rhsanborn]

An EMP capable of taking things out at a range large enough to down an air campaign would be equally effective against manned fighter jets, which also rely on equally advanced electronics, and would also probably take out most of your own infrastructure within range.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[luis_a_espinal]

They just need better net code.

As Torvalds once said: Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[ElWojo]

I wonder how well those drones would perform if comms were jammed during that encounter? And what type of $1M drone is going to be able to fly and turn fast enough to even get close to a F-22?

You have the right idea for some applications - but for air superiority the F-22 is as good as it gets in the modern era.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[zlives]

I agree cruise missile negate the use of drones and planes :)

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Ichijo]

I see you $100 million dollars in drones and raise you a signal jammer.

The guy who takes out the signal jammer wins.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[zlives]

thanks AC, now shut your yap and go back to 4chan

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[PRMan]

You mean the Trade Federation. The Empire used clones to get around this problem.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Those who know don't say; those who say don't know."

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Talderas]

Well. I guess you could just alter the code so that instead of avoiding near objects it seeks out near objects to strike.

I suspect adding a 3rd dimension and a number of targets that are seeking to kill you creates a bit of difficulty compared to 2 dimensional environment where most targets are not trying to hit you.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[tnk1]

Send up 100, $1,000,000 drones with a single missile for each $190M fighter aircraft and see who wins. It's the air version of the disposable boat gambit in naval surface warfare.

So, put up one aircraft with a powerful EW package on the side of the manned fighters. Then watch 100 drones turn into million dollar inert gliders as their control signal is completely disrupted.

Get back to me when the drones start being piloted by independent AIs.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Send up 100, $1,000,000 drones with a single missile for each $190M fighter aircraft and see who wins. It's the air version of the disposable boat gambit in naval surface warfare.

If you could figure out how to make an autonomous drone capable of engaging a modern fighter plan and avoiding common air defenses for less than 1M each, you should go into business.

Last I checked the global hawk was about 35M each, wasn't autonomous and definitely couldn't penetrate modern air defenses. (I'll give you that it could probably launch an AA missle, assuming it could get close enough to it's target with it's relatively low top speed)

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[craigminah]

I used to play a game back in the early 90's called crobots where you get a C interpreter and some additional commands to control a robot, move, scan for objects, shoot, etc. It wasn't difficult to "dog-fight" with simple two-dimensional "robots" back then as a kid...I imagine it's child's play for a government to program actual fighters to dog fight if necessary. I'd think a fighter drone would be unstoppable by piloted aircraft due to G-loads a pilotless aircraft could endure and it coul,d be much smaller (e.g. harder target, mor maneuverable, etc.).

http://crobots.deepthought.it/home.php?page=screenshots&link=3

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[luther349]

that i would pay to see. 100 drones and a single f22 with a single jammer watch all 100 drones fall from sky without a shot fired.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[luther349]

it just might be able to. i would assume the f22 would have a problem targeting something so small and slow and low flying.unless of course someone of the ground lazier locked it for him.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Ichijo]

A signal jammer is the exact opposite of stealth. It would be very easy for a drone to find and destroy an F22 without human intervention if that F22 had an EM source such as a signal jammer.

This is why F22s network together wirelessly such that the F22 on the front line doesn't need to use its own radar. It receives radar data from another aircraft that's positioned out of missile range, but at that distance I doubt it would be very effective at jamming signals.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Pinhedd]

The guy with the RF jammer

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm AC because I just don't want to pay a stupid monthly fee.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK, the end of cheap oil will mean the end to manned flight in the long term. For now, we need fighter jets as a measure of political dick length.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Luckyo]

The guy who jams the control signal after they're in the air wins faster with less resources spent.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Luckyo]

Do what Iranians did to the drone they got intact. Jam it's ability to detect where it is, confuse it with fake signal and let it have fun murdering it's own masters while you don't fire a single missile.

There is a reason why people making drones are REAAAAAAALLY careful about just how autonomous armed drones are.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[zippthorne]

So.. before your hypothetical manned aircraft v. drones fight, you send in autonomous aircraft to take out the drone base?

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Wha'? What monthly fee? Nobody said anything about a fee and I post with an account all the time.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[The Grim Reefer]

I doubt it. I think you're looking more at what we saw in Stealth.

I hope not. That AI was like HALs whiny little emo brother.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Hognoxious]

Humans black out under high g. Drones don't suffer from that limitation.

Single-use disposable kamikaze drones have been around for decades and while not infallible have tended to be quite successful. One took down a U2 over Cuba.

 

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[ElWojo]

"On 27 October 1962, in flight from McCoy AFB, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba by two SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missiles, killing the pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#United_States

SA-2's are SAM radio command guided missiles - not "kamikaze drones". And they were the same missiles that were used to shoot down Gary Powers from a U-2 as well. The U-2s that were shot down did not maneuver from the missiles or use any form of electronic protection against the SA-2s - unlike what our modern systems are likely doing today.

Don't get me wrong: drones could outperform humans...but you won't see that happening anytime soon (and certainly not at $1M/unit!). And if any country is likely to get that technology working first (and well enough to compete against a 5th gen fighter), it is the USA. The F-22 will likely not be a targeted system to a competent drone threat for a long time - especially with the full assistance of the US military.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Aardpig]

He mad because he paid for a 4chan gold account...

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Oh, 4chan. Ha. I didn't know they had paid accounts. I ignore the whole board. It's a cesspit.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Rich0]

That 3d environment is almost entirely empty space. Anything it sees it is either a friend or a foe, so you just need IFF. That isn't that difficult a problem. Just keep the drones stealthy and fly them in barrier formations - chances are they'll spot the F22's IR signature before the reverse.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Rich0]

SA-2's are SAM radio command guided missiles - not "kamikaze drones".

Missiles are drones. There is no difference at all. A missile launched from another drone isn't all that different conceptually from a missile that has two stages, or especially from a multiple warhead missile.

Just take a missile and add a wing and prop so that it can loiter for long periods of time, then detach and sprint to the target. Put the fancy radar/sensors in the missile itself. It can't be any more expensive than a cruise missile.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Rich0]

You don't need all that much in the way of "AI" - they need to detect targets, IFF them, allocate them to missiles, and launch. Just think of them like mines floating in the air instead of being moored underwater. They could operate as an area denial weapon, especially if they have high endurance. They could also be fairly stealthy.

And that EW aircraft would be just as effective against the manned fighters. It isn't like they don't require sensory information, control, and coordination as well. You could even use a drone as an EW platform.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Rich0]

If you could figure out how to make an autonomous drone capable of engaging a modern fighter plan and avoiding common air defenses for less than 1M each, you should go into business.

The US already has a drone capable of avoiding common air defenses (at least as well as an F22) - the BGM109 Tomahawk. It is a drone capable of flying hundreds of miles at low altitude to penetrate air defenses. I'm not sure if either it or the F22 would really stand up to a modern air defense. Its cost is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1M.

As far as anti-air goes - the AMMRAM or some of the better SAMs come to mind, though they don't have much range compared to what most people think of as a "drone." If you took an AMMRAM, beefed up its radar, gave it a good IR sensor, and hooked it up to a solar-powered prop aircraft it probably would be fairly effective. Just have the missile be powered by the solar cells and use its sensors to find targets, and when one gets within effective range it would discard the rest of the drone and launch at the target. If you could make the aircraft stealthy enough it might make sense to just make it IR only - it would rely on stealth to get within range and then launch at its target.

Keep in mind that a drone is just an autonomous weapon - we've been building those since World War II.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Overzeetop]

That's what they make ARMs for. That way the drones don't even need to be accurate: your target paints a bullseye on himself.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Overzeetop]

Don't throw me in that briar patch! One plane with a high intensity radiation source against 100 semi-autonomous drones, 10% of which are armed with an anti-radiation missile. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Re:Penny wise; pound foolish.

[Overzeetop]

I stand corrected. I was going to claim that the morning coffee had worn off, resulting in my error, and then I realized that the reference to Ep. 1, which I have spent the last several years trying intentionally to block out.

Cost...

[omkhar]

But would that 100K 1 time cost, have led to a much more expensive battery of tests to re-validate the entire aircraft?

Its like a 2 line code change that causes 100hrs of test cases.

Re:Cost...

[wjousts]

Compared to the cost of training new pilots to replace the ones that died?

Re:Cost...

[hawguy]

Compared to the cost of training new pilots to replace the ones that died?

Even if the fix saved just one aircraft, that's a $190M savings. That's a pretty good return on investment.

Re:Cost...

[idontgno]

Cynically speaking, handwaving the risk away costs absolutely nothing until something bad happens. So the $0 immediate cost of doing nothing usually wins.

Shortsighted, true. But most program managers are on a program just a few years, and probably count on being able to escape the impact zone of the scandal before the program craters. Again, cynical, but in my observation, true to varying degrees.

Re:Cost...

[nighthawk243]

Not even including the life insurance policies that most pilots would have. Back in 1996, it was about $250,000 when my father passed due to Benzene induced leukemia (since the USAF was Benzene happy at the time). That didn't even include the MGIB chapter 35 benefits and Tricare benefits I and my sister received. A quick look at the current policy shows it as $400,000. You could retrofit at least 4+ jets for the cost of killing one pilot.

Re:Cost...

[hawguy]

Not even including the life insurance policies that most pilots would have. Back in 1996, it was about $250,000 when my father passed due to Benzene induced leukemia (since the USAF was Benzene happy at the time). That didn't even include the MGIB chapter 35 benefits and Tricare benefits I and my sister received. A quick look at the current policy shows it as $400,000. You could retrofit at least 4+ jets for the cost of killing one pilot.

The pilot training costs dwarf insurance payouts. This article says it costs $2.8M to train a fighter pilot.

Re:Cost...

[idontgno]

Here, buy my patented tiger-repellant rock. $50.

Hey, if it saves you a $10,000 dollar funeral from a tiger attack, that's a $9,950 savings. Good ROI.

