Slashdot Mirror
The Feathered Threat To US Air Superiority
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mark Thompson writes in Time Magazine that Air Force pilots flying the T-38 Talon can rest easy, knowing that their cockpit canopy can survive hitting a 4-lb. bird at 190 mph. Unfortunately, the Northrop supersonic jet trainer has a top speed of 812 mph. 'To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force fast enough to make a bird strike lethal, and with a windshield too flimsy to deflect one,' wrote one Air Force pilot. Midair collisions between birds and Air Force aircraft have destroyed 39 planes and killed 33 airmen since 1973. That's why the USAF is seeking comments to 'identify potential sources, materials, timeframe, and approximate costs to redesign, test, and produce 550 T-38 forward canopy transparencies to increase bird strike capability.' The move follows a T-38 crash on July 19 in Texas triggered by a canopy bird strike. 'The current 0.23 inch thick stretched acrylic transparency can resist a 4-pound bird impact at 165 knots which does not offer a capability to resist significant bird impacts, and has resulted in the loss of six (6) aircraft and two pilot fatalities,' the service acknowledged. 'Numerous attempts since 1970 were made to evaluate existing materials and redesign a transparency that could withstand a bird impact of 4 pounds at 400 knots.' Previous efforts have foundered because they'd require expensive cockpit modifications to the twin-engine, two-seat supersonic jet. 'Although it would increase the level of bird impact protection,' the Air Force said, 'the proposal was cancelled due to the high cost of the modification.'"
All of those birds will be extinct in a few decades.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
mostly because it doesn't mention Elon Musk
Gorilla glass! You could throw your plane on the floor without any scratch. Yay!
The T-X replacement program is currently in the pre-RFP stage, but replacement is expected within the next decade, so why are they even bothering to spend money on such an upgrade?
Maybe the cranes from Siberia or swallows from Russia?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Experts in the interpretation of songs of at least two migratory birds, for a large Washington DC-area employer who asked not to be named. Employment is full-time and stable, excellent pay and benefits. First party inquiries only. High profile bloggers need not apply.
This proves what? That human beings are disposable items of material in warfare? Well, imagine that!
Transparent aluminum.
Here is the Russian MIG 28 and here is the T-38.
As you can clearly see, the T-38 is an inferior knock-off of the Russian aircraft. In Russian, our canopies have to deal with Eagles and very large women.
- Checkoff
I guess a new transparency is still more expensive than 6 aircraft and 2 lives (let alone training costs already spent on them).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Transparent Aluminium
http://phys.org/news167925273.html
TAIA
Is the 4lb bird that they designed for thawed or frozen?
I've never read about any bird strikes using aircraft with anti gravity power plants. Maybe the math for this should be developed?
the solution is prevention
quit flying around so fast is it really that necessary?
Make them all unmanned drones. We're going that way anyway.
It's expensive to keep people alive at 800mph.
33 casualties in 40 years. Quick, does anybody have the airman cancer death statistic at hand?
20 minutes into the future
Why not have a metal mesh (with enough visibility to see of course) in between or molded into acrylic? It might not save a plane but I can see it saving lives, giving enough time to bail.
"Mark Thompson writes in Time Magazine that Air Force pilots flying the T-38 Talon can rest easy, knowing that their cockpit canopy can survive hitting a 1.8 kg bird at 300 km/h. Unfortunately, the Northrop supersonic jet trainer has a top speed of 1307 km/h. 'To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force fast enough to make a bird strike lethal, and with a windshield too flimsy to deflect one,' wrote one Air Force pilot. Midair collisions between birds and Air Force aircraft have destroyed 39 planes and killed 33 airmen since 1973. That's why the USAF is seeking comments to 'identify potential sources, materials, timeframe, and approximate costs to redesign, test, and produce 550 T-38 forward canopy transparencies to increase bird strike capability.' The move follows a T-38 crash on July 19 in Texas triggered by a canopy bird strike. 'The current 5.8 mm thick stretched acrylic transparency can resist a 1.8 kg bird impact at 300 km/h which does not offer a capability to resist significant bird impacts, and has resulted in the loss of six (6) aircraft and two pilot fatalities,' the service acknowledged. 'Numerous attempts since 1970 were made to evaluate existing materials and redesign a transparency that could withstand a bird impact of 1.8 kg at 740 km/h.' Previous efforts have foundered because they'd require expensive cockpit modifications to the twin-engine, two-seat supersonic jet. 'Although it would increase the level of bird impact protection,' the Air Force said, 'the proposal was cancelled due to the high cost of the modification.'"
