Category: Aviation

Boeing Still Cannot Make Aircraft

1 Comment

The FAA has announced that it is delaying certification of their new 777X variant because of design maturity and potentially disastrous problems with its control systems.

Everyone employed at Boeing’s Chicago headquarters beyond the janitors and secretaries need to be fired ……… and into the sun:

In yet another blow to Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration last month formally denied the jet maker permission to move forward with a key step in certifying its forthcoming giant widebody airplane, the 777X.

In a sternly worded letter dated May 13, which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, the FAA warned Boeing it may have to increase the number of test flights planned and that certification realistically is now more than two years out, probably in late 2023.

That could push the jet’s entry into commercial service into early 2024, four years later than originally planned.

Clearly, someone at Boeing decided to, “Take off their engineer hat and put your management hat on,” with predictable results.*

Boeing is suffering death by MBA.

………

The FAA cited a long litany of concerns, including a serious flight control incident during a test flight on Dec. 8, 2020, when the plane experienced an “uncommanded pitch event” — meaning the nose of the aircraft pitched abruptly up or down without input from the pilots.

Boeing has yet to satisfy the FAA that it has fully understood and corrected what went wrong that day.

After all the troubles with the 737 MAX, you think that they would have that one at the top of their, “To Do” list, but in their rush to meet schedule, and to move production to a non-union facility, they screwed the pooch AGAIN.

“The aircraft is not yet ready,” [local FAA manager Ian] Won wrote. “The technical data required for type certification has not reached a point where it appears the aircraft type design is mature and can be expected to meet the applicable regulations.”

An FAA official, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely, said the drag on 777X certification is now “the subject of a lot of attention” at high levels both within the agency and at Boeing.

The FAA got burnt by Boeing with the 737MAX, and they are now dubious of Boeing’s claims.

The reputational damage to the Seattle aircraft manufacturer from its rampant managerialism is ongoing and an existential threat to its continued viability as a going concern.

*This is a paraphrase of a comment made to Thikol engineer Roger Boisjoly by an unnamed manager when he warned of the danger of launching the Space Shuttle Challenger in very low temperatures.†

†For those who don’t know your history, the o-rings in the solid booster failed, and the Challenger blew up.

I’ll Believe It When I See It

2 Comments

United Airlines has put in an order for Boom Supersonic’s Overture airliner.

There has never been a meaningful Supersonic Transport (SST) that has entered service without billions in public subsidies, so I do not expect this aircraft to see service. 

The financial numbers are just not there, as shown by the recent demise of the Aerion supersonic business jet.

I don’t know why United put in an order, but I don’t ever expect them to actually fly the aircraft:

More than half a century after placing options for the European-made Concorde, United Airlines is once again banking on the commercial allure of speed by becoming the first operator to order its spiritual successor—Boom Supersonic’s Overture.

United never flew the Concorde.

The startling deal, which covers orders for 15 aircraft with options on a further 35, is a key milestone toward the revival of faster-than-sound commercial transport and a major boost for the Denver-based startup aircraft manufacturer.

………

The United deal envisages introduction of the first civil supersonic services on transatlantic and Pacific routes by 2029. The Overture will be designed to cruise at Mach 1.7 [Down from earlier goal of Mach 2.2] and carry up to 88 passengers on routes up to 4,250 nm using 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Note that, much like the Concorde, this jet cannot operate at supersonic speeds over land, and even if it uses “Sustainable” fuel, a subsonic airliner will carry more 2 to 3 times people on a gallon of fuel.

The numbers just don’t add up.

Boeing F%$#s Up Again

No Comments

Boeing will be delaying delivery of new 787s because of new safety issues.

Once again, Boeing’s MBA driven culture has led to it cutting corners, and the FAA has called foul.

It appeared that faith based safety procedures are not looked upon favorably by the regulatory authorities:

Boeing Co. has halted deliveries of its 787 Dreamliners, adding fresh delays for customers following a recent five-month suspension in handing over the aircraft due to production problems, people familiar with the matter said.

