The Self-Locking F-22

By Robert Bryce



Last week, Lockheed Martin announced that its profits were up a hefty 60 percent in the first quarter. The company earned $591 million in profit on revenues of $9.2 billion. Now, if the company could just figure out how to put a door handle on its new $361 million F-22 fighter, its prospects would really soar.

On April 10, at Langley Air Force Base, an F-22 pilot, Capt. Brad Spears, was locked inside the cockpit of his aircraft for five hours. No one in the U.S. Air Force or from Lockheed Martin could figure out how to open the aircraft's canopy. At about 1:15 pm, chainsaw-wielding firefighters from the 1st Fighter Wing finally extracted Spears after they cut through the F-22's three-quarter inch- thick polycarbonate canopy.

Total damage to the airplane, according to sources inside the Pentagon: $1.28 million. Not only did the firefighters ruin the canopy, which cost $286,000, they also scuffed the coating on the airplane's skin which will cost about $1 million to replace.







Click Here <http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20396> for more photos of the incident.

The Pentagon currently plans to buy 181 copies of the F-22 from Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons vendor. The total pricetag : $65.4 billion.

The incident at Langley has many Pentagon watchers shaking their heads. Tom Christie, the former director of testing and evaluation for the DOD, calls the F-22 incident at Langley "incredible." "God knows what'll happen next," said Christie, who points out that the F-22 has about two million lines of code in its software system. "This thing is so software intensive. You can't check out every line of code."
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Now, just for the sake of comparison, Windows XP, one of the most common computer operating systems, contains about 45 million lines of code. But if any of that code fails, then the computer that's running it simply stops working. It won't cause that computer to fall out of the sky. If any of the F-22's two million lines of computer code go bad, then the pilot can die, or, perhaps, just get trapped in the cockpit.

One analyst inside the Pentagon who has followed the F-22 for years said that "Everyone's incredulous. They're asking can this really have happened?" As for Lockheed Martin, the source said, "Whatever the problem was, the people who built it &nb sp;should know how to open the canopy."

Given that the U.S. military is Lockheed Martin's biggest client, perhaps the company could provide the Air Force with a supply of slimjims or coat hangars, just in case another F-22 pilot gets stuck at the controls.

As if the latest canopy shenanigans weren't bad enough, on May 1, Defense News reported that there are serious structural problems with the F-22. Seems the titanium hull of the aircraft isn't meshing as well as it should. Naturally, taxpayers have to foot the bill for the mistake (improper heat-treating of the titanium) which is found on 90 aircraft. The cost of repairing those wrinkles? Another $1 billion or so.

Lockheed Martin's F-22 spokesman, Joe Quimby, did not return telephone calls.

Is that covered under waranty?

All they had to do was get him to strap in and punch out.

Is this the million dollar damage?

1970 or so, one Friday afternoon I flew a TA-4J from Cherry Point MCAS to Patrick AFB. For what reason, I have long ago forgotten, but it was probably cross country training.

When we (the TA-4J is a tandem cockpit a/c), arrived at the plane to fly back on Sunday morning, we couldn't get in the damn thing. I guess that is just the opposite of the trapped pilot, but for whatever the reason, we had to call VMFAT-201, the squadron... and get somebody down to Florida and get our stupid butts in the airplane.

Eventually, the folks who flew down to fix the a/c cut a hole in the side of the plane and replaced a cam that had worn flat on one side.

After the fix, I remember well flying back up the coast v.f.r. and rolling the plane inverted to point out my parents house on St. Simons Island, GA to the IP in the back seat. I got a real hoot when later that day I got a call from my mother who asked me if I was the idiot flying upside down over the beach. Mama thought that low and slow were safe.

Why didnt they just use an electric sawsall? Would have at least eliminated the oily mess!

Somewhat old news, but new to me...

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225

Lockheed's F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line
Brandon Hill (Blog) - February 26, 2007 10:28 AM

Six Lockheed F-22 Raptors have Y2K-esque glitch of their own over the Pacific

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighter in the world with its stealth capabilities, advanced radar, state of the art weapons systems and ultra-efficient turbofans which allow the F-22 to "supercruise" at supersonic speeds without an afterburner. The Raptor has gone up against the best that the US Air Force and Navy has to offer taking out F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18 Super Hornets during simulated war games in Alaska. The Raptor-led "Blue Air" team was able to rack up an impressive 241-to-2 kill ratio during the exercise against the "Red Air" threat -- the two kills on the blue team were from the 30-year old F-15 teammates and not the new Raptors.

But while the simulated war games were a somewhat easy feat for the Raptor, something more mundane was able to cripple six aircraft on a 12 to 15 hours flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Air Force's mighty Raptor was felled by the International Date Line (IDL).

When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to "reboot" the systems to no avail.

Luckily for the Raptors, there were no weather issues that day so visibility was not a problem. Also, the Raptors had their refueling tankers as guide dogs to "carry" them back to safety. "They needed help. Had they gotten separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they had no attitude reference. They had no communications or navigation," said Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. "They would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble.â€

"The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad," Shepperd continued. "It turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes."

Luckily for the pilots behind the controls of the Raptors, they were not involved in a combat situation. Had they been, it could have been a disastrous folly by the U.S. Air Force to have to admit that their aircraft which cost $125+ million USD apiece were knocked out of the sky due to a few lines of computer code. "And luckily this time we found out about it before combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again, completed their deployment. But this could have been real serious in combat," said Shepperd.

Don't get me wrong...I love Lockheed airplanes and have a bunch of time in the Herc, the 10, and the 18. But, dammit, for the price tag we, the taxpayers, are shelling out for that overpriced dream machine, you'd a thought they'd have worked all these idiotic bugs out of it before they deployed the damned thing.

I have a buddy who works at LM. Some of the stories coming out of that place will set your wallet on fire.

Can't do a TRANSPAC without crashing the computers?!? Gimmie a break!!

quote:

Originally posted by Mississippian:
Why didnt they just use an electric sawsall? Would have at least eliminated the oily mess!

the "oily mess" from a chainsaw has nothing to do with the engine, the oil is to keep the chain and bar from self-destructing.

Frankly I'd have used a circular chop saw.

Hey, he could have simply ejected... but imagine the repair cost for that...

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quote:

quote:
Originally posted by Mississippian:
Why didnt they just use an electric sawsall? Would have at least eliminated the oily mess!


The "oily mess" from a chainsaw has nothing to do with the engine, the oil is to keep the chain and bar from self-destructing.

They could have replaced the bar oil with vegtable oil, at least it is easier to clean up. That used to be done to field dress Moose. The 18 and 24 volt sawzalls have replaced the chain saw for that.

The blade on a sawzall is reciprocating and does not need oil for lubrication. I am not sure if they make a blade for polycarbonate, but if a chain saw can cut it, I would guess that a course bimetal blade would work very well, but much slower than a chain saw.

I am sure glad it was not me in that cockpit with those guys trying to work dressed like that. I wonder what those workers were protecting themselves from?

Roger