The difference is how realistically you assess the POI, as they call it in engineering-management-speak: Probabilty of Incidence. (Or "POO", Probability of Occurrence. I like that one. Anything that reminds me of all the crap in a big program's management and engineering environment makes me smile).

So anyway, if you convince yourself it's not going to happen, you save yourself $x dollars (more than $100k, I assure you) and you leave your time on the PM team with awards for keeping cost and schedule escalation under control. If you spend the $100k, you will never EVER be able to prove it was well invested, because the incident that doesn't happen because of your precautions is indistinguishable that the incident that doesn't happen because it was impossible from the outset.

Sorry. It's a numbers game. Something that's not absolutely not guaranteed to happen WILL NOT HAPPEN in order to justify not paying for prevention.

There's a corollary to this. I usually express it by paraphrasing an old saying in Safety Engineering: "Safety decisions are written in blood."

Re:Cost...

[mcgrew]

The pilots ejected, but each damned plane is worth a lot more than $100k. Spending dimes to save pennies.

Re:Cost...

[Andy Dodd]

Sadly, too often, the attitude is, "Oh, that problem isn't going to be as bad as the engineers are making it out to be."

Usually, in this case, the engineers are right, and the guy who made the bad decision is long gone, the engineers have to work shit-tons of overtime to deal with a massive fire that would've been far easier to fix years earlier.

It's typical American financial management - Anything more than a year or two out just doesn't matter to anyone any more.

Re:Cost...

[hawguy]

Here, buy my patented tiger-repellant rock. $50.

Hey, if it saves you a $10,000 dollar funeral from a tiger attack, that's a $9,950 savings. Good ROI.

The difference is how realistically you assess the POI, as they call it in engineering-management-speak: Probabilty of Incidence. (Or "POO", Probability of Occurrence. I like that one. Anything that reminds me of all the crap in a big program's management and engineering environment makes me smile).

If it can be shown that this $100,000 "fix" really would have prevented the problem, then the process they used to assess the replacement was faulty. It's easy in retrospect to say that they made the wrong decision, but the value in doing so is that the whole process used to arrive at the decision can be analyzed and improved.

Sorry. It's a numbers game. Something that's not absolutely not guaranteed to happen WILL NOT HAPPEN in order to justify not paying for prevention.

There's a corollary to this. I usually express it by paraphrasing an old saying in Safety Engineering: "Safety decisions are written in blood."

I don't think that's true - there is no guarantee that any particular piece of the hydraulic system will fail, yet there is redundancy built it to those systems because it's likely that it will happen. There's no guarantee that a plane will suffer damage such that it's uncontrollable, but not so damaged that a pilot can eject, but they still put expensive ejection seats into military jets. There's a cost-benefit decision for every project (sometimes the cost is weight or complexity, but it's still a cost). It sounds like they may have made the wrong decision in this case.

Re:Cost...

[wjousts]

From the summary:

"The Associated Press is reporting that years before F-22 stealth fighter pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit, before one struggled to breathe as he tried to pull out of a fatal crash"

Emphasis on the "fatal" part; i.e. he didn't eject.

Re:Cost...

[PRMan]

It's typical American financial management - Anything more than a quarter or two out just doesn't matter to anyone any more.

FTFY

Re:Cost...

[idontgno]

Ejection seats were an engineering answer to the conflict between an organic requirement (pilot must be able to bail out) and the increased speed of jet aircraft, which made it impossible to bail out safely by just opening a canopy and climbing out with a parachute. And I assure you, the need to resolve this conflict wasn't uncovered in a think tank of life-support system engineers saying "I bet the pilot won't be able to just climb out." Pilots were injured or killed bailing out of fast-moving non-jet aircraft in the propeller-power combat aviation era, and even then ejection seats weren't prevalent until jet-powered planes made it clear that bailing out unassisted was a non-survivable option for high-performance jet aircrews. This would be an example of the rule about including powered egress systems into jet warplanes being written in the blood of those who died trying to escape a fast-moving plane without an ejection seat.

Re:Cost...

[CubicleZombie]

Here, buy my patented tiger-repellant rock. $50.

Your $50 rock will cost $100,000 after CMMI and all the government certification processes.

And don't forget overhead.

Re:Cost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your tiger repellant rock analogy kinda falls flat, in that the SUMMARY ITSELF mentions a plane that went down... thus losing both a plane and a pilot... directly caused by the problem. Several pilots outright refuse to fly the aircraft.

So IF the problem were fixed, we'd already be up 180k, and one pilot (or multiple, if you count the several that previously refused to fly it now willing to fly).

How many tigers has your rock already repelled? Because unless you've got prior occurances of tigers attacking, where it's shown that the rock has a very distinct, direct scientific reason to work... then your analogy is useless.

Re:Cost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but our military doesn't really apply POI effectively anyways, or they wouldn't be spending $190 million each for airplanes that don't really match a likely combat scenario.

Re:Cost...

[rtb61]

But, and it one great big ginormous "BUT", when you get the numbers wrong you are fucked, well and truly "FUCKED". Especially when it's no real numbers you are talking about but guestimates. Well, they fucked up, the got the guestimate numbers wrong and now they are fucked. They should be hauled across the coals, publicly shamed and all associated with the erroneous numbers fired. You seem to have forgotten how that bit of the numbers game works and I assure that is the reality. Make you guesses, get it right fine, get it wrong then you are fucked and they got it wrong.

Doesnt sound realistic

[Anonymous Coward]

1 plane crash because of the issue would cause a cost equivalent to 1900 planes being fixed (assuming a 0 cost of life and training)
Assuming that not a single plane would crash because of this would be wrong
Probably some other reason that hasnt been dislosed behind the lack of a fix?

Odd solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution was to add a DoD toilet to each aircraft?

$100k?

[4wdloop]

"RAW-G recommended more tests and that the F-22’s oxygen delivery system be adjusted through a digital controller and a software upgrade."

So the $100kis average-per-plane of cost of testing side effects of more oxygen on pilots?

Tragic, but maybe understated

[idontgno]

No denying that shaving off so little and leaving the program and the warfighters at such known risk was a tragic mistake. But I don't know the genesis of the $100,000 cost for software mods. TBH, the Engineering Change Proposal process required to convey the modified requirements in order to change the software as directed may have required more than that much cost just in terms of specification and process costs. Add to that the uptick in formal requirements verification costs, and program schedule delays by adding yet another function point to the development schedule of an already-late program.

No matter what it cost, it would have been worth it, but keep an open mind as to whether a mere $.1 million upper over the program costs is credible.

Remember, this is a DoD development program regulated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations and DoD Systems Architecture and Engineering processes. There is no such thing as a cheap change to program baseline.

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, this is too little information.

Let me present a scenario: there were 1000 working groups set down that identified 1000 possible changes each coming in at 100,000 dollars, which would have added 100 million dollars to the cost of each plane if every one was approved.

We also say it is impossible to know precisely which proposal will lead to a crash if it's not followed, so either all had to be approved or all had to be rejected according to one consistent policy.

In that case, by rejecting all of them huge amounts of money were saved.

OR: maybe only 1 working group proposed only 1 change that was rejected. In this case, the policy of rejection obviously lost money.

Which of these applies? It's impossible to say, we don't have the information.

I wonder if there is a briefer way to state the principle above.

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[Anonymous Coward]

$100,000 PER PLANE. The English reading deficit of computer geeks never ceases to amaze me. Just finish reading the sentence! "Would have added about $100,000 to the cost of ---->each $190 million aircraft.---"

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds related to the "trials penalty" used in several fields when doing many statistical tests on the same data. If you set your significance threshold on one statistical test such that the probability of a false positive is 0.1%, then if you get a positive, you are pretty confident it is real. However, if you then go and perform a thousand tests (say, searching for a thousand different frequencies in some waveform data) and ask "did you find anything?" then the probability of a false positive to that question is (1 - 0.999**1000) = 0.63 = 63%! As a result, you have raise your significance threshold per test to a much higher level to ensure you don't get a false positive on the full set of trials.

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[fermion]

As mentioned elsewhere, the total cost would be more like 10 million. However, as mentioned above there are other costs. And seriously, estimates are often an order of magnitude off at the end of the day. So we would be looking at another 100 million. After all, if the project were not already drastically over budget, this would not be an issue. OTOH, when one is looking at nearly half a billion per aircraft, another 100 miliion does not seem so bad, and would have been ok in the end as it would likely not have increased the incremental cost and likely would have reduced the long term costs. Definitely a case of the military industrial complex trying to transfer wealth from the taxpayer to a few high level executives. Jobs for the masses indeed.

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[im_thatoneguy]

$100k might be 'cheap' but it also wouldn't have fixed the problem. The solution was evidently to fix the g suits not the oxygen system.

"The source of the issue, the Pentagon now says, is believed to be a faulty valve in the high-pressure vest that is worn by the pilots at extreme altitudes -- one that Air Force officials believe is constricting the pilots' ability to breathe."
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-confident-22-raptor-fighter-problem-solved/story?id=16845990#.UGYcBk3A98E

Re:Tragic, but maybe understated

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really all that shocking? They spent millions over budget to build a dinosaur like plane, compared to drones, and then the USAF said "it will take a 100k to fix the problem, are you out of your mind" (again considering they already spent ""well over budget"" which I would assume to be millions of dollars).

I wonder if these mistakes that the USAF or there contractors claim, are not intentionally going to cost millions dollars, in essence these million dollar mistakes are being diverted to other projects that congress or the "powers-that-be" would otherwise reject.

Seems (to me) it was just too cheap to add 100K to each plane to ensure pilots safety, if it would have been millions of dollars they probably would have had no problem adding/adjusting the needed fix to these aircraft.

Bad at estimates

[ZombieBraintrust]

Air Force physiologist who led RAW-G until he left the service in 2007, believes the cost of adjusting the oxygen flow would have added about $100,000 to the cost of each $190 million aircraft

The air force doesn't do anything for $100,000
Who take seriously the estimates a physiologist would give to an engineering problem.

Re:Bad at estimates

[Guspaz]

Per aircraft. They built 195 of them to date, so the program to fix the whole fleet would cost about $20 million.