Federal air-safety regulators have requested more information about Boeing’s proposed solution to address the previously identified quality lapses, these people said.

………

A Boeing spokesman said the company was working in a timely and transparent manner to provide regulators with more information related to undelivered 787s. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday confirmed that Boeing had halted Dreamliner deliveries, saying that the plane maker needs to demonstrate that its proposed inspection method complies with federal-safety regulations.

There are statistical methods to validate these procedures, it’s just that Boeing couldn’t be bothered to take the time, because there were union members to be laid off.

………

The FAA launched a review of Boeing’s Dreamliner production last year and has increased scrutiny of its 737 MAX manufacturing operations following earlier factory slip-ups.

As part of its Dreamliner scrutiny, the agency has recently requested more information about the plane maker’s proposed method for addressing quality issues using a system that would allow for targeted checks of newly produced aircraft, rather than broader inspections of more areas, people familiar with the matter said. Boeing’s proposed method is based on a statistical analysis of data.

Until Boeing can satisfy the FAA’s requests, the agency is requiring Boeing to perform the broader inspections, which are more time-consuming and labor-intensive, these people said.

Many of the 787 quality lapses involve tiny gaps where sections of the jet’s fuselage, or body of the plane, join together. Problems have emerged in other places, too, including the vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer at the tail. Such gaps could lead to eventual premature fatigue of certain portions of the aircraft, potentially requiring extensive repairs during routine, long-term maintenance.

This is a problem with composite structures.  Unlike aluminum, things need to fit exactly, since you there is very little flexing to accommodate tolerance stack-up.

You have to get these shims right, or you get point loads, which are death to composites.

………

Boeing has reduced output of the Dreamliner to five a month after shuttering assembly at its Everett, Wash., plant near Seattle and focusing production at North Charleston, S.C. It had built up a backlog of around 100 finished planes by the end of April, and had hoped to deliver most of them by the end of the year.

Yes, the South Carolina plant, which (by their own admission) they opened just to punish and weaken the union, which has poor training, poor morale, and poor safety procedures.

The management at Boeing does not know how to make airliners, and holds the people who do in deep disdain, and it shows.

When do the crashes start?  

My bad, they already have.

Why Do We Keep Choosing Neo-Nazis?

3 Comments

I do not think that the interception of a Ryanair flight to detain Roman Protasevich in Belarus is a travesty.

I’m less concerned about this than the fact that once again, the US foreign policy apparatus, having confronted a broad based opposition to a despot, always seems to choose Neo-Nazi assholes.

I’m not a fan of our US regime change operations, but I wonder why these efforts always seem to pick Nazis.

It seems that the US State Security Apparatus has been very careless for a very long time:

There is more to say about the Ryanair incident in Belarus and the arrest of the ‘regime change’ operative Roman Protasevich.

We will start with the latter.

The sympathetic portraits of Protasevich in the New York Times and in the Guardian are only of interest for what they leave out.

FOIA Research and The Canadafiles have very well sourced and way more complete pieces on him. They link to a mountain of evidence in form of social media postings, photos and videos which support their findings.

From those we learn that Protasevich has long been a member of the fascist “Young Front” militia of Belarus. He has fought alongside the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine’s post-Maidan civil war.

………

Neither the NYT nor the Guardian mention Proasevich’s ideological position or his involvement with the neo-nazis of Azov. The London Times had originally reported that Protasevich was involved with Azov but later silently removed that passage from its report.

Another point missing from ‘western’ media is that Protasevich has long been on the payroll of various ‘western’ government financed propaganda media:

If this were an isolated case, I’d put it down to someone being lazy, and not doing a proper background check, but this happens over, and over, and over, and over again, so I have to conclude it’s deliberate policy.

This is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake, and it raises an obvious question:

This Ain’t Rocket Science

2 Comments

Specifically, supplying oxygen to fighter pilots has been a known quantity for well over 50 years, but somehow or other, Lockheed-Martin has been able unable to make this work on the F-35.

NASA has done a study, and found that the Joint Strike Fighter has problems not shared with other aircraft using onboard oxygen generate systems.

