Fatal Problems Continue To Plague F-22 Raptor 379
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that even though the Air Force has used its F-22 Raptor planes only in test missions, pilots have experienced seven major crashes with two deaths, a grim reminder that the U.S. military's most expensive fighter jet, never called into combat despite conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, continues to experience equipment problems — notably with its oxygen systems. New details from an Air Force report last week drew attention to a crash in November 2010 that left Capt. Jeff Haney dead and raised debate over whether the Air Force turned Haney into a scapegoat to escape more criticism of the F-22. Haney 'most likely experienced a sense similar to suffocation,' the report said. 'This was likely [Haney's] first experience under such physiological duress.' According to the Air Force Accident Report, Haney should have leaned over and with a gloved hand pulled a silver-dollar-size green ring that was under his seat by his left thigh to engage the emergency system (PDF). It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer. 'It would've taken superhuman efforts on the pilot's behalf to save that aircraft,' says Barr. 'The initial cause of this accident was a malfunction with the aircraft — not the pilot.'"
Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
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Hasn't F-22 production been shut down? So 'lessons learned' won't help much.
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Please. Lockheed will be getting upgrade contracts for years to come.
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Please. Lockheed will be getting upgrade contracts for years to come.
Sure, but that's minor compared to producing hundreds of new aircraft.
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You haven't seen what they can charge for updates.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess again, support and upgrade contracts can surpass construction contracts significantly - it's where most companies look to make the bulk of their profits in this arena.
For example, recently the USAF asked for $8billion to upgrade the F-22 fleet to be able to use the much vaunted datalink capability. That's more than 10% of the current program cost.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
For example, recently the USAF asked for $8 billion to upgrade the F-22 fleet to be able to use the much vaunted datalink capability. That's more than 10% of the current program cost.
Sort of.
The Air Force asked for the support contract limit to be raised from the existing $6 billion to $7.4 billion
That extra $1.4 billion represents several upgrades, including data link.
You can't do just one thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess again, support and upgrade contracts can surpass construction contracts significantly - it's where most companies look to make the bulk of their profits in this arena.
My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Funny)
Not if they keep crashing all of the ones that were built... at this rate there won't be many left to upgrade...
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
My grandfather the B-17 and B-24 pilot had some saying about the first couple hundred B-17 (or was it B-24?) engines pretty much being no good, lots of return to base after engine failure, a couple times for him personally, he even had a wing fire (obviously, survived, somehow). No big deal if the first couple hundred fail, because they made thousands.
Sounds like they're doing that with the F-22, the first couple hundred are kind of learning experiments. Whoops, they only made a couple hundred and then shut down the line. Well, thats not gonna work so well.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
When Rolls Royce had to make their Merlin engine reliable enough fr long range bombing missions, they took every 10th engine off the production line and ran it constantly until it broke, took it apart and made whatever piece that failed stronger.
By the end of the war they had one of the most reliable piston engines the world has ever seen.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:4)
By the end of the war they had one of the most reliable piston engines the world has ever seen.
Sure, that's great if you're in the middle of a war.
But a proper development cycle would have had [strike]Rolls Royce[/strike] Lockheed Martin do all that testing before cranking out production volumes.
Lockheed is partly to blame for fucking up the design and systems integration,
but the Pentagon is also at fault for allowing this 'build & improve & build more' contract to have ever been signed.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't we usually in the middle of a war or two?
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Waterfall works pretty well when it must be absolutely bulletproof reliable, you have lots and lots of time to do it, and costs be damned.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting the blueprints is not the hard part, they are easy enough to find. There are multiple Merlin engines in museums and there are current working Merlin's for sale. Getting one of these beasts made as a one off would cost you huge. Bringing up a production line would cost a small fortune.
There is a guy in Northern California who actually purchased the type certificates for the airplane and will build, from scratch, from factory plans and brand new P-51D. You have to find a registration plate for it though. People comb Europe to find them off of wrecked ones since there is a loophole in the FAA regs that allows him to put the placard on the new airframe.
excuses for lazy managers to kill people (Score:5, Insightful)
if troops were treated with as much respect as 'the customer', they would get experimental shit rammed down their throats, and then told its their duty to die for the glory of some corporation.
dying in the f22 crash did not 'keep america safe'. it did not protect freedom. it did not have to happen.
this is the same fucked up attitude by the managers who think that somehow because of the two shuttle crew losses, it means space is 'inherently dangerous'. well if you ignore your engineers and only care about bullshit like politics and money, yeah, space is incredibly dangerous... its so dangerous that you can continue making exactly the same fuckups for years, without getting punished, even though your decisions cost the lives of people.
if someone is willing to die for their country, it takes a really low bellied sack of shit to believe to take that willingness for granted, and chalk up their death to inevitable accidents, which, upon further investigation, typically prove to have been completely avoidable, if it wasnt for some fucked up shitbag pencil pushing ass lick managment douchebag who will never get any punishment or reprimand for his negligence and stupidity.
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Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
Laminar flow gave it range via low drag and therefore reduced fuel consumption. It was unsatisfactory for its mission until the British got a hold of it and in fact, initially failed to perform up to anticipation. With the US made engine, it could only perform down low and high altitude performance was a requirement for long distance bomber escort. Without the British's contribution to the P51, it would have been little more than a footnote in history. Period.
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Are you aware that the P-51 was actually built in the first place for the British? The MoD approached North American for them to license build another manufacturers aircraft, and NA responded that they could design and build a better aircraft in the same timeframe - the P-51 was born. The USAAF originally attempted to block actual sales to the RAF, until the RAF gave them several examples as a test batch - and thus the massive US usage of the P-51 was born.
Without the British contribution to the P-51, it
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
They plan to use them for decades, but they haven't used them at all yet. As the summary says, they've only been used for test missions so far.
The article says that there have been many cases of F22 pilots showing signs of hypoxia, and they grounded all craft earlier this year to run a study as to why. They didn't find or fix the problem, but started allowing people to fly them again. Now someone dies and they blame him rather than the faulty air supply. That's pretty damn low. I hope they keep all of these planes grounded now until the issue is resolved.
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Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a system that, based on sensor input, shuts the OBOGS oxygen system down automatically. Why design it so that it then requires the pilot to manually activate the other system?
