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.
uh, yah. I'm pretty familiar with how computers work.
I completely understand that there was some sort of problem that caused them to divert. I'm just skeptical that this, as described here, was the problem.
I dunno fer sure. I wasn't there.
"Crossing dateline, cancel or allow"?
If the system uses a mixture of local time, local date, UTC time, and UTC date for different purposes, crossing the International Date Line could create some scenarios that would not exist under any other circumstance.
As to why local time would be used for anything on such a system, I don't know, but Windows does base some things off local midnight. If the system time zone is adjusted when the aircraft moves from place to place (instead of being permanently set to UTC+0) and attempts to derive UTC from local time, that could wreak all sorts of havoc.
It just seems quite weird and a bit Urban legendish.
Also the news source was from a retired general. I have my doubts about such sources.
Y2K was not quite a nonevent; there were quite a few problems. I have heard that there was one fatality with a documented connection to Y2K, a railroad accident in Russia, but I don't know any details.
See, that's just it. Local time just isn't all that useful, and probaby gets in the way. Think about it... on any sortie it's not unlikely at all that the plane could cross back and forth several times across the local zone boundary. Shifting the system time an hour up and down each time would just be confusing.
Sure, maybe there's a ~clock~ display that can have a local zone adjustment, but beyond that there's no purpose to it.
Of course... in new systems bugs will happen. Sometimes it's the *really* simple bugs that nobody thinks to look for. But this story isn't making any sense yet. But we'll see.
Go to the link for the story, the vid, and the second 'longside bridge nearing completion.
This was initially reported about a week ago. They did indeed return to Hawaii, but news reports of the time just said "software glitch".
I write navigation software for a living, and I can certainly see how the issue came up. It's not the "date" part that's the problem it's crossing from latitude -190 to +190. Kind of like a Y2K issue, except this one happened for real. Basically any map they had would have a reversal of sequence within the same map, which could cause any number of issues.
The part that worries me is that they lost so many sub-systems, like fuel, etc. Or perhaps they merely lost their display of those indications, while the hardware functioned merrily on it's own.
Now THAT is maintaining a "wet edge"!!
See post #90. I think it was a latitude reversal issue.
Longitude, you mean.
Standard GPS signals are used to coordinate time down to a nanosecond or so all the time. By definition, a GPS with sub-meter resolution *must* know the time within a sub-meter at the speed of light. Even a commercial Garmin GPS has internal time within a few feet at speed-of-light.
See post #90. I think their map died from crossing latitude -190 to +190. I've written moving maps for a decade now, and mine won't do that trick either.
Ya know, I'd bet it was the switch from 180W to 180E that jammed things up, and the article got it wrapped up as "Dateline", perhaps not wanting to confuse the proletariat with all those numbers...........
Arrrrgggghhhhh. Yes. Starts with an 'L' you know.
that sound very reasonable ....
Hey, it is only software! What could possibly go wrong?
Yikes, could you imagine 6 Raptors splashing into the Pacific?! Would definitely be Bush's fault.
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