Re:Bad at estimates

[Anonymous Coward]

vs. the cost of how many of these $190M airplanes that have been lost due to this issue?

Re:Bad at estimates

[Guspaz]

I'd like to think that saving the lives of the pilots would have been more important, but yes, there would have been a large monetary savings too.

I'm not saying it's expensive, I'm just pointing out that the GP's comment about the airforce not doing anything for $100k isn't relevant, because they're not doing this for $100k.

Re:Bad at estimates

[tru3ntropy]

All of you seem to be making the assumption that the F-22 was built for combat; when in reality the brief was to build the most expensive and elaborate auto-asphyxiation machine for congress, after all hookers can only cost so much. It has been an a-rousing success; speed, blowing stuff up, and giving it to the taxpayers 200 mil at a time that's the American way.

Not so fast

[rillopy]

If you read past page 1, what RAW-G warned about isn't even quite what had been happening recently:

"The link between oxygen saturation at lower altitudes and the recent spate of hypoxia-like incidents at high altitudes remains a matter of debate, and it is likely that there are other contributing factors."

But don't let that get in the way of headlines.

Costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at $100k per plane, it's far cheaper to not make that fix and simply loose a few $190M aircraft.

Um...wait..

Oh, nevermind, this is government accounting. Everything adds up.

Hard to believe

[llZENll]

On one hand you can say that arguing this now is ridiculous now that we know it is actually a problem, there are probably 100's of other things that were budget slashed and worked out fine. On the other hand the entire reason the plane costs 190 million is because every single transistor and bolt in the aircraft is backed by millions of hours of testing and fail-over systems and with such a high priority placed on safety and reliability it seems ludicrous that they would skimp on safety to the pilot. You have to draw the line somewhere though, turns out someone was wrong and is now a higher up, and in true CYA fashion the problem is buried rather than fixed.

Re:Hard to believe

[couchslug]

" On the other hand the entire reason the plane costs 190 million"

Much of that is actually do to poor economies of scale and changing airframe purchase numbers.

Computer analogy:
You need a chip fab to make CPUs. The cost per CPU is spread out over MANY CPUs, or not.

Working for Lockheed Martin, I saw this

[Anonymous Coward]

DO YOUR BEST WORK OUR YOUNG MENS LIVES RIDE ON IT:2010 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1898806&cid=34472826

* I wrote about it here a couple years ago, & it made me sick (but aware of HOW the "real world" actually does work) - what if it was YOUR (insert relative/loved one here) WAS RIDING ON IT?

At the time, it was one of mine doing so (surviving 2 wars now, he's part of that SAME "military industrial complex" now, & is a Bronze-Star decorated field-grade officer (Major))...

Folks?

It's "ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS" & keeping them out of YOUR POCKET as "normal folks" ( & enriching the "investment class 1%'ers" all the more...)

APK

P.S.=> That's what you GET when GREED, rules!

It's what you GET, when wealth distribution is SO "F'd UP" that MOST PEOPLE lives lives of "quiet desperation" alright:

Folks taking shit and listening to "managers" (who most have very little hands-on product knowledge in whatever it is they're making + selling) & their "plans" (merely more crookery coming from "boards of directors" & marketers)

Those "schemes" shit their companies up even MORE, meaning job cuts occur even more (while they offshore labor & import more, stopping the U.S. Citizen from having a job & spending their disposable income INSIDE our borders on product made here) - why?

Well - product quality in materials + payrolls? EASIEST "cost centers" to control is why...

... apk

Re:Working for Lockheed Martin, I saw this

[Anonymous Coward]

What does any of that have to do with blocking ads with a hosts file? You're out of your league boy.

Re:Working for Lockheed Martin, I saw this

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't mention hosts or ads. What's your off topic trolling for?

Re:Working for Lockheed Martin, I saw this

[Anonymous Coward]

I need that expressed in terms of a custom hosts file.

Re:Working for Lockheed Martin, I saw this

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to get on topic troll.

Look, let me see what I can do for you.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Well, Brigadier General, you are driving a hard bargain. Here's what I'm gonna do? The trim line and the auto dimming mirrors are going to be totally free. I am taking them off. Also free floor mats. Free. Totally free. I had already taken ADM and DPC off. Now what do you want me to do? Oxygen flow control for high altitudes? Man, I will go and talk to the manager. But you know what, he is not going to give in. These things are 100K, for Pete's sake. We can't keep throwing things in and still put food on the table for missus and kids, you know. Just consider it. The number I gave you, 190 million that is probably the lowest we are gonna go and we can't go any lower. OK? And another thing, this deal is off after 5PM today. We got a deadline and you shop around all you want. But if I am not getting the order in before 5PM I am not making quota, and this quarter is gone and we need wait for new pricing promotion data from the factory for the next quarter. OK General. 5PM today. Final. And this is the last trip I am making to the manager. And I am telling you. He is not throwing in the oxygen flow control for free. Definite. I'm positive.

ADM = Additional Dealer Markup

DPC = Deal promotional charges

Re:Look, let me see what I can do for you.

[nharmon]

Well, we've never done this before. But seeing as it's special circumstances and all, he says I can knock a hundred dollars off that Trucoat.

Re:Look, let me see what I can do for you.

[WGFCrafty]

"Remember, cruise control is NOT included with the cruise missiles."



The cruise just seems to happen, and the control is a state of mind.

$100k to restore an $190m machine? Deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We have a choice to either squander $xy billion in state-of-the-art F-22s to the aircraft graveyards, or increase their costs by 0.0005%."
"Meh, junk em'."

Re:$100k to restore an $190m machine? Deal.

[lightknight]

Mmmm. Where there's smoke, there's usually a fire. Makes you wonder what other things might be wrong with them.

Hindsight is 20/20

[Overzeetop]

This is, by the way, how a $90M aircraft quickly grows to be a $190M aircraft. It's not one thing that sends a project over budget, it's a series of cascading events each with a minor impact on the design which causes over-runs. It may very well be that this was a good idea overlooked, but there are literally thousands of these good ideas in a product cycle like a modern aircraft.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Anonymous Coward]

Scope creep is a bitch. :(

Although technically, this is a requirements noncompliance... So it isn't scope creep.

Now if you want to see scope creep at its worst, look at VH-71... The program went something like:

Navy: We need a new helicopter for the President. Here are the requirements.
Multiple contractors: Here is our bid
Navy: Hey Lockheed, we like your proposal
Lockheed: Thanks
White House: Hey, Lockheed and Navy - We need these additional features X, Y, and Z. We can't tell you why, but if we don't have them, The Terrorists Will Win!!! (Remember, this is during the Bush era, and anything Bush wanted, Bush got by claiming the terrorists would win if he didn't get it.)
Lockheed: It'll cost $shitton (because baseline changes are expensive)
White House: OK, can't let the terrorists win, no matter what the costs!

End result: Program MASSIVELY over budget. What was envisioned to be an improved presidential transport morphed into an overweight flying tank.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually hindsight isn't 20/20. That's a false statement most of the time.

Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dogfight? Dogfights are passe. A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit. Drones are relatively cheap - especially compared to the F-22.

Close combat with a drone? It's already here.

Let's face it, drones are a cheaper and safer alternative and they're getting better every day.

And planes like the F-22 have a serious defect: they are worthless against wave after after wave after wave of cheap planes. The F-22 would run out of bullets and missiles and while it's running away to get more, it'll get it's ass shot off or it's base blown to smithereens - LOTS of dead people.

And don't get me started on the disappointment of the F-35. Our current line up of planes are fine for current needs and we just need to replace our Air Force with all drones.

Our air force is not ready for future conflicts - we are still in this Cold War mentality. And if there is another big conflict, I'm afraid we will have a very rude awakening.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[autocannon]

Exactly right. The hundreds of thousands of fully functional, combat ready drones that Iran, China, and N. Korea each have will be the end of our air superiority.

The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars. The video game logic of this AC's post is downright sad.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[frosty_tsm]

The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars. The video game logic of this AC's post is downright sad.

The AC does raise a point: non-conventional air warfare. What if this (extreme and unlikely scenario) occurred: an enemy force launches an extremely large flight of propeller-powered fighter/attack aircraft. Sure, our F/A-18s and such might blow them away until they run out of missiles. The dynamics between propeller (slow but extremely maneuverable) vs jet (fast but makes bigger turns) might prevent a gun-range, outnumbering dog-fight from playing out in our favor. This is before you get into details such as propeller planes not generating as much heat (and might require radar missiles instead of heat).

Lots of questions that our military should be asking but probably aren't as they are busy building their super-weapons. Worked out so well the last decade...

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[dywolf]

Dogfight? Dogfights are passe. A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit. Drones are relatively cheap - especially compared to the F-22.

They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now.
Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.

Close combat with a drone? It's already here.

No, it's not.

Let's face it, drones are a cheaper and safer alternative and they're getting better every day.

They are also more limited, and less capable.

And planes like the F-22 have a serious defect: they are worthless against wave after after wave after wave of cheap planes. The F-22 would run out of bullets and missiles and while it's running away to get more, it'll get it's ass shot off or it's base blown to smithereens - LOTS of dead people.

Wave after wave doesn't happen. As it stands the F22 was designed to meet the goal of taking on 16 - 1 odds and winning, a requirement that was seen as unlikely already because the worst case plausible scenario is 8 to 1, with 4 - 1 being the most likely scenario. Combat flights never fly alone to start with, always in at least pairs, if not 4 together.

Simply put, your claim of "wave after wave" is a fine hypothetical, but simply does not exist in the real world. A combat flight of 4 F22 has the theoretical max capability to take on 72 enemy aircraft. That's 6 squadrons worth. An entire deployed F22 squadron of 12 planes could take on 192 enemy aircraft. the F22, by being stealth, is essentially the Rogue class of air dominance: it is better able to dictate the terms of the fight, striking more targets from a longer distance without warning than any potential enemy aircraft is capable of.