If you can cut off the pilot's oxygen based on a sensor reading, why not also activate the backup system automatically at the same time?
Seems like a poor design, to me.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem here with the Raptor is that they replaced the bottled oxygen system, used for decades in dozens of other aircraft, with a complex compressor system that's hooked to the engines. In this particular accident, the plane shut the compressor system down and hence the oxygen. You had a new dependency that, on the surface, seems nuts.
The resolution of the fault required the pilot to manually start the back up system. For whatever reason, the pilot was unable to do so.
Yeah, bleeding edge is bleeding edge but the real problem is that the military has bypassed the prototype system. You build a demonstrator on paper that requires several new technologies. You get the contract and of course once your are building the aircraft, THEN you find big issues. By then you're pretty much committed to either leaving the problem alone, doing some sort of kludge that makes the aircraft more expensive / less dependable and / or delaying the program.
This has been seen in pretty much every high tech military hardware purchase in the last two decades. And it keeps happening.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:4, Insightful)
Hypoxia is insidious. Unlike holding your breath, since you are expelling CO2 just fine there is no urge to breath associated with it. You just slowly pass out. By the time he was aware of the problem, he wasn't thinking at all clearly or able to move in a coordinated manner. If the plane really just shuts off oxygen without an impossible to miss warning bell and lights, then it is nothing more or less than a deathtrap. Preferably, it SHOULD at least activate the backup automatically.
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Computers shouldn't be running oxygen supplies anyway.
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Uh, if you RTFA, you'll see the problem is the computer isn't running the BACKUP oxygen supply. It requires manual activation which is flat out retarded design.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
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If they haven't collected enough data already, what makes you think extra flights will help?
IMO they should be able to run enough extra tests without these things ever leaving the ground. If they require supersonic air flow to test the issue, there are always wind tunnels..
At the very least if they fly these planes again, they need to give the pilots a different primary air supply until they have sorted out the intended system. Alternately as someone else suggested, they could have the backup supply auto-en
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They said that in the 50s and 60s, when ICBMs were supposed to replace fighter planes.
While remote-operated drones can and will replace a lot of "meathauler" plane functions, for the foreseeable future there will still be a role for fighter aircraft flown by people on board.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing cutting edge about the inboard oxygen system on the F-22, which is where they have had a lot of problems recently - it *should* be a solved problem, but seems not to be.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
Sure any programmer with his salt knows how to fix it and should have though about it before hand... However things slip threw the cracks, as you are focusing on proof of concepts, then by the time you got the proof of concept working you were behind schedule and never really went back and looked at your data inputs (for that one routine).
Then it goes out and you end up looking like an idiot.
Mistakes happen, most mistakes that cause the biggest problems are the ones that are easiest to solve, and are often just overlooked mistakes.
Because Oxygen system wasn't cutting edge, I am willing to bet no one stressed out too much over it, as it was a piece of cake issue. Well it got overlooked and it cost peoples lives (which is much worse then looking like an idiot). But where was the mistake.... Lets go back to the code example.
Sure you are to blame because you coded it, but QA should have tested common names with special characters, management should have adjusted their project plan because you were having issues getting some proof of concepts working... Mistakes even big ones really isn't any ones problem but usually due to a full breakdown in the organization.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, though, the "OBOGS" oxygen system had an "air bleed failure" which probably means that it was still generating oxygen, but there was no pressure to deliver the oxygen to the pilot. Sounds like a gasket, seal, or hose failure. Those things are hardly bleeding edge technology. Another possible cause was the overly difficult emergency pull. Again, not exactly hi-tech. These kinds of design problems are often attributable to poor management in the design phase, rushed development, or sweeping known problems under the rug because of budgetary concerns.
Why is the emergency oxygen manually triggered? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like this should have been automatically switched on.
Re:Why is the emergency oxygen manually triggered? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a pilot all be it not an F-22 pilot, the unfortunate thing is you have to plan for total system failure. I would prefer to have a full manual O2 bottle than an electronically activated backup system which can itself fail. The 40 lb pull seems a bit high, there should be plenty of opportunity to get a mechanical advantage on the valve.
In this case an autopilot preset for 10k feet and wings level is what he needed. There are implementations that have automatic terrain avoidance in the event the pilot becomes a greater than usual liability for the aircraft
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
No, that is not what this means.
"Air bleed" is the method by which the OBOGS generates breathable air. It's called "bleed" because it "bleeds" off a small amount of air from the engine's compressor system. (This air can also be used for deicing flight surfaces, generating power, and other purposes).
An "air bleed failure" means that either no air is getting into the system, or a sensor failed and it thinks no air is getting into the system.
To summarize, this wasn't a failure where air was bleeding, this was a failure of the system that bleeds air from the engine for the pilot to breathe. That's important to understand.
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That's semi-wrong. It was a failure of where the air was bleeding. The bleed air isolation valves closed because there was a leak in the bleed air duct. Since bleed air is hot, a leak in a wrong place is likely to cause a fire, thus the fire control system's leak detection triggered the environmental control system (ECS) to stop bleed air from the engines from reaching the things it normally feeds, including the oxygen generator.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
The standard term is "bleed air", not "air bleed". (I was an F-16 engine mech and crew chief (and Comm/Nav on Phantoms and Broncos).
We don't yet know what caused the bleed air leak. but bleed air ducting isn't something new and leaks tend to be either because of improper connection or duct failure (bleed air is bled from the engine compressor, but it's HOT and at very high volume).
http://defensetech.org/2011/12/15/af-alaska-f-22-crash-due-to-pilot-error/ [defensetech.org]
"While the oxygen generating system on Haneyâ(TM)s jet didnâ(TM)t fail, it did shut down because oxygen from the bleed air system, which feeds the OBOGS, was leaking into the engine spaces"
Cooling and running it through a molecular sieve to save doing LOX servicing is theoretically a good idea, but the MAIN reason to have OBOGs is to get rid of the base LOX plant, support equipment, and servicing personnel.
Some "ancient" history:
http://www.f20a.com/f20obogs.htm [f20a.com]
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
You've mixed things up, it makes no sense. I've read the report. Here's what happened:
1. The fire control system (FCS) detected a bleed air duct leak and has closed the isolation valves, cutting off engine bleed air from reaching the bleed air manifold (or duct). Bleed air is hot air from the compressor, used to power other systems. This triggers the "C BLEED HOT" caution.
