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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Dumb question here. Why do military aircraft care what the local time is? I thought they operated on Greenwich Mean (Zulu?) time.
The F-22 was their "golden project", funny to see how LM management wins again.
Cheers,
CSG
Scotty: "Aye, sir. The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
"Mistakes were made..." Hey, shit happens at any price. Question is, what to do about it. Apparently, this was an easy fix and all planes returned safely. I doubt, in a dogfight, pilots would be wondering where they were as much as they want to know where the other guy is.
That'll teach 'em to be early Vista adopters! :D
And I thought it would be the lack of a flux capacitor. Do I need to worry about this if I take my GPS in my car across the IDL? For those with blue water boats is this problem for them?
I was so embarrased about this. I wondered if it was a -180 to +180 problem, not an "international date line" problem.
This is such a petty NON-STORY.
Gosh, ban the program and go to a proved aircraft that has cleared the skies of all adversaries with grace.
Bring back the P-51 Mustang so we can once again be comforted in our quest for air superiority. /s
Incredible. Even for stationary computers like the one I am using now, all time and date calculations are done in Universal Coordinated Time. Any stored time stamps are in UTC. Conversion to local time is ONLY done at the very last for display. That way you don't get your time stamps out of order when daylight time ends in the fall, or you set your laptop to a different time zone. Your program is much simpler when you have a consistent frame of reference for everything.
Exercise: Look at the filetimes in any folder on your computer. Change your time zone. Look at those filetimes again. They're all displayed in the new local time. No fuss. Change your time zone back again. Same thing.
A nav system has to use a consistent time base internally. You can fly over the date line, over the poles, or over the date line near a pole, crossing ten time zones in a minute, turn around and cross directly over the pole and it just doesn't matter to your algorithm. Any other way is a big mess.