World's Priciest Stealth Plane Takes First Run to Vertical Landing

The skies over Fort Worth, Texas, hosted a historic aviation milestone today when the most expensive plane on Earth—a modded version of the F-35 Lightning II that lands vertically like a helicopter—made its first flight. Its pilot certainly had the chops to do the job: He learned to fly short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) airplanes when Jimmy Carter was president.

Retired Royal Air Force squadron leader Graham Tomlinson, now employed by BAE Flight Systems, flew AV-8 Harriers (the first STOVL warplanes to see action) for 28 years, including time in the late 1980s as a test pilot qualifying the FA-2 Sea Harrier for carrier operations. And today he became the first ever to fly the prototype of the F-35B, a next-gen Lockheed Martin aircraft built for three branches of the U.S military and a host of international partners. The program, at nearly $300 billion, is the most expensive weapons acquisition program in history.

Flight testing has evolved significantly in the years since Tomlinson first flew STOVLs. Computers have so many responsibilities on these planes that they've taken some of the tactile feedback away from pilots. "In the Harrier family, the pilot took care of the aircraft," Tomlinson says. "With the F-35, the airplane takes care of the pilot."

The F-35, known widely as the Joint Strike Fighter, comes in three versions with the same fuselage, identical wing sweeps, and similar tail shapes. The first, a conventional Air Force airplane, A-1, has been flying for more than a year. The STOVL B-model, which will fly for the first time this week, is designed for the U.S. Marine Corps. The last C model will be a larger airplane more suitable for the Navy.

I was glad to see they weren’t referring to the B-2 crash in Guam!!!

AVweb | World's Premier Independent Aviation News Resource
June 5, 2008
Update: B-2 Crash Caused By Waterlogged Sensors
By Glenn Pew, Contributing Editor, Video Editor

The crash on takeoff of a 509th Air Wing, Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber, Feb. 23, operating at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, was caused by water in the aircraft's sensors, according to an Air Combat report issued Thursday. Specifically, moisture in three port transducer units "distorted data introduced by a B-2 Spirit's air data system" that led to flawed information entering the bomber's flight control computers. The aircraft was reacting to inaccurate airspeed and a "perceived" negative angle of attack. This resulted in an "uncommanded 30 degree nose-high pitch-up on takeoff," according to the Air Force.

Major Ryan Link and Captain Justin Grieve, the aircraft's two pilots and the only two aboard, were unable to regain control and safely ejected just as the aircraft stalled and mushed into the ground and its left wing impacted the ground. The $1.4 billion aircraft crashed just off the left side of the runway and exploded. It was the first-ever B-2 crash and followed 75,000 hours of loss-free service. Link and Grieve both suffered injuries during ejection, with Grieve suffering compression fractures to his spine.

The report points to the inaccurate readings as contributing factors, adding that ineffective communication of critical information about a technique used to remove moisture from the sensors also contributed. It's possible that all the maintenance crew had to do to avert the accident was turn on the pitot heat prior to performing air data calibrations. But the suggested technique was not part of checklist procedures.

Video -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZB-iziY2Bw&fmt=18

Considering the development budget is split among a handful of prototypes, the F-35 series are currently the most expensive. That will change once it enters series production.

That, or the copy editor is an idiot.

You are correct, and it used to infuriate me when they gored my own personal ox in the process of publishing accounting illiteracy. The first prototype of a plane is fabulously expensive, viewed - properly - as embodying all the design cost of model. All that $$ buys you the first prototype - the first prototype and the ability to make subsequent aircraft of the type at a more-or-less reasonable cost. But that form of accounting requires you to be realistgic about the fact that the money spent to design and build the prototype, once spent, is "runway behind you, or altitude above you, or fuel used." That money, already gone, has no bearing on whether it makes sense to build the next one, or in general what production rate makes sense. So the first prototype cost a great deal of money to build - but its replacement cost is simply the cost of construction of one additional plane.
From that POV the development of the F-18 was a foolish choice. There was no case that the plane would be superior to the existing Navy aircraft - it wasn't even designed to be as good, it was designed to be cheaper to produce. And yet the cost and the technical risk of the development should have predominated in the balance against the (putatively higher) production cost of the F-14, the development cost of the F-14 being a long-sunk cost and thus irrelevant to any current decision. Instead, journalists and Democrats (redundancy) insisted on calling the unit price of the F-14 the total cost of the program divided by total build. An accounting procedure which would always favor paper tiger new designs over the continued construction of a known-quantity design. IOW, it makes "better" not only permanently at war with "good enough," but permanently triumphant over good enough. Meaning, you will never have anything but paper tigers and no actual equipment.

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