2. Loss of bleed air made the following systems inoperational: environmental control system (ECS), forced air cooling for avionics et al (ACS), oxygen generator (OBOGS), inert gas generator (OBIGGS), cabin pressurization.
3. About 5 seconds after the bleed air was cut off, a new caution appeared: "OBOGS FAIL". This means the oxygen generator is out and you have to activate emergency oxygen generator on your seat - soon. That one is on your seat because it has to supply you with oxygen when you eject.
4. About 14 seconds later, a sensor picks up loss of oxygen pressure to the mask (from failed OBOGS).
That's all there's to it. Apparently the pilot never managed to activate emergency oxygen, and while fumbling with that he also bumped the control stick and rudder, causing the aircraft to fly a "random" trajectory. The cabin is cramped, and with extra cold weather gear it's nigh impossible to activate that emergency oxygen without bumping into things. That is a design issue, as well as the awkward way of activating that emergency oxygen system (you have to pull a ring from a hip level about 2 in. forward (away from you) with 40lb or more of force.
The report is here [airforce-magazine.com].
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:4, Informative)
The report mentions that in tests they managed to activate the system while installed backwards, but I wonder if that's only because it was under controlled conditions. Is there the slightest chance in hell that anyone could do this in an emergency (which is literally the only time you would ever have to do this)?
And then the fact that it's hard to locate if dropped due to the cable jamming, a failure to exert the necessary force, etc. Short of removing the system entirely, I don't think it's possible to design anything worse. This design is a textbook example of how not to design an emergency system.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
From the plane's trajectory, it seems his first action upon comprehending the failure was to put the plane into a dive to get it into thicker, breathable air. Unfortunately it sounds like he lost consciousness during this maneuver, before he could turn on the emergency oxygen generator, and only regained consciousness a few seconds before impact.
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I would be very surprised if the 40 lb pull was designed that way without any thought. These emergency actions (ejection seats being the obvious example) are a difficult tradeoff between quick emergency access, vs. preventing accide
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. Mistake upon mistake in those comments. The computer didn't detect any oxygen leaks. It detected a leak of hot air (bleed air) that is used to power various things, including oxygen generator (OBOGS). Since an uncontained leak of bleed air is likely to start a fire, the bleed air was automatically cut off by closing isolation valves at the engines. Thus it was no more powering the oxygen generator. The pilot fumbled for about 30s trying to activate emergency oxygen, eventually failing to do so, but while he was fumbling he bumped the control stick and rudder pedals, sending the aircraft on an uncontrolled inverted dive.
The bleed air is really hot -- between 1200F to 2000F (650C to 1000C). PHX (primary heat exchanger) then cools it down to 400F (200C).
There was some maintenance done in the previous months that required disconnecting the bleed air ducts, the accident investigators didn't think that anything went wrong there.
The bleed air leak was survivable, but somehow the pilot couldn't get emergency oxygen going, and lost situational awareness. When he tried to recover from the dive, it was too late.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
Under loss of oxygen supply, a pilot has 12 seconds left before he will lose all ability to do anything. Unfortunately, about six seconds are needed to fully comprehend the situation they are in and that leaves six seconds.
Even worse, their heart rate will double and they will likely consume the oxygen remaining in their blood stream in half the time. Assuming they are still not quite in a position of panic.
So once a pilot realises what they have to do, they have just three seconds to do it, without panicking. At best, that is five seconds if they remain absolutely calm in the face of an "Oh Shit" situation.
This is from USAF research into tests that went wrong in which people suffered sudden loss of pressure in test situations.
I've noticed this is not mentioned anyway despite being widely known.
eg,
e. While other significant effects of hypoxia usually do not occur in a healthy pilot in an un-pressurized aircraft below 12,000 feet, there is no assurance that this will always be the case. The onset of hypoxic symptoms may seriously affect the safety of flight and may well occur even in short periods of exposure to altitudes from 12,000 to 15,000 feet. The ability to take corrective measures may be totally lost in 5 minutes at 22,000 feet. However, that time would be reduced to only 7 to 10 seconds at 40,000 feet and the crewmember may suffer total loss of consciousness soon thereafter. A description of the four major hypoxia groups and the recommended methods to combat each follows.
Printed from Summit Aviation's Computerized Aviation Reference Library, 7/15/2005 [faa.gov] .75
Page 1
AC 61-107A - OPERATIONS OF AIRCRAFT AT ALTITUDES ABOVE 25,000 FEET MSL AND/OR MACH NUMBERS (MMO) GREATER THAN
This probably explains why the pilot couldn't get the emergency oxygen going... You try doing something really basic like holding your breath, running 10m, jump into a car and in less than three seconds, do the following... Close the door, put your seatbelt on and then lock the door.
Can you do it? Sure. Try it. But if you knew that if you took longer than 3 seconds knowing you'd be dead? Bet you'd screw it up...
GrpA
Re:The F-22 should be decommissioned. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place."
This is a load of Horse Shit. This is not whats at issue here.
There is a difference between dying in combat or for a cause and dying due to someone's incompetence or unfinished work.
If this was a car then lawyers, consumer prot organizations, and the gov will all be up in arms. Any industry is accountable with dire consequences. What was acceptable 70 yrs ago is no more, and the same applies for all industries; I don't
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between dying in combat or for a cause and dying due to someone's incompetence or unfinished work.
Test pilot is synonymous with risk, even more so than being a fighter pilot.
If this was a car then lawyers, consumer prot organizations, and the gov will all be up in arms.
But it is not a car is it?
that particular risk was in no way necessary (Score:4, Insightful)
it was, in fact, entirely preventable, by proper management and engineering, both of which failed on an epic scale. how do you make a 145 million dollar aircraft that does not do basic life support functions to the same quality of an aircraft built in the 1970s?
its unbelieveably fucking ridiculous. military men are not willing to die, that doesnt mean you can waste their lives with stupid decisions and cost-cutting back room political bullshit and get away with it.
ultimately, the taxpayers are the customer here. and i doubt many of them, in a jury, would find the managers and air force innocent here.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
OBOGS isn't bleeding edge even F16s used them http://www.cobham.com/media/75388/SYSTEM%20F-16%20OBOGS%20ADV10556.pdf
This is just a case of poor design, the Eurofighter has Oxygen level warning system, the F22 doesn't. If you put the emergency O2 actuator in an ergonomically challenging position, what do you expect?