And it would get its ass shot off should it turn to run? How? You forget that the F22 is stealth? That its faster than any credible threat? It's countermeasures are second to none? That it is engaging the inital targets from farther away than they can? In order to shoot its ass off, you have to be close enough to do so, and able to get a target. The whole point is the F22 denies both possibilities. Even if the F22 ere surprised and forced into a close in dogfight if the chance should come to disengage it could clear the area much quicker than any enemy aircraft.

And don't get me started on the disappointment of the F-35. Our current line up of planes are fine for current needs and we just need to replace our Air Force with all drones.

Our air force is not ready for future conflicts - we are still in this Cold War mentality. And if there is another big conflict, I'm afraid we will have a very rude awakening.

The F35 is not designed for air dominance. It could perform such a role, by virtue of being more capable than most enemy combatants, but it's meant to be a multi-prupose, jack of all trades. The F22 is designed for one thing and one thng only: denying the enemy control of airspace. If you honestly think the current line up is fine, and the drones can do all, you're just another armchair quarterback second guessing the refs who've been doing it for years.

Plus its illogical to state that ouor current line up is fine, and then next say our air force is not ready....you cannot have it both ways. They are mutually exclusive statements.

Your entire post is 100% clueless.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[bhcompy]

What drone provides the capabilities of an A-10 or AH-64? What about drones that provide the capabilities of a F-22? What about drones that provide the capabilities of a P-47? Drones serve a purpose, but as of right now drones are very light aircraft carrying very small payloads. They're very useful for certain aspects of asymmetric warfare from a combat perspective, but they have a long ways to go in replacing manned aircraft simply because of what current-day manned aircraft can do that a drone cannot, and will have trouble doing(the latency alone from using satellites to drive the drones is enough to make them unfit for many combat roles today regardless of hardware).

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, yeah. I don't care how many propeller drones you scramble against F/A-18s, the speed and altitude discrepancies just never make it a contest. They're basically attack turtles - one is as useless as a dozen is as useless as a thousand.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[fahrbot-bot]

Simply put, your claim of "wave after wave" is a fine hypothetical, ... And it would get its ass shot off should it turn to run? How? You forget that the F22 is stealth? That its faster than any credible threat?

Perhaps the parent was imagining wave after wave of armed, enemy SR-71 Blackbirds...

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Jeng]

Lets say that China looses it's marbles and decides to go after the US, how quickly do you think they could start producing drones by the thousands?

Iran has already claimed to have reverse engineered the one they captured and are producing drones based on that, but I'm sure that is a load of bullshit considering their past statements.

The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars

Actually to help with jamming issues and such I think a drone mothership is the future of drone control. So a manned jet that controls all the other drones near it.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[fiannaFailMan]

This is before you get into details such as propeller planes not generating as much heat (and might require radar missiles instead of heat).

Depends on what's driving the prop. If it's a piston engine then there's probably not much heat, but I'd imagine a turboprop would produce plenty of heat.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said the attack turtles were targeting the rabbit? The point was with enough cheap units, it is conceivable to make air superiority governed by a few super-craft moot. And if you don't have (functional) air superiority anymore, you're now vulnerable to air attacks on ground targets, which would be a sudden shock to US forces that have grown accustomed to ruling the skies for so long.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

100 miles? The F14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat had the ability to track 24 targets and attack more than 4 targets simultaneously at a 60 miles distance (thats ~1975). Drones are good for dealing with an underdeveloped enemy but when it comes to other countries like Russia and China or even Iran, you need a pilot in the cockpit.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[zerodl]

Every time I hear about this jet it's never good. Biased or not. I think it was only made for just squeezing taxpayer money so Lockheed(?) Could get revenue. like other military contractors.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[TemporalBeing]

What you're proposing wouldn't make much difference in our air superiority as:
- the jets would be able to return/reload/resume faster than more drones could be brought up
- ammunition could be used far outside the drones range by the jets to bring the drones down
- the jets tactical abilities are far superior to the drones, making close range combat useless
- the jets would be able to take down the drones before the drones would be able to detect the jets
- the jets would be able to buzz the drones, creating deadly turbulence for the drones in ways that drone operators would (and software) would not be able to easily account.
- the list goes on

Now if you put up 10,000 drones it would become difficult to take them all down before some reached their targets. But more likely than not, you would take one down and have a chain taken out with it - either by the fire that took it down, or by it running into (and cascading into) numerous drones, etc. And gain, 1 F-18/16/22 would be able to easily take out several hundred of those drones by itself beyond the range of the drone. (The heat signature would not even half to come into play.) And that's not even going up to the carpet bombing techniques that could be used as well.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[tnk1]

Ask yourself this question, however. Why does one actually fly fighter jets? They can't hold airspace indefinitely, and there is nothing in the sky to "own".

Fighters are there to ensure air superiority, and that means stopping other aircraft like ground attack aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft from getting through to affect your ground forces.

So, send up a bunch of piston fighters? Well your fighter jets simply ignore them. Huh? How is that possible? Because the piston fighters can't stop your jet powered ground attack craft. They're too slow to intercept before the modern craft get into range of their superior weapons. If you use slow fighters against modern ground attack or recon craft, they are pointless. And so the standard answer that the modern fighter jet has for the piston fighter is to simply ignore them.

Waves of Red Chinese tend to work against you on the ground because, for the most part, they are just as fast as you are, and you are forced to stay in one place to hold a patch of ground. This allows their numbers to concentrate because you can't outmaneuver them. Modern fighters can select their targets based on threat level and outmaneuver any that they don't have the ammo to engage freely.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[ColdWetDog]

Do you have any idea how many Cessna 172's are located in the US? A 12 gauge shotgun and a 172 would have those things in pieces. It be like goose season.

That, my friends, is why we have the Second Amendment.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[bhcompy]

Do you remember what happened in Korea, World War 2, and(IIRC) Vietnam when those scenarios occurred? It didn't end well for the people in prop planes. The Me262 was ridiculously good in the air despite some very serious deficiencies(it was the first production fighter jet afterall), and most of the losses occurred during the very long takeoff and landing patterns, something that is not a problem on modern jets.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Sir_Sri]

Drones can do it all, so long as whomever you're fighting has no appreciable airforce, or is unwilling to risk any pilots or resources on the air component of operations.

Against a capably armed adversary is a whole other ball game. And the problem is that 10 years from now you don't know who you might be at war with, or for what. Whomever you're up against might have drones, might be able to jam drones, might be able to trivially shoot down most of the 'ground support' type drones etc. no one knows.

Against an enemy willing to shoot down or jam your communications satellites drones become a lot less useful. If the Russians or chinese figure out how to make a 'drone killer' kit for 10 grand that can shoot down reaper drones for 10 000 bucks suddenly they become a lot less useful. Trying to build an unmanned replacement for a full aircraft has some advantages (no pilot makes the plane a lot easier to design aerodynamically), but you're then either relying on AI or remote piloting to run the thing, and both of those come with their own problems.

They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now.
Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.

And when was the last air to air dogfight with guns? How often (as a percentage of air combat) does that happen? Most of the air -air engagements of the last 30 years have been missile driven, with a relatively poor 'missiles fired to planes killed' success ratio. The falklands, where the UK was using harriers and the argies using Vietnam era fighters is the last gun to gun dogfight I know of, but I'm by no means and expert and the documentation I can find doesn't distinguish between missiles or guns. And just because no one has done it lately doesn't mean they can't. The reason you still put guns on things isn't so much that you expect there to be gun level dogfights as the fact that you don't want to be caught with a knife at a gunfight so to speak.

We have to be careful here to distinguish between 'BVR' (beyond visual range) kills, and missles vs. guns, those are, I think, separate debates. Lots of air combat is becoming BVR, but just because it's visual range doesn't mean you don't use missiles.

As it stands the F22 was designed to meet the goal of taking on 16 - 1 odds and winning

That's a nonsense talking point if I ever heard one. What are you a conservative in the US Air force? You can design for whatever the hell you want, that doesn't mean it can actually do it in practice. You think the Brazillians, or the North Koreans or god knows who is going to show up to a fight with 20 year old aircraft that you can take down 16 to 1? Right. Depends on who you're up against. Pakistani F16 C/D's are a very different problem than a North Korean MIG 21, or a Saudi EuroFighter. In a 1v1 against a Eurofighter at long range I'd be thinking it's a lot more about the missiles than the airplane, and in that situation both aircraft don't look all that promising.

You forget that the F22 is stealth?

You think the F22 is stealth. That's cute. The russians and chinese have other ideas. And you know. Radar researchers.

Your entire post is 100% clueless.

And your post is about 25% naive and myopic talking points. It's like you've bought into your own countries propaganda about just how capable it is.

Virtually all military procurement is about trying to find the best platform for the types of problems you might face, and then getting the best thing you can with the money you have. That applies as much to Monaco and their 250 person military as it does to China and their 2.3 million. The US faces the unfortunate problem of needing to be capable of fighting virtually everyone in the world, so I agree, there's a place for dones, there's a place for manned aircraft, and there's a place for the rest of us to be capable to shooting both down.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[beh]

And planes like the F-22 have a serious defect: they are worthless against wave after after wave after wave of cheap planes. The F-22 would run out of bullets and missiles and while it's running away to get more, it'll get it's ass shot off or it's base blown to smithereens - LOTS of dead people.

Wave after wave doesn't happen. [...]

Are you really sure about that - I would agree maybe on the strictest terms: 'it DOES not happen' - the question is how long before it WILL happen?

It may not be 'wave after wave' - but with drones becoming 'cheaper', particularly if they were to be mass-produced - any idea how an advanced plane like the F22 will deal with a couple of dozen drones heading their way? Even if they managed to shoot down 8 or 10 - if those 8-10 drones still manage to get shots fired, they will likely cause enough problems for the advanced plane as well.

1:1 the drone might not have a chance - 5:1 the drones might still have problems.... 10-20:1, and there might be so many bullets and other ammo in the air around the more advanced plane that it will be shredded just as well - and likely with a good number of drones still left...

But, yes, right now, that might not be a big issue - YET...