The F-35 office had declared this a tempest in a tea pot, which is typical for them:

Between 2011 and 2017, more than a dozen U.S. Air Force F-35 pilots reported experiencing oxygen-deprivation symptoms. NASA has obtained new information that may help solve the mystery behind these physiological episodes and wants to study the issue more deeply. But the F-35 Joint Program Office is disputing the findings.

The recently released—but not widely circulated—report from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) pinpoints a lag time between the pilot’s breathing pattern and the aircraft’s life-support system, due to differences between mask pressure and line pressure. It is the first independent review focused on the hypoxia-like episodes reported by pilots in the Lockheed Martin F-35 for more than a decade.

………

The NESC’s work builds on a 2017 report that assessed pilots’ physiological episodes in other fighter aircraft (AW&ST March 28-April 10, 2016, p. 23). That study was driven by a congressional mandate to the U.S. Navy to conduct an independent review of the episodes in Boeing F/A-18 and T-45 aircraft going back to 2009. But the mandate did not cover the F-35. The new report is part of a larger pilot-breathing assessment that includes F/A-18 and F-15D data using CRU-103 or CRU-60 breathing gear. 

………

But the F-35 data set, the first of its kind, was subsequently embargoed by the Air Force, and the NASA team had to wait about a year for the service to release pilot–breathing data for independent analysis. F-35 pilots admitted in interviews with the NESC that information about breathing problems had been suppressed over concerns about protecting the program.

Bottom line:  The Pentagon wants its over-priced and under-performing mistake jet, and if a few pilots have to experience suffocation, it’s a small price to pay.

Boeing Still Can’t Build Planes, Part 4⁹

No Comments

In 2019, a sweeping transformation of Boeing’s quality system deliberately eliminated thousands of quality checks during production and cut 100s of quality inspector jobs.

Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, the architect of that shift, left the company in Decemberhttps://t.co/SbcHIzcnFp

— Dominic Gates (@dominicgates) May 18, 2021

Roll Tape!

Boeing has finally been forced to accept the fact that axing hundreds quality inspectors in order to bust the union did now work, and now they are rehiring the inspectors that they laid off, and they canned the architect of the failed program:

The Boeing Co. has quietly recalled at least some of as many as 900 quality control inspectors who were laid off in 2019 as part of a drive to adopt car-industry manufacturing processes in aerospace manufacturing.

The move comes after the union for the inspectors – Machinists District Lodge 751 – pushed the company to prove that getting rid of inspectors could be done without risking quality issues and would actually improve production times.

“Our union’s goal is to save Boeing from making decisions that could be detrimental to (its) future and ours,” union leaders said in its monthly AeroMechanic newsletter. “A second set of eyes is a critical component of building Boeing airplanes and necessary for the long-term success of the company.”

A union spokeswoman said she was unable to say precisely how many of the inspectors were initially laid off, and how many have been brought back since the recalls started. Boeing’s media relations team did not respond to a written list of questions on the topic.

………

In theory, if you eliminate the downtime and the inspections a few thousand times on each plane, that adds up to substantial savings in production time without any investment in people or tools.

IAM 751 appealed to the Federal Aviation Administration to look into Boeing’s plan and made rumblings about getting its supporters in Congress to intervene. Congress is now preparing an investigation into quality lapses at Boeing.

But the deciding factor, in this case, seems to have been the union’s demand to enter into what’s called effects bargaining. Since Boeing was eliminating 900 jobs, the union claimed the right to negotiate over the impact of those changes on its members.

As a result of these talks, Boeing and the union agreed that a team of union-appointed experts would begin reviewing data in areas where inspections were ending, with the ability to propose reinstating inspections when warranted, using Boeing’s own risk assessment criteria and FAA regulations as guidelines.

No Efficiency Gains

What the experts found was that eliminating inspections did not lead to a more efficient production process, the union said.

They f%$#ed up their quality processes for nothing more than the hope that they could fire some union members, and they failed.

