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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."
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.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.