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.
Seriously? Sure, its more likely the fighting troops will be ok - but will have losses. It's the hand-wringers in DC and at the higher commands that will have an absolute cow. JAG officers who can no longer "see" over the shoulder of each soldier will demand that we withdraw and bury our heads in the sand. Col and Generals and politicians (in and out of the military will get timid.
GPS repeaters inside the shelter keeps the fix current. Receive the signal outside, route it to antennas in the shelter, re-radiate. I started doing those systems 12 years or more ago.
I've seen them as well for the F-117. But that's what I mean by becoming excessively reliant on tech.
Previously, the location was painted on the floor in numbers for certain hangers
For some reason I thought those marked coordinates were for input for INS initialization? Some GPS receivers will accept a Lat/Lon input to speed satellite acquisition (never messed with a mil-air unit), but that is still a lot slower than a warm start, let alone already locked up.
You would lose GPS, but that wouldn't cause a loss of things like fuel displays and things like happened in this software crash.
Back in the day, F-4s had "inertial nav" systems that weren't dependent on any outside input. I don't know if these things have such goodies, because INS has a problem with drift so they're useless for precision bombing. But INS would get you in the area of the target and then home. As would standard TACAN NAV systems, if they're in the area (probably not). Or LORAN, if these things have them (don't know).
Dogfights with radar or infrared missiles shouldn't be effected.
These are all just guesses based on what I know of the available technology. I have no idea what real F-22s actually have, but I wouldn't be too worried. Our satelites give us many times the capabilities of Vietnam era systems, but if they were taken out, there's no reason we couldn't operate the same way F-4s did back in '75.
The real problem with depending on satellites is that future unmanned systems that depend on them for navigation would be toast. Any any external nav input could be jammed or killed as well. That means aircraft like the F-35, that may have an unmanned variant, would have problems in a total-war scenario with a major power that could take out our sats.
what's the number for 911?
If there were no tanker with them, I was mentally seeing them having to put down across the Bearing Straits in Russia ....
I looked it up. It was Lockheed on the Mars orbiter/lander:
"The prime contractor for the mission, Lockheed Martin, measured the thruster firings in pounds even though NASA had requested metric measurements."
http://www4.cnn.com/TECH/space/9911/10/orbiter.03/
Was Lockheed the contractor on the Hubble deal as well?
Getting Across the Line
The F22 Raptor was deployed to Asia for the first time earlier this month. Although capable of breaching the sound barrier, all twelve aircraft proved unable to penetrate the Time barrier on 11 Feb. Whilst enroute to Japan, they were forced to turn back to Hawaii. That delayed arrival in Japan has been previously reported amidst vague rumors that there were some compatibility problems with the software. CNN Television reported on 25 February that each and every fighter had lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the International Date Line. The entire squadron reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers visually back to Hawaii. Essentially they were the first fighter squadron ever to be "towed home". As the CNN anchor said wryly, "if it had not been for their tankers or if the weather had been bad, the situation could have been serious". Bill Gates wasn't returning any phone-calls on the subject but an anonymous source at Redmond vehemently denied that Microsoft's new Vista release authentication protocols had anything to do with the double-crossing of the line. "And you can quote me on that, line by line", he said anonymously.
At ASW we suspect that it was disrespect for King Neptune and his ablutionary crossing-the-line ceremonial liturgy that caused the hiccup at the 180 degree meridian. However we also freely admit that we may have our lats and longs confused. But nothing equators to much in comparison with the newly discovered Time Barrier. Once the US DoD breaks through that, international dating will be a whole new vista of undiscovered parallels. Pentagon experts deny that the Raptor design is consequently somewhat dated. They are now wrestling with software pentagrams, trying to break down this time nexus.
Meanwhile in Hawaii, a whole squadron of F22 fighter-pilots is suffering from circadian dysrhythmia - and re-living Groundhog Day.....
http://www.aviationtoday.com/asw/
A lack of GPS shouldn't disable the other systems. If they have contact with AWACS or surface controllers, and their own passive radar, they should still be able to find their targets; the -22's missiles use active radar, but by the time you've been painted by one, it's usually too late.
Would the plane be able to hold up in a dog fight basically could they even find their targets without a satellite? I would assume being a stealth aircraft they wouldn’t want to use on-board radar.
By the time they're actively engaged in a dogfight, they're close enough that using active radar wouldn't be much of a handicap. The current doctrine is to hit bogies from stand-off distance; if you're within visual range, something has already gone wrong.
But loss of GPS might make it more difficult for smart bombs to hit ground targets, especially ones that aren't within range of someone with a laser designator. The planes would still have ILS systems and VFR systems (i.e. eyeballs) to help them get back home.
I would suspect in about 10 years (give or take a few years) taking out satellites will not be a difficult task by China and Russia given they both have the capability today.