If you fired Boeing’s entire C-Suite and replaced them with dirnking bird toys, you would increase productiveity and product quality.

Boeing Still Can’t Make Planes

No Comments

The FAA will audit Boeing following the discovery of a serious manufacturing flaw.

The short version of this is that Boeing has systematically dismantled procedures to allow employees to report safety issues on the shop floor to senior management, because the management fetishist MBA culture that was imported from McDonnell Douglas when they acquired the firm.

Since McDonnell took over Boeing with Boeing’s money, they have systematically dismantled every advantage that Boeing once they came on board:

Boeing Co. is facing an audit to determine why changes in its manufacturing practices on the 737 Max led to a hazard that went unnoticed for almost two years.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees Boeing and has meted out multiple civil penalties against the planemaker in recent years, said in a statement Thursday that it is also investigating the origin of the manufacturing flaw.

“These initiatives are part of our commitment to continually evaluating and improving our oversight of all aspects of aviation safety, recognizing that catching errors at the earliest possible point enhances what is already the world’s safest form of transportation,” the agency said.

………

The flaws in the electrical components raise new questions about Boeing’s ability to monitor safety issues within the company. The lack of a robust internal safety review and oversight system was cited repeatedly by multiple reviews of the 737 Max crashes.

Until recent months, Boeing didn’t have what is known as a Safety Management System, which requires an organization to conduct more robust risk analyses of design features, open channels for employees to raise concerns and involve senior management.

………

The changes to how certain electrical components were installed on the 737 Max occurred in 2019. At the time, Boeing concluded it was such a minor change that it didn’t require FAA approval, the agency said in a statement. Similarly, Boeing employees who are deputized to act on behalf of the federal regulator also didn’t approve of the changes.

………

The electrical problem was deemed serious enough that the agency said it was waiving the normal period for public comment and would require the repairs as soon as Boeing completes a bulletin detailing them.

Boeing is being run by finance guys, and their business model is tor burn the the company down for the insurance money.

From the Department of About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

It looks like members of Congress are getting sick and tired of skyrocketing operational costs and fiscal obfuscation by the Department of Defense, and will be pushing back against any increase in acquisition.

Unfortunately, the excessive costs of the program has been baked into the program, with the DoD signing off a model that is clearly intended to maximize rent seeking by Lockheed-Martin: (Paid subscription required)

In response to new delays to the F-35 fighter program, senior House Democrats are threatening to limit aircraft production and end the practice of adding funding for aircraft the Pentagon never requested.

The laundry list of program problems includes cost overruns, a large engine backlog at the depots, funding cuts to an already temperamental predictive maintenance system and delays to essential upgrades.

“If this program continues to fail to significantly control and reduce actual projected sustainment costs, we may need to invest in other affordable programs and backfill an operational shortfall of potentially over 800 tactical fighters,” Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), House Armed Services Committee (HASC) tactical air and land forces subcommittee chairman, said during a hearing on the F-35 program.

………

Now that Democrats control the Senate, Garamendi and Norcross may turn the tide and prevent lawmakers from increasing the F-35 quantity in future budget requests. During the fiscal 2021 budget cycle, the HASC failed to convince the other defense committees not to add extra F-35s.

………

F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, agrees with Abba’s assessment. Delays in delivering required support equipment and technical data, along with the increased work scope for F135 power module repairs, are driving the depot shortfalls, he said.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) acknowledges that the Pentagon is taking steps to increase depot repair capacity for the F135 power module, but the GAO says the number of capable aircraft will remain an issue in the near term.

………

Along with those delays, the cost of the engine is growing. The increase, likely 3% for the 15th production lot, is the result of Turkey being removed from the program after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opted to purchase the Russian-manufactured S-400 anti-aircraft weapon system.

………

Meanwhile, the F-35’s logistics system is experiencing yet another round of upheaval. The Pentagon was in the process of transitioning its Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) to a new cloud-based network, the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), by 2022. But the Pentagon has directed a “strategic pause” for the move to ODIN because of a 42% funding cut in fiscal 2021.