What we need is a treaty that states that all of our air forces need to be made up of hot air balloons.
Have birds become the enemy now? Is the Air Force going to hunt down every bird in the US now?
We should be intercepting the commie birds with lasers!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike#Incidents
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates the problem costs US aviation 400 million dollars annually and has resulted in over 200 worldwide deaths since 1988.[40] In the United Kingdom, the Central Science Laboratory estimates[6] that, worldwide, the cost of birdstrikes to airlines is around US$1.2 billion annually. This cost includes direct repair cost and lost revenue opportunities while the damaged aircraft is out of service. Estimating that 80% of bird strikes are unreported, there were 4,300 bird strikes listed by the United States Air Force and 5,900 by US civil aircraft in 2003.
Just another day in Paradise
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway. The actual physical scenery amounts to nothing more than a distraction. Ditch the canopy, stick the pilot deeper inside the plane, and present everything as a video feed.
Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne. Aside from "boots on the ground", today's military amounts to nothing but expensive portable explosion delivery machines. Those machines can do their jobs better, cheaper, and (for some seriously fucked up definition of the word) safer without the overhead of needing to carry an easily-broken bag of meat inside.
Siberia is a part of Russia.
Ontopic.. it must be incredibly expensive to modify the aircraft, if it costs more to do that, than it does to buy new planes and train up new pilots each time a bird strike occurs. Just think how many millions they've lost already, and how much they're going to lose in the next decade. Though as someone said, military drones make much more sense than planes these days.
which is totally what she said
You're obviously confused yourself. The T-38 is twin-engined as well.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway.
The HUD doesn't give the pilot any information he can't already get from his other instruments. It's there so the pilot doesn't have to look down, away from whatever he's looking at through the canopy.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Corning, who make Gorilla Glass, do have some other awesome glass products awaiting the right application, including rolls of flexible glass sheets.
I hope they are looking at this application.
Considering the amenities that mere money can buy, I bet a viable solution could be over-engineered for this problem. Pentagon-Class Budgets Rock!
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
... which is illustrated here, on the ME Komet:
Retired Komet Pilot ...and here...
Nothing he said indicated Siberia was not a part of Russia. He just believes that only Siberian cranes are at fault, whereas the swallows hail from all over the country. Personally, I think it was a loon.
I should have let that page resolve before I linked to it. I was thinking of a different system.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Except, you know, in planes where there is only the HUD and no instruments.
Maybe the (snip) swallows?
African or European?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Seriously, what do commercial planes have that stops certain swans that fly at 29,000 feet? Most migrating birds fly at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. I know that commercial aircraft reach speeds of (an average of) 500 MPH, which would certainly cause the same crash that would kill a pilot that flew into a +4lbs bird.
I've never heard of a commercial aircraft having to deal with this.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Which planes might those be?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
How is that the answer?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
There is a device that will accelerate a 4lb bird to 165 knots!
Yea, ditch the canopy and have to bail out of the aircraft blind when the power fails. Any idea how often the power fails on one of these things? It is NOT a good idea to make all the instrumentation in the aircraft mission critical and leave the pilot without the ability to look around. No manned fighter is going to *ever* do this.
On your "leave the pilot on the ground" idea.... There are serious issues with doing this for a fighter. Actively controlling an aircraft at a distance requires bidirectional data links with sufficient bandwidth and low latency. Establishment of such links requires RF energy to be radiated from both the aircraft and from the control point. Jamming communications and Shooting missiles at transmitters is fairly easy, so the bad guys have an easy way to defeat your drone.
Then there is the whole stealth issue. It's really hard to stay stealthy when you have to keep the RF transmitter running on an aircraft. Checkmate, at least for fighters.
