Air Force Claims To Have Solved Fatal F-22 Oxygen Riddle 172
Hugh Pickens writes "DefenseTech reports that Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Lyon, the director of operations for Air Combat Command, told the Pentagon press corps that a valve that inflates the Combat Edge upper pressure garment is the cause of hypoxia-like symptoms in pilots flying the F-22. The problem forced the service to ground the Air Force's most prized stealth fighter fleet for four months and led two Raptor pilots to tell the nation on CBS's 60 Minutes that they refused to fly the jet because the pilots feared for their lives. The vests help control the breathing of pilots in high G-force environments, inflating before pilots start to experience extreme G-force conditions. However Lyon explained that the valves caused the vests to inflate too early in an F-22 flight, causing pilots to hyperventilate in the cockpits. 'It's like putting a corset around your chest,' said Lyons. Eagle and Viper pilots stopped wearing the upper pressure garments in 2004 'because they were not giving us the contribution we thought they would,' said Lyon. F-22 pilots kept wearing them because they flew at higher altitudes and the vests protected the pilots from 'rapid decompression,' adding that F-22 pilots, many of whom flew the F-15 and F-16, didn't notice the vests had inflated early because of the layers of gear a pilot wears in flight. Such a simple answer to a problem that has eluded Air Force engineers and scientists for four years has left some Air Force pilots skeptical that the USAF has solved the problem. An F-16 pilot said the Air Force is either 'incompetent for missing this until now,' or 'dishonest and trying to sweep something under the rug.'"
Re:F-22 - without a doubt the world's best fighter (Score:4, Informative)
Re:F-22 - without a doubt the world's best fighter (Score:4, Informative)
The only problem with the F-15's is not that it's being out classed even today as it is the number of flight hours on the existing airframes.
Boeing's F-15 production line is still up and running.
A few years ago, they unvieled the F-15 SE (Silent Eagle) [wikipedia.org] for ~$100 million
It has updated avionics and a stealthier aspect + export legal stealth coating that is good against air-to-air radar.
The current crop of F-15C/E airplanes is also getting some updated radar and avionics, but not a full overhaul.
/Boeing is also offering F-18 variants for ~$50 million each.
Re:Covering up for a crony? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Covering up for a crony? (Score:5, Informative)
We didn't need an M-16. An AK-47 would do the job.
Have you ever actually fired those two weapons? I was sure I'd prefer the AK (due to high reliability) until I actually tried one and compared it with an M-4. The AK was almost embarrassingly inaccurate, and jumped around like a madman. The M-4 was extremely-accurate, and very stable while firing. It may take more careful maintenance, but there's no question which of the two I'd want to depend on as a weapon.
Re:Whose problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Building weapons of war works a little differently than building a Prius. Once the government accepts a contractors product as meeting the specifications requested, and so long as the contractor does not conceal relevant information from the government, it's nearly impossible to hold the contractor liable for defects in the design. Basically, we're asking Lockheed Martin to design and build the most complex flying machine ever imagined by mankind. It wouldn't be possible - let alone financially feasible - to expect each and every single aspect of the product to be perfect from day one, nor would it be viable to expect Lockheed to go back and find, diagnose, and fix every single problem in every single aircraft produced. It'd put military contractors out of business to do so (and that isn't fixing your planes either).
Now I completely agree that we should be doing a whole lot more to fix the issues of cost overruns without sacrificing quality control, but holding them to your average consumer product warranty isn't the answer. We'll end up with nobody left to build any of this stuff and nobody else willing to try.
Re:Covering up for a crony? (Score:4, Informative)
The notion that the M16 is unreliable got started with the shaky roll out in Vietnam. The normal teething problems of any system
C.J. Chivers covers this in "The Gun", his history of the AK-47. The inherent reliability of the AK-47 goes back all the way to the prototypes. There are a couple of design decisions that make the AK-47 very reliable. One is that the gas piston reloading mechanism that ejects the spent casing has heavier components and has a much forceful action, it just hammers the spent shells out, so it is harder to jam. Another is that the components were deliberately made to fit together loosely, if the rifle gets dirty or is dropped in sand or mud, it can still fire. The rife was also protected by chrome, which made it corrosion resistant. And the other thing is, they field-tested the prototypes. They didn't settle on the AK-47 design and then start field-testing, they had a number of different designs they were experimenting with and they were rolling them all around in the mud to see which would hold up well under combat conditions.The AK-47 was the design that emerged from this Darwinian design process.
The M-16 has more moving parts, they fit together closely and, critically, the Armalite company never did the kind of field-testing that the Soviet design bureau did. The GIs sent to Vietnam did the field-testing, and when the reports came back that there were problems, the company and the Army were slow to respond. One of the biggest issues is that the M-16 was sent to wet, humid Vietnam without chroming the barrel to protect it against rust. Eventually they worked a lot of the kinks out, but a lot of GIs died in the process. There's an excerpt from the book talking about this you can read online http://www.esquire.com/features/ak-47-history-1110-3 [esquire.com].
I think the comparison of this oxygen system to the premature rollout of the M-16 is a valid one. In both cases, contractors fielded a system before it was ready, jeopardizing people's lives. And given the cost of the F-22, I think the design philosophy behind the AK-47 is also worth talking about. The Soviet approach was to create a gun that had several key features- it was lightweight, it had a rapid rate of fire, it was cheap enough to produce in vast numbers, and it was simple and rugged enough that it didn't require a lot of training and maintenance to use. They emphasized quantity over quality. An enemy with accurate weapons and superior training could be overcome if you just rounded up a whole bunch of peasants and gave every one of them a gun that shot 600 rounds per minute. And all you have to do is look at the American experience in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to see that there's a lot to this philosophy. Because of planes like the F-22, nobody can possibly defeat the U.S. in a head-to-head contest for air superiority, but that doesn't guarantee victory any more than it did in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
Re:Covering up for a crony? (Score:4, Informative)
The obvious next step is to make a UAV with supersonic capability, vectored thrust and large control surfaces for improved maneuverability, and a powerful radar to track aircraft- basically, an F-22 minus the pilot.