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The crashes of the early F-16 that they couldn't figure out were related to a similar situation but it was blood deprivation of the brain in High G Turns. They didn't actually figure out what the problem was until a pilot woke up from the blackout and bailed out before his plane crashed. It's because of those crashes that pilots today where flight suits that constrict the legs to keep blood in the upper body and there's now a significant warning system when the pilot pulls turns that exceed the G-rating of
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Informative)
No. Read the report:
http://usaf.aib.law.af.mil/ExecSum2011/F-22A_AK_16%20Nov%2010.pdf [af.mil]
This wasn't a case of extraordinary circumstances. This was calm, high altitude flight where a critical (but understood) subsystem failed.
The pilot then became distracted by the system failure possible because of oxygen deprivation, or because the emergency air control was in an ergonomically challenging location. While distracted, he became inverted (240 degree roll during descent) and didn't attempt to correct until 3 seconds prior to impact.
The ergonomic issue may be a contributing cause. but a pilot *must* be able to continue instrument scan while dealing with an emergency. Just because you're air doesn't work doesn't mean you can't still crash while dealing with that.
It's sad, but more or less understood what happened.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Interesting)
Pardon me but I won't believe the government report out of the gate, the DOD has a tendency to blame personal off the cuff before the real facts are in.
They made similar bullshit claims about pilot error on the F-16 until the guy survived the crash and reported blacking out and then they put cameras in the cockpit and recorded the pilots blacking out. I'm old enough to remember those crashes (half of them were in my state) and all the blame they heaped on the pilots until the real facts came out and AFAIK they never retracted the allegations of pilot misconduct.
So I'm going to wait a while and see what really develops before I believe a report whose purpose appears to be to blame the pilot.
Re:Bleeding Edge Aviation (Score:5, Funny)
It's just a simple reality that as we push the aircraft engineering to the edge of our capabilities that they will find areas where the body can't keep up, just like with the F-16.
There's a simple and obvious solution: replace the human pilot with an artificial intelligence which is almost 100% guaranteed to probably never go rogue and generally speaking has a low probability of wiping out the human race. It will be developed using a best-practices extreme programming rapid iteration test-driven model and we'll do our best to test it thoroughly before launch, but, well, there was time pressure, it was a bad economy, we had to cut costs and rationalise our testing plan, mistakes do happen, and long story short, we're all very sorry about what happened to Las Vegas. But the 2.0 model will be 150% faster and we'll completely rewrite the hatred module.
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DeHavilland had chief executives as part of the test pilot crew. They still had fatal accidents, but strangely not as many as other companies. I think if military aircraft companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin adopted a similar strategy, you'd see designs improving very rapidly indeed.
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The problem with AI is that it can defect to the other side.
Sure, that sounds pretty bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure, that sounds pretty bad... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure, that sounds pretty bad... (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, in a communist country, the arms manufacturer would BE the government, and accidents like these would be swept under the rug while you read news stories of how the glorious leadership has brought the country boldly into the technological future.
Yeah. Here in the USA the arms manufacturers have to share the government with the pharmaceuticals and banks.
Blamed F16 Pilots Too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blamed F16 Pilots Too (Score:5, Interesting)
Side point....If you have zero visibility, you need a gyroscope to tell up from down because of centripetal forces, your other senses can't help you whether you're ignoring them or not.
I don't know if you have any piloting experience or not, so I don't know if you are speaking from experience or not. However, I have been a pilot for a little over twenty years (albeit in much more mundane aircraft than F-16s or F-22s). In point of fact, not only can your other senses not help you, they will actively lead you astray. The stories about pilots flying by the seat of their pants are pure mythology.
:)
If you ever get a chance to try flying on instruments, give it a try*. You wouldn't believe how quickly your sense of "up" and "down" get mixed up...or how difficult it is to ignore your kinesthetic senses and trust your instruments. There's a reason your average non-instrument rated pilot has a life expectancy of about 2-3 minutes, tops, when encountering instrument conditions.
*Alternatively, if you have a bar stool that can spin in circles, you can replicate the experience at home. Sit in the bar stool, close your eyes, and lean forward so that your forehead is touching your knees. Have a friend spin you a couple of times, then rapidly sit up. Oh, yeah...you might want some padding on the floor, because I guarantee you won't be able to stay seated
meanwhile, somewhere deep in the engineering dept: (Score:5, Insightful)
A series of engineers argue over who's fault it was.
Was it engineer A, who had to make the emergency system require 40kilos of pull to activate, due to flak that it might engage accidentally if the craft hits stiff turbulence or is kicked while the pilot is entering the cockpit?
Was it engineer B, who designed the oxygen recirculation system, and had to work within the physical space and weight restrictions imposed by engineers C and D, resulting in a suboptimal implementation?
Was it engineer C, who designed the superstructure of the figher's cockpit, for failing to fully appreciate the downstream requirements of his peers?
Was it engineer D, who designed the aesthetic and aerodynamic form of the fighter, imposing limitations on engineers A through C, and many others, for continuing the trend of smaller, faster, sleeker, and more compact designs?
Or was it engineer E, who oversaw ergonomic annd human interaction studies that led to the requirements statements fed to engineers A through D?
Was it the beaurocracies involved in construction, telling the engineers to use cheaper, more easily sourced materials so that the fighter comes out underbudget?
With all these parties in the room, bickering over who's fault it was, is it any wonder that the dead pilot, who can't stand up for himself, is the one that got blamed to save face?
Really. I work in aerospace. Many of the people in the engineering depts of major companies act like their shit doesn't stink, even when it obviously does. I make inspection blueprints, and when the degrees of a circular pattern exceed 360 degrees, or when point to point dimensions exceed total part length, and you inform them of the impossibility of these design specs, more often than not your time would be better spent talking to a brick wall.
It's like trying to have an informed discussion on computing with an ardent member of the cult of mac. All you will get back is snide remarks, or pretentious silence. You can quote rules of geometry until you are blue in the face. Quote directly from the gd&t manual for geometric tolerancing, or even play dumb and ask politely what their intentions were... result is almost always the same.