We are going to see manned fighters for a long time. Bombers though are an entirely different issue, but the Tomahawk seems to be taking care of that.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The summary was painful to read so I checked the article and found it a direct copy. As an example:
“To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force fast enough to make a bird strike lethal, and with a windshield too flimsy to deflect one,”
I know it's a direct quote from a "one-time Air Force pilot" but you need to exercise some editorial control and clean that shit up. How about:
"To my knowledge, the training planes are the only ones in the Air Force with a windshield too flimsy to deflect a lethal bird strike at high speeds."
Surviving collision is ill-stated problem. Avoiding collision is the proper name of the game. Enhance detection range of small, slow objects traversing the flight path and allow flight computers to, if pilot doesn't react in timely manner, perform avoiding maneuver - it should be fairly easy to avoid a bird, given that same problem is already tackled for high speed SAMs.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway. The actual physical scenery amounts to nothing more than a distraction. Ditch the canopy, stick the pilot deeper inside the plane, and present everything as a video feed.
Because the real world is in Super-Duper-Ultra-HD-X-treme (TM).
Think of it as evolution in action.
No prob. You rarely find birds above 4,000 feet. Just put another placard in the plane "stay under xxx knots below yyyy feet in peacetime".
They should get in touch with these guys: http://www.aviation-glass.com/
These guys specialize in very thin, very strong layered glass that is virtually indestructible.
Here's a demo video on a glass pane of just 1.8mm (0.07") thick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H80PkGPE0uc
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
who actually has a comparable air force?
> Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne.
The problem is, the onboard computer sometimes starts to obey not the twitch gamer inside Cheyenne, but the ayatollahs inside the Khomeini mosque (cue iranian hackers) and then you have the axis of moste evile publicly parade their freshly captured RQ-170 stealth plane drone on live CNN TV...
AFAIK, no texan rednack pilot has been convinced so far to ditch the US military and defect to Iran or North Korea in his F-22 or similar high-tech plane. (There was a dutch or belgian NATO techie who tried to defect to the soviet block in an F-16 Viper circa 1988, but he crashed on take-off.)
Hitchcock tried to warn us. Now we will pay the consequences for ignoring him.
the Sapphire glass should go out and give them a few free Canopies. That's the same outfit that is building a facility for Apple in Arizona to produce iPhone and iPad "glass" faces. Of course,it's kind of cool that it's an actual artificial gem!!!
Next, some company could "Bedazzle" the jet aircraft, seeing as how it's . I see a "Bratz Girlz tie-in" as well. If allowing private companies to advertise to kids in our schools to subsidize things is OK ... whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander at 800 mph.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Or, better yet, just ditch the entire pilot and give the job to a twitch gamer flying the plane from deep inside Cheyenne.
Lag.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Wraith Darts.
Maybe the cranes from Siberia or swallows from Russia?
What about African swallows? Carrying coconuts, they would likely cause a great deal of damage should a plane strike them.
and f5 has a single engine variant.. but usa is operating over 500 talons. the crash rate isn't that bad in that regard..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hahahahahah, nice joke.
Pfft, why do we even HAVE aerospace engineers? Slashdot neckbeards have solved everything in two paragraphs!
Energy goes as velocity squared, so a bird strike at 600 mph has 16x the energy of a strike at a 150 mph takeoff speed where most bird strikes occur. At these higher impact velocities and without the metal airframe surrounding the entire windshield like on an airliner, the only way the canopy can survive an impact is by deforming enough to spread out the impact over time, but not so much that it hits the pilot's head.
There's a beautiful film of a high-speed bird strike test on a F16 canopy that I saw in a 1980s or 1990s documentary. Unfortunately the only version I could find on youtube has the gamma set too low so you can't really see the detail. The canopy bubbles underneath as it deflects the bird up, then snaps back to its original shape. You can kinda see at 6-7 seconds when the bird remains disappear from view due to the canopy bouncing back to its original shape. This video shows a similar test from the side and you can see the impressive amount of deformation. The canopy bends enough to smash the HUD, but bounces back into shape. This video is tests of road debris (a tire) into a race car windshield at relatively low speed (compared to a F16 or T38), but they show a plane canopy for comparison.
There is very little current AI bogies do that a pilot can not.
Air to air dog fights don't actually happen anymore.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Call it an occupational hazzard.