………

Other delays plaguing the program include the slowdown of Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) and Block 4 development. Lockheed Martin waived $60 million in fees because of the delays to TR-3, the hardware providing the F-35 additive processing power, memory and open-systems architecture. The company says the delays were caused by supplier challenges related to the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Lockheed knows that they have the DoD, and particularly the USAF by the short hairs, and the “Mistake-Jet” continues to eat the operational capabilities of the USAF. 

The tail, now controlled by the contractors, is devouring the teeth.

Headline of the Day

No Comments

The Operating Costs of the F-35 Are High Because They Are Designed to Be

—Hush-Kit

Money quote from the interview:

The operating costs are high because they are designed to be so. From the very beginning of the program, the F-35 was set up to operate as a “total system performance responsibility” enterprise which meant that the services were intentionally surrendering a great deal of control over the maintenance and operations of the weapon they were buying to the contractors. This incentivised the contractors to design the aircraft in such a way that only their personnel could perform many of the maintenance actions on the aircraft. It is nearly always more expensive to use contractor personnel to perform work for the government, which certainly drives up the cost-per-flight-hour. It also means that the government has only one source bidding for these contracts, so there is little incentive to lower costs.

This, “Total system performance responsibility,” was not an accident.

The Pentagon procurement is deeply corrupt, with senior military officers choosing the most expensive, and hence most profitable ways to address their stated needs, because at the end of their career, after they retire, they secure comfortable sinecures at defense contractors and the like.

Our defense procurement system is corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaffordable.

Russians Test Pulse-Detonation Engine

No Comments

Russia’s United Engine has has successfully tested a low thrust pulse detonation engine.

The short version of what a PDE is is that it is a formed of pulsed propulsion where instead of just burning the fuel (subsonic combustion) it detonates the fuel (supersonic combustion) creating about 50% more specific thrust.  (Ratio to thrust to all mass flow through the engine)

Higher specific thrust engines are more efficient, thermodynamics favors constant volume combustion, particularly at higher speeds.

My guess would be that the first real-world application might be as an afterburner, but seeing as how this program is funded by Rostec, they clearly see space applications:

Russian powerplant specialist United Engine has carried out initial testing of a pulse-detonation rocket motor which has potential application to orbital spaceplanes or hypersonic aircraft.

Pulse-detonation propulsion combusts fuel and oxidizer using detonation waves, with relatively few mechanical moving parts, offering a more efficient thermodynamic cycle than conventional gas turbines.

United Engine’s Lyulka design bureau – part of its Ufa-based UMPO division – has established a specific development project for such powerplants.

Russian state technology firm Rostec says the bureau has completed the first stage of tests for a demonstrator engine.

“In some operating modes the powerplant demonstrated up to 50% increase in specific thrust compared with traditional engines,” it adds, enabling aircraft range and payload to rise by a factor of 1.3-1.5.

Rostec envisions the design being applied to orbital spaceplanes and other future-generation aircraft operating at supersonic and hypersonic speeds.

I think that this is some seriously neat tech, but much like fusion, its application always seems to be about 10 years away.

Looks Like Another Take on the B-70 Valkyrie

No Comments


Not particularly informative, but the patent application has a bit more information


The B-70 with the wingtips lowered to contain the sonic boom


106 is the Engine, 108 is the nacelle, and 114 is the underside of the wing


Some more detail.

I just came across this brief bit about New Century Transportation & Aeronautics Research’s (NCTAR) concept for a low sonic boom SST, and it seems rather similar to the compression lift concepts developed for the B-70 supersonic bomber in the late 1950s.

It had wingtips that folded down (see picture, those wing tips are each as big as a Mirage III wing) that contained the shock waves generated off of the inlet and fuselage which increased lift.

This contained the pressure under the aircraft and increased lift and so improved its lift to drag ratio. (It also moved the center of lift forward, reducing trim drag at supersonic speeds, but that’s for another post)

It appears taht NCTAR is looking to do the same thing, only with an additional goal of using shock waves and bypass air from the engine to reflect the sonic boom (shock wave) back up to the wing, and hence attenuate the, “Boom.”

