A friend in the
avionics industry sent me this…
"You've got to be
kidding me there
must be a handle in here somewhere!"
The
Self-Locking F-22
By ROBERT BRYCE
Last week, Lockheed Martin
announced that its profits were up a hefty 60 percent in the first quarter. The
company earned $591 million in profit on revenues of $9.2 billion. Now, if the
company could just figure out how to put a door handle on its new $361 million
F-22 fighter, its prospects would really soar.
On April 10, at Langley Air Force
Base, an F-22 pilot, Capt. Brad Spears, was locked inside the cockpit of
his aircraft for five hours. No one in the U.S. Air Force or from Lockheed Martin
could figure out how to open the aircraft's canopy. At about 1:15 pm,
chainsaw-wielding firefighters from the 1st Fighter Wing finally extracted
Spears after they cut through the F-22's three-quarter inch-thick polycarbonate
canopy.
Total damage to the airplane, according
to sources inside the Pentagon: $1.28 million. Not only did the firefighters ruin
the canopy, which cost $286,000, they also scuffed the coating on the airplane's
skin which will cost about $1 million to replace.
The Pentagon currently
plans to buy 181 copies of the F-22 from Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest
weapons vendor. The total price tag: $65.4 billion.
The incident
at Langley
has many Pentagon watchers shaking their heads. Tom Christie, the former director
of testing and evaluation for the DOD, calls the F-22 incident at Langley "incredible."
"God knows what'll happen next," said Christie, who points out that
the F-22 has about two million lines of code in its software system. "This
thing is so software intensive. You can't check out every line of
code."
Now, just for the
sake of comparison, Windows XP, one of the most common computer operating
systems, contains about 45 million lines of code. But if any of that code
fails, then the computer that's running it simply stops working. It won't
cause that computer to fall out of the sky. If any of the F-22's two million
lines of computer code go bad, then the pilot can die, or, perhaps, just get
trapped in the cockpit.
One analyst inside
the Pentagon who has followed the F-22 for years said that "Everyone's
incredulous. They're asking can this really have happened?". As for Lockheed Martin, the source said,
"Whatever the problem was, the people who built it should know how to open
the canopy."
Given that the U.S. military
is Lockheed Martin's biggest client, perhaps the company could provide the Air
Force with a supply of slim jims or coat hangers, just in case another
F-22 pilot gets stuck at the controls.
As if the latest canopy shenanigans
weren't bad enough, on May 1, Defense News reported that there are serious
structural problems with the F-22. Seems the titanium hull of the aircraft
isn't meshing as well as it should. Naturally, taxpayers have to foot the
bill for the mistake (improper heat-treating of the titanium) which is
found on 90 aircraft. The cost of repairing those wrinkles? Another $1 billion
or so.
Lockheed Martin's F-22 spokesman, Joe
Quimby, did not return telephone calls.
What do you get when you cross an F-22 with a Software Glitch?
Re: What do you get when you cross an F-22 with a Software Glitch?