This is the T-38 trainer. It's not a combat aircraft. The T-38 is fast and modern looking, but the first flight was in 1961. Back then, one in five fighter pilots died in accidents, without any help from the enemy. In the 1950s and 1960s, fighter pilots were viewed as expendable. It's not a career choice for the timid.
The T-38 has killed many pilots. Good ones. Four astronauts, four of the USAF Thunderbirds. Yet fighter jocks like to fly it. It's not as bad as it used to be - the original engines were unreliable.
The ejection seat has saved many T-38 pilots. The T-38 ejection seat blasts through the canopy to get the pilot out. There's a big spike on top of the seat to punch through the canopy.Here's the 1990 redesign for a canopy that will resist bird strikes. "The seat mounted cutting blade is virtually ineffective in cutting through materials which comply with Bird collision resistance." So toughening up the canopy meant a new ejection system. Fighter planes, which have tougher canopies (they're expected to be shot at) have such systems, which usually involve explosives shattering or releasing the canopy. The T-38 is just a trainer - no armor.
The T-38 later got an ejection seat upgrade with zero-zero capability (you can eject while parked on the ground, which is useful if you have a fire during engine start or a bad landing), and that seems to have a new canopy disposal system. They had to give up the tiny bit of luggage storage the T-38 had. One of the original Mercury astronauts (they were issued T-38s as personal transportation) was able to find a case that would just fit the T-38's space under the seat. But for a few weeks, he wouldn't tell the other astronauts where he got it.
Using acrylic that is only 1/4 inch thick is a joke. If a bank teller can see just fine through 2-4 inches of bulletproof acrylic, it should work for pilots too.
Air Force has named this initiative "Operation Angry Birds!".
The brief is to withstand any coordinated attacks sustained above level 14.
The birds are trained by Al-Qaeda, no doubt about it.
It's a military fighter jet. It's built to attack and defend with bullets and missles and bombs and explosions and death. It has chaff and radar and ground support and air support and parachutes and exploding canopies and emergency beam-out.
And the most common element, indeed pretty well the only element at that altitude -- birds -- can take it out likety-split.
So what you're saying is interesting.
If a military super-power were to take 100 fighter jets at a cost of a trillion dollars, and move to attack a village in the middle of brazil, the entire village would be protected by their homing-pingeon aviary. Release the doves.
Nice. Excellent planning. Let me know when you've invented a stealth bomber that doesn't work in the rain, a fighter jet that can't fly across the international date-line without being towed back by a boat, or a space shuttle that can't be in orbit across new year's eve.
Can't you see the 4" thick sheet of armoured glass mounted on top of the cockpit dashboard that the pilot looks through? Honestly?
Those are primitive HUD optics, and have nothing to do with armor or birdstrikes.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Make that 6"....
Problem solved.
I reckon I'm an avian sympathiser myself. I don't much support the bombing of humans either, FWIW.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
With all the new carbon analogues and isomers, they haven't made a diamond hard cockpit glass *yet*?
With today's cameras and thin screen technology, do they even need them anymore? Redundancies can be built in. A strong, ejectable windshield cover could be made to protect against any bird.
Why do you discuss modern plane design in relation to an article about retrofitting new canopies to a 40-year-old design of plane? Or are you going to use your time machine to take the revised canopy design back to the mid-1960s when the plane was designed to avoid the problem.
Actually, TFA obscures the problem. They already know at least one way of avoiding killing their pilots, and they admit it.
But they've decided that the cost of implementing the change would be higher than the cost of continuing to pay damages, pensions etc to the families of the pilots they kill. That calculation is probably going to change after they have a plane hit the ground after a bird strike, and the pilot survives but the wreckage impacts a bus full of schoolchildren, putting 40 of them into wheelchairs needing 24x7x365 care for the next 120 years. You'll note that the Air Force have implicitly put a cost on replacing a pilot with a newly-trained one, and paying off their family - probably a handful of millions of dollars ; maybe 10 million. And they're not willing to pay that sort of money to protect their pilots.
I do hope that I haven't given the impression that the Air Force include a bunch of cold-hearted calculating bean-counters who supervise their aircraft safety department. That would be really morale-boosting.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"