Posted on 03/15/2007 4:35:28 PM PDT by IonImplantGuru
Recently, American F-22 fighters were sent, for the first time, across the Pacific, to Japan, for a training exercise. This would be the first time the aircraft would cross the International Date line, where it is tomorrow, and the aircraft's GPS and navigation software would handle the date change.
There were problems.
All off a sudden the software that ran the navigation and communications systems wasn't working too well. Being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, this was a problem. Some of the pilots were able to reboot their software and make the problem go away, but this did not always work, so all the aircraft turned around and returned to Hawaii. Those aircraft that still had malfunctioning navigation software, followed other aircraft back.
The contractor quickly found and fixed the problem (the routines for crossing the International Date Line, and changing the date, were not well thought out and tested.)
To quote Murphy's Law; "Whatever can go wrong, will, and at the worst possible time."
pinging Aeronaut's aviation ping list.
So the pilots can't navigate without GPS? I hope they realize that in a shooting war with China GPS won't be available.
They are worth every penny we spent.
The F-15 has never been shot down by another aircraft in combat.
At recent tests in the mid-west, F15's were shot down many times by F22's and no F22's were shot down.
GPS won't be available to China.
ROTFLOL
Millineum meltdown, heheh.
And we thought 12/31/1999 23:59 was behind us.
Maybe they should try putting wings on a DeLorean - Back to the Future.
I can't wait to see the F-22s go against the Iranian air force
That would be annoying having to re-boot in the middle of a dog fight.
Hey...it was an EASY fix.
Expensive would be going on into this age of military aviation without them.
They are currently the most awesome war bird up there. Just be glad they are OURS.
One F22 should be sufficient.
I'm fairly certain that the first thing China or Russia would do in a war is take out the GPS system.
I see this all the time at NASA. But, it's diversity and process that count now, not how well things work. As long as the software engineer has a bad accent and is not a white male all is good. And the process... spend four out of five days doing all of the ridiculous paper work, rather than engineering, and it's even better. Oh, then it splats into the side of Mars but that's OK.
They should have inertial navigation system (INS) back up.
Well the film footage would be fun to watch. Too bad we can't get seats on the ground to catch the show.
U.S. Air Force fixes computer glitches in 87 F-22s
http://www.f-16.net/news_article2210.html
The six Raptors were participating in an inaugural 12-hour flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan on Feb. 10 when a "navigation anomaly" maimed several computer systems on the aircraft, an Air Force colonel said.
The computer glitch, which occurred as aircraft crossed the International Date Line, crippled navigation systems and hindered communications.
One pilot was able to contact contractor Lockheed Martin to troubleshoot the error during the flight, the Air Force said. Several pilots attempted to reboot the system with no success.
Luckily for the Raptors, there were no weather issues that day so visibility was not a problem which meant that with their refueling tankers as guide dogs, they were able to safely return to Hawaii.
"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."
F-22 engineers and maintainers were able to locate the problem within hours and fixed the glitch in a matter of days on the aircraft. After successful testing, the aircraft continued their planned first overseas deployment to Kadena.
It was a computer glitch in the approximately 1.7 million lines of code. Somebody makes an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes.
It is common for pilots to experience operational problems during initial deployments and there are no plans to conduct further testing on the F-22 Raptor.
The Raptor, with a price tags of roughly $70 billion including development costs, has endured periodic delays and political attacks. Initial plans called for 750, but only 183 are now slated to be built under the proposed 2007 fiscal defense budget.
That darn Win98 was just not made to keep dates correctly.
Especially getting both hands free to hit (Ctrl)(Alt)(Del) at the same time.
"And these aircraft are HOW expensive?"
Oh.. Wow. Mr. Ion Implanter.
Complaining about a super-cruise stealth fighter.
Whoop. tee. doo.
Pull a vacuum on the wafers and flip the switch! Difficult!
How expensive are those? Can we buy them at walmart? I didn't think so.
I am going to assume that you know how many GPS satellites that there are in service and how many reserves that we have.
Further I will postulate that you know that China has proven that they can shoot down satellites.
Finally, if China is practicing a global fighting war without satellites and the US is not then which country is screwed?
Does the US military not have a back up plan?
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