From my point of view, the biggest problems we're getting with these drones, as that now that they're "proven" to work, it won't be long before some 3rd world dictators will get their hands on some... Can you imagine, how a citizens revolt like in Libya or now Syria would have ended with more and more autonomous weapons on the side of the dictator? I don't quite see drones 'switching sides' when seeing the misery they're bringing over their victims...

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[frosty_tsm]

For air superiority, you hit all the points. What about when the prop planes turn on the ground or naval forces (the scenario I suggested was F/A prop planes)?

Remember that the Bismark was caught because the British torpedo planes were too damn slow for their AA to hit.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm hardly a expert in radio, I suspect drones have a serious defect and it's jamming, not to mention drones would be chewed up instantly by autocannons like the 9K22 Tunguska.

You have to realize that one you start going cheaper, the defensive side can go even cheaper. You don't even need a 9K22, you can even use WW2 gear, a time when anti-aircraft cannons were relatively common, as opposed to the modern and rather expensive missile defense.

It's like watching Argentinian comments about Falklands Wars and commenting how they could win against the British if they used cheap drones... it just doesn't really make sense to me. The cheaper you go, the cheaper the defenders can go.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[frosty_tsm]

Except in maybe Europe in WW2, there were probably very few cases where 50 or 100 prop planes picked a fight with 2 or 4 jet fighters. The Me262 wasn't invincible in dog-fighting either; Chuck Yagger didn't know what it was when he shot it down.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[suutar]

a prop plane may not be fast enough to defend against jets, but it's fast enough to attack infantry or field installations (or probably cavalry)

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you can just jam the GPS and your swarm of drones is useless.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[camperdave]

What if this (extreme and unlikely scenario) occurred: an enemy force launches an extremely large flight of propeller-powered fighter/attack aircraft. Sure, our F/A-18s and such might blow them away until they run out of missiles. The dynamics between propeller (slow but extremely maneuverable) vs jet (fast but makes bigger turns) might prevent a gun-range, outnumbering dog-fight from playing out in our favor.

There was a short story something like that - some modern jet fighter slips back in time to WWI, and could not engage the enemy planes due to the speed difference, and the inability of the fighter jet's radar to get a lock onto the paper and wood enemy planes. It turned out that he didn't need to fire weapons at the warbirds of the era. All he needed to do was to buzz them while supersonic. They didn't have the speed or maneuverability to get out of the way, and their airframes were so relatively fragile, that they couldn't handle the shockwave. The planes would snap like twigs in the wake of the jet. And being supersonic, he could travel up and down the entire front lines in a matter of hours.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[osu-neko]

Lets say that China looses it's[sic] marbles and decides to go after the US...

Looses its marbles? Doesn't really require that to bring US and Chinese military forces into conflict. It's ultimately a question of just how much force we're willing to use to protect Taiwan when China is finally confident enough to risk asserting their claim with force. Which is just one of many potential flash-points the US has a stake in in the region.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Jeng]

They are currently confident that they could use force to claim Taiwan, but there are many reasons that they do not. Loosing is not one of those reasons.

There is no upside for China if they go and claim Taiwan by force.

There is no upside for China to go to war with the US.

If China was interested in using its military to solve political issues then China would be blockading Japan in regards to their current dispute.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[HaZardman27]

you're just another armchair general

FTFY

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[craigminah]

Wow, you make conclusions based on having no specs and assuming the piloted planes are FA-18 or F-22 or something else semi-modern and the drones are biplanes. You got spec sheets on these drones that don't yet exist? Who's to say the drones won't be as fast as a normal jet, just more maneuverable (due to no pilot to keep alive while turning)? Drones would rule the sky so long as an idiot doesn't program them.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[shiftless]

Obviously you're a moron, because if you have 1,000 drones attacking somewhere, how in the fucking world is 1 or 10 or even 20-50 aircraft going to shoot it down? We don't have thousands and thousands of jet fighters you know. There's only so many and only so many trained, qualified pilots.

It's just like the Panzer tanks vs Sherman back in WWII. Germans took their time producing top of the line, high quality tanks. Americans overran them with cheap ass Shermans stamped out by the thousands.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

The most advanced military in the world will be the only one flying jets with pilots in future wars. The video game logic of this AC's post is downright sad.

The AC does raise a point: non-conventional air warfare. What if this (extreme and unlikely scenario) occurred: an enemy force launches an extremely large flight of propeller-powered fighter/attack aircraft. Sure, our F/A-18s and such might blow them away until they run out of missiles. The dynamics between propeller (slow but extremely maneuverable) vs jet (fast but makes bigger turns) might prevent a gun-range, outnumbering dog-fight from playing out in our favor. This is before you get into details such as propeller planes not generating as much heat (and might require radar missiles instead of heat).
 

The propeller planes with their low flight speed get trivially shot down by SAMs that were developed to hit considerably harder targets. The Raptors just have to mop up the ones that were smart enough to bugg-out.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[GODISNOWHERE]

Actually, the first drone (U.S. Predator MQ-1) vs. manned fighter jet (Iraqi MiG-25) dogfight happened in 2002. At the time, the U.S. was using Predators to bait Iraqi fighters and then run (Israel had successfully done something similar against Egypt and Syria in the early 1980s using F-4s as bait). The MiG engaged the Predator, and the Predator, which was armed with Stinger missiles, did not run. Both both fired missiles at each other. The Predator missed; the MiG didn't. You can see a video of the dogfight here http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=76a_1173456397 [CBS video hosted on liveleak.com], and read about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Persian_Gulf_War [wikipedia.org].

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[farble1670]

A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit.

the dead people on the ground?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[WGFCrafty]

Simply put, your claim of "wave after wave" is a fine hypothetical, ... And it would get its ass shot off should it turn to run? How? You forget that the F22 is stealth? That its faster than any credible threat?

Perhaps the parent was imagining wave after wave of armed, enemy SR-71 Blackbirds...

Bombing blackbirds? Outdated, undergunned.

it's out

Nuclear powered drone space shuttle bombers is where it's at!

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Seraphim1982]

The Me-262 that Yeager shot down was preparing to land, it wasn't a dogfight.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[farble1670]

Who's to say the drones won't be as fast as a normal jet, just more maneuverable (due to no pilot to keep alive while turning)?

a drone that's as capable or more than a manned jet isn't going to be less complex, it's going to be MORE complex and hence more expensive.

that's the whole point that everyone is making. a wave of thousands (?) of drones would win by sheer number ... because drones are cheaper and you can produce more. do you think iran is going to build / buy an air force of 10,000 drones that can out fly an F-16/18/22?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. And as if our military isn't always looking for any excuse to plug any hole in our offensive and defense arrangements. We're already testing scramjet powered drone systems that travel at mach 6.

We're ahead of the plane-to-sam curve with stealth technology. Our navy is unmatched. Our air superiority fighters (despite the helmet problem) are unmatched. Our drone fleet is unmatched. Our bombers are unmatched. Our electronic warfare is unmatched.

And all along, we're spending $1-1.5 trillion a year on defense related shit. If someone is going to hurt us, it isn't going to be by way of an air war. It's be some asshole nobody driving a rental truck full of explosives into a crowded place.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Pinhedd]

Drones can be jammed

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[farble1670]

It may not be 'wave after wave' - but with drones becoming 'cheaper', particularly if they were to be mass-produced - any idea how an advanced plane like the F22 will deal with a couple of dozen drones heading their way? Even if they managed to shoot down 8 or 10 - if those 8-10 drones still manage to get shots fired, they will likely cause enough problems for the advanced plane as well.

how about a cluster missile that races in and then spawns 50 mini missiles that wipe out the drones en-masse? that's of course hypothetical (AFAIK), but if i can think of a countermeasure to your "wave after wave" of drones, i'll bet the military types are all over it.

if your answer is that the drones get faster, or have better counter measures, or more maneuverable, well ... now you're not talking about cheap things that can be used as cannon fodder any longer. you are talking about sophisticated, NOT mass produced, expensive aircraft. there's nothing about the fact that it's a drone that makes it cheap. it's cheap because it's slower, less maneuverable, and simpler.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[couchslug]

It's worth noting that such weapons systems ARE "loss effects multipliers" because they are so few.

They rely on generating many sorties (sorties are the purpose of combat aircraft) and when you lose ONE "Death Star" you lose a lot more than if you lose a less-expenseive, much more common fighter.

Our fighters are also most of our ground attack aircraft. Fewer airframes means less ordnance delivered downrange, even if it is very precise ordnance.

Life is full of tradeoffs, but since the purpose of an airframe is to deliver munitions, making the munitions smart enough to deliver themselves is preferable.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[gay358]

If there is really wave after wave of drones, it would be probably unnecessary to go after F-22. There is only limited number of drones the F-22 can destroy and all other drones will get past it. And the drones could be used to target airfields, aircraft carriers and tanker air crafts and if this is done in large enough scale, F-22 cannot operate in the area anymore, because it won't be able to refuel.

And many of the drones could be (and probably should be, because otherwise it would be very expensive) very simple planes. Many of them could be even even fake ones (=without enough intelligence to attack), that are used only to make F-22 to waste missiles and increase the change of the real drones of getting through.

USA typically uses aircraft carries and attacks distant countries. Even though aircraft carrier has lots of things, it has still finite amount of weapons to defend itself. It doesn't really matter if the attack against it is done using quite simple and inexpensive weapons, as long as there is just enough of them. And if there is large enough salvo of simultaneous missiles, you will be able to hit the ship even if the ship doesn't run out of defensive weapons, because the defensive system has upper limit on how many incoming missiles it is able to handle.

Having said all that, having so many drones would be quite expensive and it is probably easier and cheaper to attack the aircraft carriers under water (ballistic missiles might also work). But who knows about the future wars, as drones are getting more popular.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Of course, the whole "cloth-and-wood makes the plane invisible to radar" bit is bunk, the engines show up beautifully.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[readin]

They are currently confident that they could use force to claim Taiwan, but there are many reasons that they do not. Loosing is not one of those reasons.

There is no upside for China if they go and claim Taiwan by force.

There is no upside for China to go to war with the US.

If China was interested in using its military to solve political issues then China would be blockading Japan in regards to their current dispute.