Don't you know, they have degrees, make big salaries, and are important. They never make mistakes. Just ask them.
I have been surprised a few times by polite aerospace engineers that own up to drafting errors, omissions, and flat out screwups before, and I am always cordial and polite with them. But for the most part, all I get back is silence, and derision.
(Just to clarify what I do: I make manufacturing drawings used for internal QA processes. Often times the customer supplied data is a digital nurbs representation of a part with some datum features called out, hole sizes listed and annotated, an some geometric tolerancing frames tacked on. My job is to take this data and in conjunction with the customer's tolerancing guidelines and practices documentation, create drawings that inspectors can use to validate the part was properly manufactured. This requires that they accurately convey the engineering intent of their geometry and datum choices. This is why I sometimes have to ask seemingly silly questions when they break the rules for gd&t frames, or define impossible (mathematically so) tolerances. You would probably be stunned how often I catch insane engineering mistakes because they pencilwhipped shit, and have to figure out the fit form and function myself, because they won't own up to it.)
Re: (Score:3)
Some excellent points there.
I'd go with Engineer D - for not "continuing the trend of smaller". The F-22 is pretty much the same size as the F-15 (62ft long with 44ft wingspan for the Raptor). And still around the same size (though with a larger wingspan) than the F-4 Phantom II.
And, going back further, the F-86 Sabre was 37ft long; 37ft wingspan, roughly the same size as the P-51 Mustang.
Re:meanwhile, somewhere deep in the engineering de (Score:4, Interesting)
As a MechE who is currently working in Aerospace doing design, let me tell you that those of us who know how to properly CAD stuff up and indicate the important dimensions on a drawing hate the other guys as much as you do. I can't say how many times I've opened up a part file, gone to the sketch, and found that none of the lines were fully constrained, or the constraints were arbitrary and were only tangentially related to the driving dimensions. I used to go back to the original author and ask what was going on in their head, but found it to be easier to just silently redo constraints on the features that needed it, hopefully without moving any lines. The place I'm in now is full of people who have been using NX since it was new, and yet the "guru"s in house all say that sketches are bad and want us to use solid features instead - completely ignoring that it's so much harder to change parameters when a design needs to change, all because sketches used to suck (or so I hear) and they can't be arsed to learn how to use constraints correctly now.
The fun part comes when you have to mix units - two weeks ago I had to draft up a simple adapter plate that had 4 force transducers on it, which all happened to have metric bolt patterns. Trying to indicate that the distance to the center of each group of holes was the driving dimension is fun when you don't have a feature at the actual center, but at least you can dual dimension with the nice even number in mm under the ugly inch one. (disclaimer: I hate the english system. I have to use it because that's the policy when you're .gov).
Then there's the "here's a vaguely circular bolt pattern with 28 thru holes, and the only important thing is that they're symmetric about a center point, have a minimum radius, and line up so the bolts go into a 1" grid on some table somewhere", but that ends up needing 20 dimensions and all sorts of center lines. These are times when GD&T is just annoying and it would be a whole lot easier for me to put a note on there with the intention (though that's probably because I don't know enough yet to do it cleanly and correctly).
I like it when the machinists or someone else checking the drawing tells me what I did wrong so I can fix it and not have them need to yell at me again - I just wish more people I worked with had that attitude.
Re:meanwhile, somewhere deep in the engineering de (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you and I would get along great.
I am a stickler for model quality. I've been called on to design tooling and fixturing for manufacturing purposes, and really, not constraining your sketches, or using sane build parameters is writing a recipie for disaster later on when you need to make a revision. Cad software these days can let you make some truly beautiful design models that are built to resist breaking in amazing ways. (Catia's knowledgeware comes instantly to mind. You can do some really crazy stuff with the knowledge workbenches.)
That said.....
I have seen some of the worst models in the history of aviation come out of gulfstream. For confidentiality reasons, I won't name my employer, or the part series, but the models for a series of wing support bulkheads they sent us for manufacture had the following things wrong with them:
They pencil whipped the floor fillet information into the parts list. They did not model the floor fillets into the digital models. The filletless models were used for the stress and weight metrics in other engineering depts.
The geometry that was supposed to be filleted would result in impossible geometric configurations with the fillets in place.
Full radius fillets in slots that have non-normal walls were done in such a way that the models had a jagged edge where two discrete fillets failed to propery merge.
Location authority for holes was not given to the solid model, but to a pencil whipped cad drawing going to two decimal places (inch), with tight tolerances beyond two places.
Geometry was "boolean split disco fever" in nature; featues that should be nominally parallel were angled by .000000X degrees instead, poor surface tangencies were extant everywhere, and surfaces did not align cleanly.
Long story short, I had to spend an entire month cleaning up and interpreting the data they sent us, just so I could ultimately rebuild their models in a sanitized and useful format for our CNC programmers.
Seeing shit like that makes me hope to god that I never have to fly in one of their planes.
Re:meanwhile, somewhere deep in the engineering de (Score:4, Interesting)
Space nutters often cite fantasy stories as proof that their crackpot ideas will work.
Aerospace engineers simply refuse to admit that the real world can limit what they do, and that some things simply cannot be done. They refuse to accept the possibility that they could be wrong. (Not that they are wrong, just the mere possibility of it.)
More often than not, you get stonewalled rather than have your questions answered, of they direct you to a secretary that doesn't know her clevage from a hole in the ground (as far as reading and interpreting blueprints are concerned.)
As I said, occasionally I get a bite, and the guy on the other end is polite and helpful. "Oh, we did that because of FOO", etc. I always return the favor and thank him for his time. Most of the time though? "Not me!" And finger pointing.
Re: (Score:3)
You work with the lhc?
Great, somebody I can point this out to!
While looking for documentation on catia's programmer interface, I stumbled upon an internal lhc website with truly terrible security set. I am positive that this web server is not meant to be publicly viewed, since it contains a fullblown and live installable copy of catia v5 64bit, as well as engineering plans for the atlas experiment.