Basically shock-waves off the engines, which are located in front of the wing keep the boom, and its pressure  contained under the wing, increasing efficiency and reducing boom.

A part of this is that the bypass air is not, as is normally the case, ejected radially, but rather from the bottom of the nacelle, further reinforcing the “wall” that contains the shockwave.

It’s a nifty concept, though I wander what the trade-offs might be:

With the resurgent interest in supersonic air travel, aircraft designers are looking at different ways to work around the problem of sonic booms. Flying supersonic only over water, or at a low enough Mach number to prevent shockwaves reaching the ground or shaping the airframe to minimize boom strength are all approaches being taken with aircraft now in development.

U.S. startup New Century Transportation & Aeronautics Research (NCTAR) has patented (U.S. patent 10,618,638) a different approach: use the engines and their exhaust plumes to reflect and attenuate the shockwaves from the wing and so reduce the sonic boom reaching the ground.

In NCTAR’s concept, the engines are located ahead of a wing that is curved so that, in cruise, the downward-propagating compression waves from the leading edges are focused onto the exhaust plumes. The shockwaves reflect off the shear layer between the freestream airflow and supersonic exhaust plume and back up onto the underside of the wing. This increases pressure under the arched wing and generates additional compression lift to improve supersonic lift-to-drag ratio.

Like I said, kind of nifty, in a B-70 bomber kind of way.

That being said, I really don’t see this for commercial airliners, because even with improvements, the aircraft will be less fuel efficient than their subsonic counterparts, but given the current trajectory of our society, I could see something akin to a supersonic version of a Gulfstream private jet come from this.

Speaking of Defense Procurement Misconduct………

No Comments

The US Air Force has declared the F-35 A combat ready.

The Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) has declared that it is not even close:

The Pentagon’s top weapons tester is again sounding the alarm over the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, warning that significant deficiencies with the gun, challenges integrating the short-range AIM-9X missile and unresolved software bugs could delay fielding of the jet’s full capability.

 On the heels of the U.S. Air Force’s milestone decision to declare the F-35A ready for battle, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) is raising new concerns about Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter. In an internal memo to Defense Department leadership Aug. 9, the DOT&E warned the jet still has a long way to go before full combat capability and may run out of funds to fix significant performance problems on time if late discoveries delay the end of the program’s development phase.

 ………

 In response to Aviation Week queries, the DOT&E reiterated concerns that the program’s official start date for IOT&E is “not realistic,” repeating the agency’s public assessment that the F-35 will not be ready to begin the test period until mid-2018 at the soonest—assuming the JPO can provide production-representative test aircraft by then.

Late, over budget, and not combat ready.

The internal fun does not shoot straight, there are cracks in the carrier variant’s wings, external carriage of ordinance is at least 2 years away.

The Pentagon procurement process at its finest.

Ummm ……… the Solution Here Is Straightforward. Better Pay and Benefits.

No Comments

Over at Aviation Week, there is much hand wringing over the fact that their workers are retiring, and they can’t find replacements:

There are two statistics that haunt the U.S. aerospace and defense (A&D) industry when it comes to its workforce: 10% and 2.6%.

 The first, according to Aviation Week’s 2016 Workforce Study, is the percentage of the overall workforce who were qualified to retire in the past year. The second is the percentage that actually did.

 Industry faces a potential crisis in its workforce, just not the one that formerly predominated. For sure, defense prime contractors, OEMs and top-tier suppliers continue to fear the mass departures possible as the baby-boom generation begins reaching the traditional retirement age—65—en masse. At the same time, employers would like a little more actual turnover because they are eager to staff their companies with the new and younger talent offered by technology-oriented “millennials” because they fear losing those Gen Y workers to the lure of Silicon Valley.

 “While retirements are of concern, so too is attrition,” the study says. “As the industry comparison illustrates, the attrition rate for A&D is low, with only the chemical industry coming close to a comparable rate.”

