Super Hornet gun kill of F-22
Posted on 02/26/2007 2:47:19 PM PST by SubGeniusX
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.”
"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.
I'm not either.
But I'll bet those pilots are!
"I probably speak for a lot of the computer programmers reading this thread when I say I read this article thinkng, "Thank God it wasn't my code."'
The hardest debug I ever saw was from Konica. A code writer had mispelled the letter 'i'. He had entered the number '1' instead. It took forever to find it.
You do what for a living?
East-west involves changing longitude.
That would be as costly as losing an attack sub or an Aegis cruiser. Aren't those things like $250 million apiece?
-ccm
Why are you saying that Lockheed is scum?
That was my thinking as well, but I guess these guys were using a geosynchronous sat system that was not GPS, or I suppose thats the inference, and the time signal was somehow linked to the position matrix in the nav system , so that it couldn't do a proper return affirmation signal on the time line? This caused all computers to crash and they were on VFR?
Sounds like a bas akwards nav system that won't work unless all the clocks are synchcronized to local way point time zone progression?
I have a hard time believing that , but I suppose its possible.
After all we must bomb the enemy at exactly the planned local time, not Zulu?
And all the computer systems crashed? Sounds too urban legendary for me. But what do I know, with all the new systems coming on line these days.
Or maybe F22s are also able to engage in time travel?
Just kidding.....
ROTFLMAO!
One of my pet peeves on the Macintosh was that the default monospaced font had "I" and "l" characters that were identical, as well as "O" and "0". Grrrrr....
NOTE ITEMS http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787369/posts?page=27#27
WE HAD TO RUN NAV. SYSTEM IN OWN AIRCRAFT ---FOR VARICATION
OVER POLES AND -+ 180 DEGREES
It is very hard to understand how this could get out of the house
I pass by that 757 everyday, I thought that cockpit redo was for the JSF(Boeing Version). Was it for the F-22?
Super Hornet gun kill of F-22
That was in Washington State, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge...
Yep, complete regression testing is an impossibility with systems of any complexity.
As a matter of fact I do... and thanks for talking down to me anyway, as if you don't know anything about me.
I guess since you've had your say, there's nothing left for lowly little me to comment on. I guess the robots that I have in service in Iraq and Afghanistan are of no use whatsoever.
Well, enough fun here. Time for a beer. Later.
Wasn't this the same company that didn't know the difference between metric and British units of measure?
The F-22 Raptor (beta). This won't happen in the next release.
Tacoma Narrows, Washington. Not all that far from Redmond...
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