It was the live catia install files that returned the google search result, since it seems google's search rob
Priorities. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Priorities. (Score:4, Funny)
The F22 program has cost around 66 billion dollars. That's about equivalent to a mission to Mars and two copies of the Superconducting Supercollider. That's equivalent to about 130 rovers of the same type as Opportunity and Spirit (ignoring the economies of scale that would substantially reduce the cost of having a lot of them). Etc. Etc. Instead we get unworking jet fighters that are supposed to be better than our previous jet fighters which are already estimated to be better than any other anyone else has in the world. Great priorities.
Yes, but at least buying F22s puts all that money in the right pockets.
Re:Priorities. (Score:4, Funny)
That's more than twice the ENTIRE budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2011. So, metaphorically equivalent to curing cancer.
Yeah, like curing cancer is anywhere near as cool as doing mach 2 with your hair on fire in a plane with the radar cross-section of a sparrow and the armament to single-handedly take out a small city.
I mean, really, which one can you make better video games and movies about? Same thing for big particle accelerators (well, unless they're man-portable and can be used to blow stuff up; think BFG) and Mars rovers (though those are a little bit cool, 1/130th of an F-22 is about right). A manned Mars expedition might be as cool as an F-22 if it turned out there were Martians or something like that, but it'd probably be like watching the goofy astronauts make faces at the camera in the ISS. Big whoop. Watching F-22s blow up today's Designated Bad Guys on prime-time TV is guaranteed to be good, and you know that whoever is in the White House will give us that, since there's no way we'll elect that isolationist doofus Ron Paul.
</sarcasm>
Flew just fine for me. (Score:3)
Weird. I remember flying a Raptor back in 1994. Thing wrecked everything in its path, no problems. The best was when I installed the tracking gun to shoot up targets I wasn't even aiming at, to say nothing of the badass EMP cannon. Laid waste to most of the Third World with that baby.
Almost 20 years on and now it has problems? Definitely a government clusterfuck at work here.
The solution they are looking for is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Drone technology to replace the human who needs oxygen...
Never used in combat? Good. (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3)
I've been thinking about this. You definitely want to make the emergency oxygen handle easier to grasp, I'm thinking.
But you don't necessarily want to have your emergency oxygen turn on automatically, unless you're ejecting, perhaps, because you may need that oxygen if you *do* have to eject. I'd prefer to see either a layer between the primary system and the pilot's mask, or a secondary system. For instance, oxygen from OBOGS compressing a tank which feeds the mask, with the tank providing a reasonable
Test missions? (Score:4, Interesting)
interesting comments (Score:3)
I read with interest the many knowledgeable comments in this thread, and understand that it takes awhile to get bugs out of a new airframe, and testing a new plane is not conducive of a long and happy life.
But I have to ask; the F22 came out in 1997. It's been out for more than a decade. So they're still finding ergonomic issues in the emergency systems?
Looking at this and at the shambles we've made of our manned space capability, and I have to wonder if a government at some point grows so bureaucratic that it can no longer successfully do the big projects.
Sounds like... (Score:3)
"I find the cause of the mishap was the MP's [mishap pilot] failure to recognize and initiate a timely dive recovery due to channelized attention, breakdown of visual scan and unrecognized spatial disorientation."
- President of the AIB, Brig. Gen. James Browne
[TRANSLATION: "Yuri Gagarin was not the first Russian in outer space. However, we do not mention the other for he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when the oxygen recycling system failed."]
Of course we haven't used it (Score:3)
I had to roll my eyes at this little gem. Yes, it's never been called on despite the small wars we've fought over the last decade. Because it's an air superiority fighter. We haven't fought anyone who could challenge the decades old F-16, let alone the F-15 or the F-22. Shall we use a screwdriver to pound in a nail because it's a really expensive screwdriver?
If we actually use the F-22 for anything more than a glorified test of its pitiful strike capability then something really bad has happened, because it means the US is at war with a country like the UK, France, Russia, China, or India.
Re:Trump Card (Score:5, Funny)
In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
That only lasted a few days though. Then the next version of PunkBuster was released, and all those guys got banned.
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't been called into combat because it is a trump card. Why reveal its capabilities for others to prepare for? The F-22 is there so no major air force in the world challenges the US. In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
All of them with a 1:100 ratio. The ratio is normally expressed as kill:loss, so you should use 100:1 to accommodate the less careful readers. ;-)
Re:Trump Card (Score:4, Insightful)
It hasn't been called into combat because it is a trump card.
That and because it's too expensive to lose. In real terms, a single F-22 probably costs about the same as a dozen squadrons of Spitfires did in WWII.
Re:Trump Card (Score:5, Interesting)
But you'd lose the entire war if you fielded Spitfires instead of F-22s.
A bit of googling gives 12,604 pounds as the unit cost for the Spitfire vs. $150 million for the F-22. Depending on which inflation and conversion calculators you believe, this might range between $300k and $950k per Spitfire today.
That gives you somewhere between 150 and 500 Spitfires per F-22.
Let's give the F-22 side enough resources to keep one plane on patrol at all times, and they can lose 10 F-22s before they lose the air war.
Then the Spitfire side can keep 150 planes in the air at all times, and they can lose 1500 planes before they lose the air war.
The two sides meet in the air. The Spitfires can't touch the F-22 because it's cruising nearly twice as high as the Spitfires can even fly. Furthermore, it can launch missiles to destroy the Spitfires from outside visual range. OTOH, that will only kill a dozen Spitfires, assuming perfect missile performance. At this point the F-22 has 480 rounds to shoot from its Vulcan cannon. Unfortunately, the F-22 is SO much faster than the Spitfires that it will tend to overtake them before it can do much aiming, so I'm going to say it's not a complete turkey shoot. Maybe another 2-3 dozen Spitfires go down. That leaves around 100 Spitfires left. They should be able to overwhelm the F-22 when it tries to land.
Unfortunately for the Spitfires, the F-22 can land outside of their range. Even if the F-22 airfields are in range, the Spitfires will have to split up into groups to cover them -- but that risks having an entire wing destroyed if they split into more than three groups.
That gets us to bombing. The Spitfires will take heavy losses, but they'll trash pretty much any airfield they attack. The F-22 can bomb the Spitfire airbases with impunity -- but its attacks will be like mosquito bites against the Spitfire's hundred airbases.