I seriously doubt it would take that long. The technology is mature and not very complicated, The Chinese and Russians don't have anything as sophisticated as NORAD's Space Command, but they have plenty enough precision to take down a satellite -- they don't have to hit it dead-on.
Satellites have predictable orbits, so all they have to do is park a warhead in its path. I'm not saying it's easy -- I mean, it's not like I could do it in my garage-- but anyone who has enough precision to put a satellite in geosync orbit has enough precision to do the same with a bomb. Think of it as an anti-sat mine. Even a dense inert payload -- no explosive required -- would be enough if its orbit collides with the target at a closing speed of 20-some mph.
The USAF, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the ESA, and even private ventures like Sealaunch could probably gear up to do it in a matter of months. I would be shocked if all those militaries didn't have plans on the drawing board, using boosters and components they already have on the shelf so they could roll them out in a hurry.
The only reason we haven't seen more anti-satellite tests from more countries is that it would be a form of escalation, and because blowing up a satellite in orbit creates a debris clout with movements less predictable and trackable than those of a single large object.
The Shuttle has gotten pits in its windshield from pieces of debris no bigger and with no more mass than your pinky nail; I think they're paint flecks from old spacecraft. NORAD tracks everything in orbit larger than about a three-inch stove bolt, and has sometimes diverted the Shuttle's course to avoid such objects. A cloud of satellite debris, each piece tiny but moving at 23,000 mph or better, would be a threat not just to enemy satellites, but to one's own.
If it escalates to the point of someone targeting our satellites, the best plan, in my non-expert opinion, would be to have enough satellite redundancy to buy time until we can target and destroy the anti-sat launch sites. Current US doctrine is to rapidly secure air supremacy, and we've had that in every operation after Vietnam; The F-22 will enhance that capability.
If taking out the satellites takes out part of the system, the Raptor will have to fall back on its on-board systems, its speed and maneuverability, and the skill of its pilots, and all are unmatched. By miles.
The glitch that started this thread shows a software weakness: that, again as a non-expert ant with limited information, a failure in one subsystem can cascade into others. I'm confident that will be fixed. That's what shakedown cruises and beta tests are for.
Yup. AKA "Galloping Gertie." No human fatalities, one canine -- the cameraman who captured the famous footage left his dog behind in the car as he ran for his life (still shooting, of course).
The Tacoma Narrows bridge was part of the growing realization that small individual forces could have a huge cumulative effect, and it led to a much greater use of wind tunnels, hydrology models, and ultimately computer testing with ever-more-precise models ad the computers got faster. There has not been another failure on that scale.
Large structures take their cue from large trees, and are designed to bend rather than break. Skyscrapers are built to sway, and it's not easy to perceive, even looking out the window.
The one and only time I went to the World Trade Center observation deck in the early '90s. When I was on the top floor of one tower looking at the other, boy howdy, was that weird. The flex was a matter of inches or of fractions of a degree, but when I stood in one apparently solid building watching another apparently solid building oscillating toward and away, I had the first and only case of motion sickness in my life. On the other three sides of the deck, looking at the skyline or the horizon, the motion was not noticeable at all.
Now THAT is FUNNY.
Which in my experience is a gratifying, though messy, experience.
That's the problem. Filthy Wog fighters. Davy Jones has been angered, and sacrifices must be made.
I'll go dump the trash onto the deck. Who volunteers to be Baby Netune?
Remember Watson-Watt's "Cult of third best"
The "best" system can never be implemented in practice.
The second best takes too long and costs too much.
(Watson-Watt was in charge of developing the British Chain-Home radar system, which arrived just in the nick of time.)
We could have been looking at another "Flight 19" incident if the Comm had been totally out...
That's the problem. Filthy Wog fighters. Davy Jones has been angered, and sacrifices must be made.
The thing that pi*sed me off most about going shellback was the sequence....
The XO (?, engineer, some d*mned shellback down in the boiler room) managed to secure fresh water to the showers right AFTER the all the polly's had gotten wogged .....
And while we were still filthy and slimy.
(There were so many (in early 70's) who had not crossed, that he ran two shellback watches: First watch went through while the 2nd was on station, then they all swapped and the 2nd watch of polly's and shellbacks went through. Capt zig-zagged across the equator at the right time to indoctrinate both sections - so I guess we were among the first Americans to ever get a shellback initiation while crossing from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere.
Shellbacks, schmellbacks. Real mean are Bluenoses.
Didn't have the pleasure of bluenosing.
Still don't have the pleasure of brown-nosing.
We didn't do weird stuff like that in the USAF. First time I crossed the dateline, it was observed only by the navigator announcing that we had crossed it and it was now Tuesday instead of Monday. First time I crossed the equator, no one said anything at all.
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