It's not that China isn't interested in using military force - their arms build-ups particularly in terms of arms for use in conquering Taiwan combined with their threates clearly indicate that they are even if mainly for intimidation.

However if China wants to conquer Taiwan and/or the Senkakus and/or the Spratly Islands and/or parts of India, then China knows the best thing to do is wait. Every year the balance of power favors them more. Their technology is improving and their wealth is growing. Meanwhile the American government seems determined to spend itself into oblivion and/or servitude.

Meanwhile they have more ability to soften Taiwan's resistance by controlling large swaths of the Taiwanese media (either through direct ownership, by manipulating the ability of Taiwanese media corps to make money in China or by working with the current Chinese Nationalist government of Taiwan). As they're economic strength grows they can also weaken American support for Taiwan through similar methods and even by direct buys in American media (see the big advertisement about the Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands in today's Washington Post).

For now China is pursuing less violent means, but don't mistake patience for pacifism. All good predators are patient.

Besides they currently have a tool in acting as Taiwan's president

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[cheesybagel]

The first jet fighters weren't that great. Besides immense reliability issues their performance was not that awesome. The Hawker Tempest did 700 km/h while the Me-262 did 900 km/h. Maximum altitude and range were slightly better for the Hawker Tempest. The P-51 had similar performance to the Tempest.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words:
Stealth drone

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[QQBoss]

I agree with your points, but lets add the following:

Someone putting up 10000 drones has to have antennas for telemetry. It is infeasible of Iran or any other likely small antagonist only capable of asymmetrical warfare to defend the antennas unless they use most of the drones for that purpose, which defeats the purpose of having so many drones, since cruise missiles (or a sat kill or 2) will knock out a significant amount of all the comm links in the first 2-5 hours. An army marches on its stomach, everything else is C&C (command and control, not the game), and C&C is relatively easy to behead in asymmetric-only warfare countries with respect to anything high tech.

And if Iran or North Korea has drones capable of acting completely autonomously AND effectively in a combat situation, what are the odds that the country they are fighting asymmetrically didn't have that capability first?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[peragrin]

falklands, balkans, heck even the persian golf war(1991) all had gun firing dogfights.

granted BVR(beyond visual range) attacks are most common. dogfighting skills and guns won't go away.

Even the F-22 has guns built into it.

The F-22 is stealth but not perfect, and I would hope the russians have other ideas, but since China is trying to build their own version of the F-22 I would have to say your wrong on that.

The question is it stealth enough to fool the missile's and enemy plane's radar? that is all that is really needed.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

A combat flight of 4 F22 has the theoretical max capability to take on 72 enemy aircraft.

How much do 72 Cessnas cost? Less than the F22s, for sure.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

Have you ever heard of AAA?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

No, they'll instead be a nice target practice for AAA defences on the ground. They specialize in mass raping of slow and low flying targets.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

That depends. On one hand, the computer systems will be exceptionally complex. On the other hand cockpit and all life support systems can be eliminated, control systems can be decentralized and aircraft itself doesn't have to limit itself to human tolerance levels by design. You could build something like eurofighter that could actually push the limits of the air frame in terms of maneuverability.

So yes, in some terms it would be more complex (command and control computers). In others, it could be much less complex (command and control systems, life support). It's a bit of a mixed bag.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

And it's slow enough to be blown out of the sky by mobile AAA unit attached to field installations. About the only way it would have not to is to sit low and have someone else designate targets for it, like A-10s do now. Which would require fire control data providing support aircraft, which will be killed by fighters.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[camperdave]

I didn't write the story. Perhaps he only had heat seeking missiles.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[AsmCoder8088]

And you don't think the engine gives off heat?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you even imagine the terrible destruction 1 fighter plane would do back then if every hardpoint was fully decked out with sidewinder missiles. That would be a terrible thing to see as the enemy.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You think first generation air-to-air missiles have anything to do with this discussion? Newsflash.. we've come a LONG way in the past 60 years.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

as a drunk mechanical engineer, I think you're full of shit.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[DMUTPeregrine]

In WWI losses were pretty much always very heavy. An F/A-18, SU-27, or a modern strategic bomber (B-1 Lancer, B-52, TU-160, etc) would be far scarier, because it would be nearly unkillable and able to attack ground targets with ease. It would also be much easier to rearm with unguided bombs, as opposed to guided missiles of a fighter.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like paper-rock-scissors... Cloth defeats radar, supersonic flyby defeats wood.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[ppanon]

Iran claims to have already produced drones using info from the US drone they captured a while back .

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[metacell]

But... isn't the cost of the pilot a huge part?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[The Grim Reefer]

As it stands the F22 was designed to meet the goal of taking on 16 - 1 odds and winning

That's a nonsense talking point if I ever heard one. What are you a conservative in the US Air force? You can design for whatever the hell you want, that doesn't mean it can actually do it in practice. You think the Brazillians, or the North Koreans or god knows who is going to show up to a fight with 20 year old aircraft that you can take down 16 to 1? Right. Depends on who you're up against. Pakistani F16 C/D's are a very different problem than a North Korean MIG 21, or a Saudi EuroFighter. In a 1v1 against a Eurofighter at long range I'd be thinking it's a lot more about the missiles than the airplane, and in that situation both aircraft don't look all that promising.

Frankly, against F-16's, 16-1 probably isn't unreasonable. F-16's are "jack of all trades", not superiority fighters. An F-18 would be a much better match. But even those have performed rather poorly in exercises against F-22s. Twelve F-22s managed to take out 144 F-18's in exercises. AN F-16 did manage to take out a raptor during one exercise, but that was because the F-16 was "re-spawned" almost instantaneously after the F-22 shot it down. I'm pretty sure aircraft don't get to do that in real life. I'm not as familiar with Eurofighers, but they are more of a F15/F16 class airframe. So, no I don't think they'd be much of a match either. The Eurofighter did pretty well recently in close in dog fighting. But the F-22 was also under restriction due to this issue. I'd like to see how that would go once this problem is resolved. Still, it's not very likely a F-22 is going to be in a situation like that either.

One of the huge advantages that F-22s have that no one seems to mention is an incredible capability to work in conjunction with other F-22's and other platforms. So not only do they have the ability to link fire control with each other, they can also target enemies for other aircraft. Since we're talking hypotheticals sometime in the future. One of the hopeful platforms to link these to is the Boeing YAL-1. So before and/or after they've used their own on-board ordnance, they could be cooking up drones for dinner. Or launching missiles from another platform. Or targeting for AAA.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[ultranova]

On one hand, the computer systems will be exceptionally complex.

Not necessarily. The low-level control systems are already there in the form of Fly-by-Wire. Sensors, in the form of radar and Friend-or-Foe recognization is there too. So's navigation.

What's missing is a backup visual sensor - and computer vision is a quickly advancing field - and an overall control system. But that overall control system doesn't necessarily need to be more complex than a relatively advanced video game AI.

Anyway, the real advantage of a drone fighter is that you're limited by your industrial capacity, not your pilot pool, and assembly lines are easily expanded. And on darker side, since drones don't have humans in them, they happily perform any atrocity their mission planners can think of without being bothered by a conscience, then or later.

I think that last point is the real reason for the push to automated armies. In these times of increasing economic disparity, unrest is bound to follow sooner or later; and when it does, the leaders want to be able to stomp it out, and that requires an army that won't hesitate to shoot its own civilians.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

> We don't have thousands and thousands of jet fighters you know.

Well actually you do have thousands and thousands of jet fighters :)

USAF: 2,402 fighters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force#F_.E2.80.93_Fighters)
NAVY: 922 fighters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_military_aircraft)

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[craigminah]

That's what I was trying to say...thanks. I think the elimination of the life support functions would significantly lighten/shrink and change the design of a fighter. Coupled with more maneuverability due to no need to limit g-forces due to pilot passing out could make drone better at dog-fighting v. piloted aircraft.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Shadowmist]

Do you have any idea how many Cessna 172's are located in the US? A 12 gauge shotgun and a 172 would have those things in pieces. It be like goose season.

That, my friends, is why we have the Second Amendment.

Because Redcoats and Indians flying Cessnas were a major threat to the American colonies.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[flaming error]

You say "our military" as if it were on our side. It kind of nominally is, but not really.

Not since Germany declared war on us has it been used to defend our territory. Not since WWII has it been used in a constitutionally compliant, congressionally declared war. Not since WWII has it been used to protect any "American interests" our founders would recognize.

Instead of being on our side, it is sucking us dry - running up deficits, causing inflation, pissing away goodwill others used to have for us, killing off our bravest citizens, and giving delusions of grandeur to the very people it exploits.

That "$1-1.5 trillion a year on defense related shit" isn't coming from money we have on deposit, it's an unauthorized loan from Generation Y. You know, the first generation of college grads that can't find jobs.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

- General Smedley Butler

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

-General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[farble1670]

someone quoted $2.8M to train a pilot for a $190M aircraft. so yes, it's not peanuts. it's still not clear that it would add to the cost though. drones don't fly themselves today, they have operators that must be trained. the more sophisticated the drone, the more the training will cost.

 

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You either need 10,000 runways to get all those drones in the air simultaneously, or much more likely, a few dozen runways and a lot of time to scramble them, while the airborne ones loiter and use up fuel waiting for all the rest so they can all go off on their swarm attack together. This thread has a whole lot of people who play a lot of video games and not many actual defense aerospace engineers.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Sir_Sri]

I don't know of any air to air engagments since the falklands that actually involved guns. (Discounting A10 ground attack stuff). Any idea on where I can find a source? Everything I find says 'dogfight' but dogfight includes missile attacks.

The question is it stealth enough to fool the missile's and enemy plane's radar?

For a missile that's a trivial problem to overcome, since you don't need to be radar guided. Aircraft... less so.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Sir_Sri]

Frankly, against F-16's, 16-1 probably isn't unreasonable.

Depends on the missiles you put on an F16.

I'm not as familiar with Eurofighers, but they are more of a F15/F16 class airframe.