Taking all that into account, I'd say the Spitfires would lose a slow battle of attrition, unless ground forces could bring all the F-22 airbases into their range. Then the F-22s would be overwhelmed before they could kill enough Spitfires.
All this ignores SAM sites...and the missiles for those would be running cheaper than the unit cost of the Spitfires. That turns into another battle of attrition; I doubt one SAM site has more than a couple dozen missiles on hand at a time!
Re:Use the old O2 system? (Score:5, Informative)
The new systems are smaller and lighter. Also, at least from the original crash report, the oxygen system wasn't at fault. It shut down like it was supposed to (it was operated by bleed air from the engine, the ECS detected a hot bleed air leak and shut off the bleed air valves. If you don't check a hot bleed air leak, you can set the plane on fire or melt parts of it), but the pilot struggled to activate the emergency oxygen system and had significant difficulty with this due to the bulky gear he was wearing.
While struggling with activation of the EOS, he lost track of time and became disoriented, failed to notice that his aircraft attitude had changed, and attempted a dive recovery far too late to save himself.
Re: (Score:2)
These systems have very specific design parameters, especially for weight, space/shape, power usage, oxygen output, and communication interface. In addition, the F-22 has low-visibility goals across the EM spectrum. Its not like taking the water pump out of a Ford.
Re:Use the old O2 system? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually its almost exactly like taking the water pump out of a 1960 ford falcon and being surprised you can't use it on a 2011 ford F-150.
Re: (Score:3)
You'd think so, but remember that these aren't being built by the "government" in a continuously operating design laboratory where the knowledge from all previous generations is leveraged to create the next great fighter jet. It was contracted out to not one, but three (four if you count the engines) different corporations, each with it's own expertise and history. While there was undoubtedly a great deal of aircraft design experience in the teams, the lack of long term mission continuity has been traded f
Re: (Score:2)
Random guess? There isn't a lot of extra room in military aircraft. Things need to be molded into the shape of the air-frame itself, which probably causes a few headaches. So, what may fit in the corner of an old air-frame, may be jutting out into the ribs of the pilot in a new one.
Additionally, they're probably trying to improve things, with more dials / electronics / what have you. And while things may work in the lab, reality is the true test.
It's kind of how everyone looks at an anatomy model of the hum
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Use the old O2 system? (Score:4, Informative)
Easy. With bottled air, you've got to cart around what you can breathe. You're limited by that, and it takes up space and weight.
The early F-16s didn't have OBOGS. When they got an engine upgrade (block 50, I think) they recieved OBOGS. From the company that builds the OBOGS, here's the advantages:
http://www.cobham.com/media/75388/SYSTEM%20F-16%20OBOGS%20ADV10556.pdf [cobham.com]
The problem is that if something goes wrong, you have to shut the system down. In this case a sensor detected hot air entering the system, which is a sign of a fire, or a potential cause of one. So the system shuts down, and the pilot needs to go to his emergency O2 supply. But this guy struggled trying to activate it. Possibly an ergonomic problem that needs to be addressed.
Generally speaking though, OBOGS is a sound, logical way to go.
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, this is total bullshit ...that's exactly what fighter pilots are trained for; that's why so few people who apply are accepted, and why so few who are accepted make the grade...
<Tinfoil Hat Mode> "Died during training (or testing)" is a military euphemism for "Died on a secret mission". At least they didn't say he "Rolled a Jeep" </Tinfoil Hat Mode>
Re:Things that make you go "Huh?" (Score:5, Insightful)
40 lb resistance is not a lot of weight but putting all that pressure onto a coin-sized ring that could only be pulled with one gloved finger? That seems really odd to me.
Think of the last time you carried groceries nowhere near 40 lb and the bags cut into your hand, even though you were using all four fingers. Increase the weight to 40lb, then quadruple it by putting it on one finger. That's a lot of force required.
Re: (Score:3)
Now do it with your brain on no oxygen. (Kind of like now do this with your drain on drugs.)
Yes, this all points to a need to retrofit the fighters. And give Hany a post-humous medal for his discovery of a critical design flaw.
Re:Things that make you go "Huh?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for fuck's sake.
Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs. As a method of fighting black-out, they tense their legs to tighten the muscles and help push air up into their upper body (away from where it tends to go during positive high-g manuvers). Yes, there is the flight suit that squeezes them as well, but every bit counts. And since the ring that starts the emergency system is forward and beneath the pilot, that means that they would be using their back to pull against that 40-lb resistance...
Actually no, they're expected to twist and turn to reach the ring while held in place by an insanely tight harness. This ain't no Cessna. Further, they're then expected to pull the ring in a direction away from their body - it's stupidly designed in the most un-ergonomic way possible.
After a minute without air? That's what it feels like to be working out hard...and since he wouldn't have been exercising vigorously during that minute, he'd have had plenty of glucose on hand, so his muscles could easily have worked using anaerobic respiration long enough for one pull of a ring.
A minute without air? I have an idea. We put a stopwatch on you and make you hold your breath while sitting in a chair. I'll put a 40-lb weight with a pop-tab on top under the chair between your legs and we'll see if you can manage to reach down, find it, then lift it a couple inches after you hold your breath an entire minute. If you're even awake still. And that test STILL won't account for the vertigo and g-forces involved in the dive and attempting a dive recovery.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
And I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
And even if all of this WAS a tall order, that's exactly what fighter pilots are trained for; that's why so few people who apply are accepted, and why so few who are accepted make the grade in training.
Which is why, when they get into the air, they should be confident that someone has fucking sanity-checked the design of the safety features aboard the aircraft. Clearly, in this case, that was NOT done.
Re:Things that make you go "Huh?" (Score:5, Insightful)
"It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer
Okay, this is total bullshit, I'm sorry. Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs
Hmm...an airforce pilot who has actually piloted fighter jets (and is an experienced accident investigator and knows the failure modes that get pilots into trouble) says it's hard, and a slashdot commenter says "bullshit, the pilot was just being a pussy". Who to believe!?
I can believe it's hard - trying to pick up a 40 pound box from beneath my chair seems like it would be quite challenging. And I'm under no stress, wearing non-bulky street clothes, and have plenty of oxygen.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
You fly *in* airplanes, but do you pilot fighter jets? Or do you sit back in coach on an airline and play on your iPhone? In straight and level flight at 800mph, movement is not restricted and you're not feeling any high G-forces.... but if you deviate from straight and level, start struggling from oxygen deprivation while you try to pilot the plane, then things can get much harder -- worse, you can get into trouble much faster.
