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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
ADM = Additional Dealer Markup
DPC = Deal promotional charges
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!