The Eurofighter is this odd half step above an F15 but below an F22. Granted it's about a third the price of the F22, and that's part of the point.

Still, it's not very likely a F-22 is going to be in a situation like that either.

Against a Eurofighter? I'm sure someone in the US government thought the same when they sold Iran F14's in the 1970's. For all the bluster over China you never know where the next revolution or revolt will happen, and India, Pakistan, a major breakup of Europe, god knows what in various US allies in the middle east could make F22 vs top of the line other aircraft a very real possibility.

One of the huge advantages that F-22s have that no one seems to mention is an incredible capability to work in conjunction with other F-22's and other platforms.

I'm not sure it's incredible. It's better than older electronics suites but nothing other countries can't do as well. But sure, that capability makes for some really interesting opportunities, a aircraft as a C&C platform for drones with a wide variety of ordinance for example completely transforms how one thinks about air power.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Moondevil]

What if this (extreme and unlikely scenario) occurred: an enemy force launches an extremely large flight of propeller-powered fighter/attack aircraft. Sure, our F/A-18s and such might blow them away until they run out of missiles. The dynamics between propeller (slow but extremely maneuverable) vs jet (fast but makes bigger turns) might prevent a gun-range, outnumbering dog-fight from playing out in our favor.

There was a short story something like that - some modern jet fighter slips back in time to WWI, and could not engage the enemy planes due to the speed difference, and the inability of the fighter jet's radar to get a lock onto the paper and wood enemy planes. It turned out that he didn't need to fire weapons at the warbirds of the era. All he needed to do was to buzz them while supersonic. They didn't have the speed or maneuverability to get out of the way, and their airframes were so relatively fragile, that they couldn't handle the shockwave. The planes would snap like twigs in the wake of the jet. And being supersonic, he could travel up and down the entire front lines in a matter of hours.

I imagine that you wanted to say WW II.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

I'm not talking about control systems. These can actually be reduced. I'm talking about command and control computers, which refers to systems that are in charge of computing the complex actions needed by the plane (essentially role of the pilot), because in combat scenario you're not going to be getting any kind of a control signal from outside - it will be jammed.
Actual movement of control surfaces and throttle can be indeed handled by flight control systems, essentially fly-by-wire, which will actually be less important because of both computing speed likely available in the computer running the complex algorithms responsible for behaviour (which is why we need fly-by-wire now - human to machine interface and human brain are not efficient enough to handle the control actions needed by modern aerodynamically unstable airframes).

You can notice it if you read my post to the end.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

There's no question about drone being better suited for dog fighting. Modern fighters have long been limited in maneuverability by human acceleration tolerance limits rather then airframe ones. Eurofighter could probably pull enough g-forces to cause significant permanent damage to its pilot while remaining intact and airworthy. Problem is that human body simply can't handle the associated stress, so there's no point at pushing aircraft design over these limits.

Remove the organic control center and replace it with a silicon chip and you can conceivably push your aircraft as far as airframe can handle. This would be a game changer - your current acceleration limiter essentially gets removed.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[camperdave]

And you don't think the engine gives off heat?

Yes, but completely the wrong profile for a missile designed to take down a modern fighter. It may simply see the engine as a diffuse IR blob, or as countermeasures. It certainly wouldn't be the hot, point-source of a jet engine.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[camperdave]

Of course, I could be wrong.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I could be wrong.

I think that the missile is hitting a flare in the tail of the plane. Exhaust from the engine is not usually visible, and furthermore, is vented just aft of the engine cowling, not at the tail of the plane. So, if the missile were tracking the engine heat, the explosion would b from front to back, not back to front.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Rich0]

how about a cluster missile that races in and then spawns 50 mini missiles that wipe out the drones en-masse? that's of course hypothetical (AFAIK), but if i can think of a countermeasure to your "wave after wave" of drones,

That's a great idea. Why don't we give that cluster missile a special name. How about "drone?"

You're simply suggesting that the solution to drone warfare is to deploy drones - not manned fighters. You're just arguing about basing the drones on an aircraft rather than a base on the ground.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Rich0]

Dogfight? Dogfights are passe. A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit. Drones are relatively cheap - especially compared to the F-22.

They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now.
Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.

Sure it was wrong in the 50s and 60s. I have yet to see proof that it is still wrong today. The Apple Newton was a failure, the Apple iPad was a success. One was too far just ahead of its time.

Back in the 50s and 60s missiles had very short range and were not reliable, radar wasn't all that reliable, and command/control was poor so you couldn't be sure of what you were shooting at. Today if you are the target of a missile that was fired within effective range, then it is VERY likely that you won't have a plane fairly soon.

Sure, the F22 has stealth, but who is to say that the drones it engages won't have stealth as well? It has to be easier to make a small drone radar invisible than a big manned aircraft.

As far as numbers go - an F22 costs $200M. Suppose you can build a much less capable drone for $100k. For the same investment an opposing force could field 2000 drones for each F22 the US fields. Suddenly that 72:1 hypothetical kill ratio isn't all that great.

I wouldn't argue with the fact that the F22 is the best air superiority aircraft around today. I think it is well up to dealing with today's threats. However, I wouldn't say that 10 years from now there isn't much risk that this will change. I also wouldn't say that the F22 was the best possible use of the funding that went into it - perhaps sinking all that money into air superiority drones would have had much better results.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[gmhowell]

A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit.

the dead people on the ground?

If they're dead, even if they care, it's hard for them to register a complaint.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Hognoxious]

And it's slow enough to be blown out of the sky by mobile AAA unit attached to field installations.

Odd then that the Douglas Skyraider stayed in service so long.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Hognoxious]

I'd guess a piston engine has a much smaller heat signature than a jet.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets[sic] say that China looses[sic] it's[sic] marbles and decides to go after the US...

FTFY.

If you're going to be a pedantic ass at least try to do it properly.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[shiftless]

How did that work out for Germany? What about Japan?

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Luckyo]

Klystron radars and expensiveness of short range radar coupled with lack of computer systems kind of sucked. Humans lack the accuracy of a modern CIWS weapon.

What do you think CIWS like Phalanx or Kashtan, or more mobile russian ZSU models. You can look at how well that worked for US when they tried to assault Baghdad with low flying slow Apaches instead of making an anti air clearing sweep first due to being oversaturated with targets in 2003. Apaches couldn't even get close to targets due to massive amount of anti air fire put out by AAA and while this wasn't really advertised due for obvious propaganda reasons, various sources that sourced info from mechanics and pilots quoted that over half of apaches got damaged in some way when they tried to breach the AAA perimeter.

Slow loitering weapons systems like modern attack drones work very well when there is no AAA or SAM defences covering the area. They're about as useless as an Apache in flat desert against targets covered by such weapon systems however. You need a proper anti-air strike that destroys any such installations and mobile units before you deploy your "drone swarm" because modern AAA can essentially swat drones out of the sky as fast and as long as its ammo stores hold.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[NelsChristian]

Because the piston fighters can't stop your jet powered ground attack craft.

That sort of depends on what rockets and radar they carry. Certainly, the slow but numerous drones aren't going to get into a cannon fire dog fight, but if they can detect the manned fighters, a flood of missles might difficult for the fighter pilot to evade. I wonder how much our opponents are spending on swarm intelligence for such a plan.

Quantity has a quality all it's own.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[TemporalBeing]

Wow, you make conclusions based on having no specs and assuming the piloted planes are FA-18 or F-22 or something else semi-modern and the drones are biplanes. You got spec sheets on these drones that don't yet exist? Who's to say the drones won't be as fast as a normal jet, just more maneuverable (due to no pilot to keep alive while turning)? Drones would rule the sky so long as an idiot doesn't program them.

I don't have to assume that to go with my analysis above.

Consider that the drones need to be able to be controlled by human as AI technology is not good enough for C2 to be done on-board - it has to be remote controlled, and that in itself makes some limits - sure the drone may have a lot of functionality and do things in a very limited way, but when it comes to fighting a human will still have to be in control, which limits reaction time (as communications have a certain latency to them by nature), and also introduces a major issue - jamming of the comms.

Consider also that without a global satellite based communications network, the drones would be limited in range by how far the comms could work. Thus far, only the US, China, and perhaps Russia have such capabilities - something that is a far, far cry from any middle east country.

Remember too that a US drone was taken by (i) jamming its comms, and (ii) providing an alternate GPS signal to make it go where they wanted it to safely and allow further study. Drone technology just isn't good enough (even at the cutting edge) for anything else yet - and we're probably taking decades away for it to get there without a major AI break-through.

So yes, the drone could be just as fast or faster than a normal jet, but they'd still have some very big limitations that would neutralize that issue when it comes to combat, especially given the capabilities of an F16/18/22, as well as other aircraft available to the US and its allies - even to China, North Korea, and Russia.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Chrontius]

Or they'll be launched with expendable solid rocket boosters, which means you can ripple-fire the entire mess of drones in about 30 seconds. The only thing you need to be careful about is not jettisoning the booster while you're over anything expensive - like other drones, or the C&C antenna array.

Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies.

[Lucractius]

I can easily see this actually having serious merit and I'm surprised its not being adequately explored, I say its not explored simply because you cant hide the thousands of full size planes required for this to work.
High efficiency propeller driven planes based on WW2 era designs with some minor modern improvements likely in materials & engines + Modern sensors + Drone AI/Remote control.
Picture 10000 highly maneuverable spitfires/mustangs/zeros armed with 1 or 2 modern missiles on each plane, could probably ditch the guns too since they wouldnt be as useful but that would need testing to determine the effectiveness of the coordinated fire of dozens of older robot planes vs a modern plane. each plane doesnt need more than 2 missiles since if your putting 12 or more robots up for every 1 actual fighter pilot the enemy had, then your able to distribute the missiles out and accept that you may lose 4 or 5 planes for each F-22, the remaining planes having plenty of time to target and launch on the F22 since they occupy more airspace, provide a greater range of forward orientation, and have a smaller turning circle, so as long as one plane of the formation (likely more could) can turn to track your enemies shiny F-22 fast enough (basic aerodynamics says they would be by virtue of relative stall speeds \, but i wont assume it 100% true they can turn fast enough) and that the planes sensors and the missiles sensors can track long enough that they can launch with reasonable accuracy.