Re:Things that make you go "Huh?" (Score:5, Insightful)
First thing:
"'This was likely [Haney's] first experience under such physiological duress.'"
Okay, that makes no sense to me. My understanding is that both USN and USAF pilots undergo extreme physiological and psychological duress in the course of their training, for just this reason. They expose you to hypoxia, to decompression, to high-g forces, even to having to survive and avoid capture (with most trainees end up getting caught) and resist interrogation techniques (see under 'most trainees end up getting caught').
It's pretty hard to simulate a life-threatening situation without actually putting someone's life at risk. Some people focus in those situations. I don't know what that's like. Some people, like me, fall apart. I know exactly what that's like. Everything you do is wrong and stupid. Every new piece of information is overwhelming and terrifying. Sometimes you just blank out, and the next thing you know, three seconds are gone. Then you go, "OH FUCK! THREE SECONDS! I FUCKED EVERYTHING UP AND NOW I'M DEAD!" and another three seconds are wasted. Now six seconds are gone, and you only had 18 to begin with. What are you going to do, now that almost half your time is gone? You'd better do something extraordinary, because 18 seconds is barely enough time so pull super hard OH FUCK I JUST RIPPED THE HANDLE OFF
Then I'm thinking about how bad I screwed up pulling the handle off, instead of pulling the backup handle.
The thing is, the smarter someone is, the more controlled, the harder it is to get them to panic until something really, actually scares them, and the harder it is too fool them into thinking it's time to be scared. If you didn't know me very, very well, you might think I was good at stressful situations. Nope. I just don't get stressed quite as easily, but when I do, watch out, because I'm about to completely lose it. I'm guessing this guy was similar.
Go ahead. Put me through some oxygen-deprivation training. The whole time, I'll be thinking to myself, "hey, worst case, they have medical staff to revive you. They wouldn't get away with actually threatening people's lives." Even if they would get away with it, I probably wouldn't believe it. I would have to literally see multiple people die in training to actually get scared there, and until I'm actually scared, you don't know how I'll act.
Re:Things that make you go "Huh?" (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to scoff at the charts that show what the FAA euphemistically calls "useful time of consciousness" at varying altitudes. I mean, c'mon...if I try, I can hold my breath for 2 minutes or more, and I'm not nearly in as good shape as I should be. How can a pilot at high altitude have a useful time of consciousness of 30 seconds or less? It's trivial to hold my breath that long, even if I don't prepare for it beforehand.
Then one day, I got a revelation: It's trivial for me to hold my breath for 30-60 seconds and possible to break 120 seconds because the air in my lungs is under full atmospheric pressure. However, if I am at 25,000 feet of altitude, and my cockpit explosively decompresses (or, as in the case of a fighter pilot, if I am at lower atmospheric pressure and my pure oxygen supply is suddenly removed), I no longer have near as much oxygen in my lungs, and consequently, my body will go hypoxic much more quickly. You might think losing his oxygen supply for a full minute would be "like...working out hard", but you'd be wrong. I haven't read TFA, but if he was above about 15,000 feet MSL (and especially if he was above 25,000 MSL) it was much, much worse than that. His muscles might have been functional without oxygen, but I guarantee his brain functions were degrading rapidly.
Re:We don't want your crappy jets (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Hoser,
The Canadian Air Force is the first line of defense in keeping that mad bitch Sarah Palin bottled up in Alaska until the Ruskis invade and do her in. Second, you don't get much sandier and oilier than the Athabascan tar sands. I'm sure you need to protect them from the Inuit Air Force or hordes of Laplanders coming over the pole or something. Anyway, hold them off long enough for us to steal all the oil, pump it south, and leave Alberta a stinking mudhole. Really, aside from Lake Louise, it kind of is anyway. Third, all those de Havilland Beavers are going to quit flying someday. You need a replacement. Fourth, the Canadian Dollar is still worth almost as much as a US Dollar. Buying a bunch of these jets will help return the CAD to its more natural $0.74 USD level.
Sincerely yours,
A. Murican
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I've been playing Novalogic's F-22 since 2001, and I've never experienced this oxygen issue. That pilot had something wrong with him.
You probably haven't been playing it at the same altitude.
Re:Welp (Score:5, Interesting)
Its never about who has the better plane but who has more money to pay off the military.
Or, here in Non-Conspiracy Theory World, it's about real life factors. Such as: in the case of the YF-22 vs YF-23 flyoff, USAF chose the 22 because it was deemed to be more maneuverable in combat above supersonic speeds... a prime goal of the ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter) program. The 23 was deemed to be faster and stealthier, but significantly less maneuverable in high speed operating envelopes. Additionally, USAF's relationship with Northrop had soured on the B-2 project. Northrop had, fair or unfair, gained a reputation for being behind schedule and over budget. Lockheed had turned out the F-117 ahead of time and under budget. At the time, considering that USAF was going into a post-Cold War budget era, the ability to deliver hardware on time and on price was considered important.
Look into the upgrades and fixes grumman was going to make to the f-14d's . THe f-14d's were better then the super hornets that replaced them . Nevermind the upgrades that would have cut maintenance in HALF , which is the excuse given for retiring the planes in the first place.
Grumman also showed plans for a new version of the f-14 that had much of the features of the raptor (besides the stealth portion). Yet they went with the super hornets.
Again, let's look at real world reasons. Cheney canceled the Super Tomcat because even with the upgrades you mentioned, maintenance costs would far and away still have been greater than any other current or projected platform. The doomed A-12 project was ongoing at the time, and it was thought that the "flying dorito" might be able to do both fleet air defense and strike, all in a stealthy platform. The Tomcat wasn't considered because, as Dick Cheney put it when he canceled the program, "Underneath, it's still 1960's technology". I loved the Tomcat and worked with them in the Navy, but I cannot emphasize enough how many man hours and dollars it took to keep it up in the air. Yeah, the Super Tom would in some ways have been more capable than the Super Hornet, but the later is far more economical. And those costs add up.