Think of them like a cloud of flying sentry turrets that costs so little, that there are 50-100 of them with missiles, for every 1 plane your rocking up with...
I can see this standing a very very good chance against modern fighters.

How much?

[Minwee]

the cost of adjusting the oxygen flow would have added about $100,000 to the cost of each $190 million aircraft.

That's pretty cheap for an aircraft that cost $412 million a piece. And that's just development and production costs, not even touching TCO.

Lockheed-Martin is full of people who didn't want to be the one guy who tacked an extra $100,000 onto the already astronomical cost of the F-22 and then had to justify it. The buck got passed until it was fumbled, and now here we are with a fighter that has killed more of its own pilots than any enemy.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

the cost of adjusting the oxygen flow would have added about $100,000 to the cost of each $190 million aircraft.

That's pretty cheap for an aircraft that cost $412 million a piece. And that's just development and production costs, not even touching TCO.

Lockheed-Martin is full of people who didn't want to be the one guy who tacked an extra $100,000 onto the already astronomical cost of the F-22 and then had to justify it. The buck got passed until it was fumbled, and now here we are with a fighter that has killed more of its own pilots than any enemy.

How do you think it got to be that expensive in the first place?

Not because anyone set out to spend literally hundreds of millions per place.

They got to be that expensive because of lots of little changes just like this one.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

it got to be that expensive because EVERYBODY that looked at this project said.
That's pretty cheap for an aircraft that cost $412 million a piece.

Kind of like how we got to $16,000,000,000,000.

gives new meaning to the phrase 640,000 ought to be enough for everyone huh?

$16,000,000,000,000.
you know were fucked right?
Do ya?

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lockheed-Martin is full of people who didn't want to be the one guy who tacked an extra $100,000 onto the already astronomical cost of the F-22 and then had to justify it....

It's really not Lockheed-Martin's call what to put into an aircraft. Lockheed-Martin's engineers can make recommendations, but it really comes down to the project managers from the Air Force side of the house.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

The really funny part is that there is no enemy for the F-22. It was conceived for last century's wars (secondary purpose). Still, it keeps the pork flowing just nicely (primary purpose).

so, let me get this straight...

[roc97007]

For an increased cost of roughly .05%, the pilot gets to breathe. Seems like money well spent.

Re:so, let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

"For an increased cost of roughly .05%, the pilot gets to breathe. Seems like money well spent."

Until you realize we have these nifty new auto-pilots that don't need to breath...

Re:so, let me get this straight...

[roc97007]

"For an increased cost of roughly .05%, the pilot gets to breathe. Seems like money well spent."

Until you realize we have these nifty new auto-pilots that don't need to breath...

I'd argue that they're not *that* nifty, yet.

Cost/benfit analysis (safety doesn't sell)

[fustakrakich]

Lee Iaccoca must be advising the Air Force...

Article is incorrect, editors ignorant, news at 10

[SplashMyBandit]

The problem was not the aircraft and was not the oxygen flow. The solution was found to be overinflation of the pilots upper G-suit ("Combat Edge") that had been occuring for years and in aircraft such as the F-16 and F-15 but no on noticed it then.

Here is a link to the USAF describing the problem and fix:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-24/oxygen-problem-with-f-22-now-solved-pentagon-s-little-says.html

As a secondary precaution the F-22 is also having a particle filter removed from the air supply (the topic of this Slashdot article) but this is not the primary fix.

The "Raptor cough" which (nugget?) pilots got spooked about is actually common for pilots flying all high-performance jets after performing high-G manuevers. It just happens that the performance of the F-22 is good enough that a lot of these maneuvers can be performed before energy bleeds off enough you can pull them (that is, the Raptor can use them to end nearly all Within Visual Range training encounters - although lesser aircraft occasionally beat less experienced Raptor pilots from time-to-time, which opponents of the Raptor love to crow about). The medical name of this acceleration-induced coughing is.
acceleration atelectasis
Please refer to: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/combat-edge-anti-g-ensemble-might-be-causing-raptors-oxygen-woes-372642/

So please could everyone stop with the media-included scaremongering and stop blaming the F-22 or invoke spooky and mysterious illnessed that pilots of that aircraft are afflicted with (ignoring that fact that the G-suit issue and acceleration atelectatis occurs on other aircraft, just less often because the F-15 and F-16 are relatively lower performance [lol, never thought I'd say that] compared to the F-22).

Now you whippersnappers get off my flight deck!

There are many questions here

[MyLongNickName]

One of those questions: why in the hell do we need to spend $190M on a plane to fight a war that we'd never get in if we didn't have jackasses running our country that only get in these fights because they have the biggest stick.

I think I answered my own question.

Re:There are many questions here

[ColdWetDog]

Because the lead time for these things is so long that you don't know what kind of jackass behavior politicians in the future will pull off.

Contingency planning.

Re:There are many questions here

[squiggleslash]

Perhaps that's the solution. If the US Military was cut to the bone, just about able to defend the US against an attack from Canada or Mexico but nothing more, then perhaps we'd have a few less stupid, evil, unnecessary wars and our politicians would be forced to actually help the country for once.

Re:There are many questions here

[MyLongNickName]

A "solution" for you and me is a "problem to be avoided" for those in power.

Atlas Drugged

[PopeRatzo]

It's time to get the government out of our military.

Re:Article is incorrect, editors ignorant, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

That.

Also, the F-22 /already has/ a backup oxygen supply, contrary to the assertion made by this article. The fixes proposed in the $100K/per retrofit were over-priced ($200 worth of parts and 2 hours of labor at $100K?), and would have created unnecessary redundancies. Contrary to popular belief, the Pentagon does, occasionally, know what the frack it's talking about.

I'm glad they stopped F-22 production

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad they stopped production at the ~187. I would have preferred stopping at 100, but the Feds are incompetent. Now, those expensive fighters can get some real world trials, and bug fixes can be made before large scale production resumes.

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

[Noughmad]

I see the US military complex is making good use of the SCC strategy: introduce lots of little flaws, so that nobody realizes they don't need the product anyway.

Impersonating me now (or, trying to)? Please...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, and I just LOVE getting anally violated by large women.

APK" - by Anonymous Coward A SCUMBAG TROLL TRYING TO "IMPERSONATE ME" & TO WEAKLY "DISCREDIT ME" on Friday September 28, @04:22PM (#41493225)

See subject-line above & this, troll: GROW UP!

* You truly have "issues"...

( & you FAIL also, of course, since I "caught you in the act", red-handed!)

APK

P.S.=> However, your particular brand of idiocy here, in *trying* to "impersonate" me? Not a first, & not even ORIGINAL...

... apk

$100k x 122 = $12.2M

[oneiros27]

Wish I had the mod points ... so hopefully this message will prompt others to mod you up, rather than the grandparent who likely posted w/out fully reading the article (or summary).

Re:$100k x 122 = $12.2M

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, we're spending $2 billion per week in Afghanistan right now.

In the Air Force, someone will get promoted for saving $50/week buying cheaper toilet paper, while someone else will get promoted for getting a $2 million widget purchase approved.

The money for these things come from the American taxpayer, it is seriously like playing with monopoly money.

If a working group recommendation was ignored, it was because it would take several years to get the paperwork through the stiffling bureacracy, or because it would inconvenience the career of someone looking to polish a turd. I can almost guarantee that the money involved would be a non-issue.

100k$ in the Grand Scheme of Things[tm]

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says the fix would've added 100k$ (yeah, that's kilobucks) to the cost of a 190M$ aircraft. Let's assume more pessimistic numbers, i.e., that one aircraft actually costs only 180M$ and the fix cost 200k$ (double!). That still results in a fix that amounts to well under 1% of the total cost of the aircraft. It's almost rounding error.

Look at it another way. There's fewer than 200 F-22s out there. If the fix really cost only 100k$, that comes out to about 20M$ in total. That's a fraction of the amount that some bank execs get for annual bonuses. Is it really too much money to spend on pilot safety?

what I want to know is

[Khashishi]

How can it cost 100K to tweak the oxygen flow to a mask?

Dogfighting drones

[gay358]

In near future, there will probably be drones which are meant for dogfighting. And drones can have at least one advantage over traditional fighters: tolerating g-forces better than what human is ever able to do -- even with g-suit on.

On the other hand, traditional fighters have other advantages. Drones may be more vulnerable to all kinds of jamming -- and you are allowed to use laser to blind the cameras and other sensors of drones, but you are not allowed to use laser which are meant to (permanently) damage the eyes of a fighter pilot.

190 Million!!

[SlashDev]

190 million dollars for each fighter plane, think about that for a moment...

Re:Article is incorrect, editors ignorant, news at

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we know that the pilots were performing high-g maneuvers before choking? That could be a cause, but likely not the only one.

Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck do you care? Get the fuck away from me!

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got issues. Seek professional psychiatric help.

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me an address where I can send you the bill. I could use some good drugs.

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3151607&cid=41500333

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Return to sender. Address unknown.. Try again

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3151607&cid=41500333

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry... If you want me to comply with your request, you gotta pay. There's no free lunch

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3151607&cid=41500333

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be that guy, what's his name? HomelessInLaJolla... yeah, that's it.. Well, carry on then.

Re:Try to keep up, idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3151607&cid=41500333

Pintos

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'm old, but why is it the first thing I thought of when I read this was the $5 gas tank fix for the Ford Pinto that Ford ignored..

Russia's system is much cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not buy a fully tested and reliable system from the Russians? they're selling one piece for a pound of herring.

Re:Russia's system is much cheaper

[abassim]

A Chinese system is a better barter, they offer one for the same with extra unit free. More over it is labeled Made In USA.

Re:Modern fighter jet lands in WWI

[cstarjewel]

Yes, in my youth I read that story too. It came to an abrupt end when wreckage from one of those high speed passes got sucked into the engine intake and the resulting FOD downed the supersonic fighter for good. The pilot safely ejected, but was stranded in the past.