 ………

 But the business risk of seeing so many skilled, experienced workers leave in a relatively short time remains a deep concern, and for good reasons that have been widely documented. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research July working paper by Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen and David Powell, economies face a double whammy of lost productivity and lost labor capacity as working populations exceed 60 years old.

Gee you need something in short supply, if only there were some medium of exchange that would allow you to adjust the value that you assign to it based on that scarcity.

If you are losing skilled staff, then you need to set pay or benefits or job security at a level that will attract a sufficient number of skilled replacements.

This is Getting Insane

No Comments

We are now scrambling jets to defend its allies in Syria against the Assad regime:

U.S. fighter jets scrambled to eastern Syria this week when Syrian bombers attacked in the vicinity of American and coalition Special Operations forces working with Kurdish and Arab opposition fighters, the Pentagon said Friday.

The unprecedented incident, near the Syrian city of Hasakah, did not result in a direct confrontation or any injury to U.S. or coalition forces.

But it illustrated the increasingly tense and ambiguous Syrian battlefield, where aircraft and ground troops from multiple countries — with multiple agendas and loyalties — are fighting overlapping wars.

Following the initial Thursday incident, the coalition began “actively patrolling the airspace nearby,” a Defense Department official said. Early Friday, “two Syrian SU-24 aircraft attempted to transit the area and were met by coalition fighter aircraft,” which “encouraged” the Syrians to depart “without further incident,” said the official, who spoke on a Pentagon-imposed condition of anonymity.

The Syrian military, engaged in a five-year civil conflict, has generally given a wide berth to U.S. aircraft targeting the Islamic State, as have Russian jets aiding their Syrian ally. But local fighters being assisted by U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground are often opposed to both the Islamic State and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

………

Marine Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said that the Syrian strikes targeted Kurdish forces in Hasakah on Thursday. Social-media reports indicated that several Kurds were killed in the bombing.

U.S. forces initially contacted Russia, using “deconfliction” channels established to ensure that Russian and U.S. planes over Syria avoid each other, but were told that the bombers in question were not Russian. Ground forces received no response to attempts to contact the planes through a recognized radio channel.

The United States then launched a “combat air patrol,” Rankine-Galloway said. It arrived in the area as the Syrian Su-24 ground-attack aircraft were leaving. While he would not specify from where the U.S. aircraft were launched, the United States maintains a contingent of F-15 fighter jets at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

So, now the Syrians are bombing the Kurds.

My guess is that this is a result of the recent Turkish and Russian rapprochement:  The Turks see any form of Kurdish state as an existential threat to their state, and so the Syrian attacks on Kurdish positions are likely an artifact of this.

The US is clearly unamused by this development, since there are reports that fighters sent to intercept the Syrian aircraft was an F-22, probably because they were concerned about Syrian and Russian SAMs.

The US forces are in a bit of a bind though, because the Turks are implacably opposed to any Kurdish autonomous regions.

The only way the US wins this game is not to play.

Combat Ready My Ass

No Comments

The US Air Force has declared that its first squadron of F-35s is combat ready:

The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday declared an initial squadron of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35A fighter jets ready for combat, marking a major milestone for a program that has faced cost overruns and delays.

………

“The U.S. Air Force decision to make the 15 F-35As … combat ready sends a simple and powerful message to America’s friends and foes alike – the F-35 can do its mission,” the program’s chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, said in a statement.

Not so much:

Dan Grazier, a fellow of the Project On Government Oversight, said, however, “This is nothing but a public relations stunt.” He added that it would not be possible to know if the F-35 jets were ready for combat until after initial operational testing.

That’s putting it mildly.

As the folks at The Register note. “It’s got dodgy radar, relies on an insecure database, boasts a buggy operating system, and a laser targeting system that can’t be used for training in the UK, but the United States Air Force is satisfied that the F-35A fighter is ready for combat.”

Also: its ejection seat can injure smaller (less than 165 lb) pilots, and its cannon cannot be fired.

This is a statement that is intended for the consumption of the Pentagon and Congress, and not reflective of the maturity of the program.

And the JSF Clustf%$# Continues

No Comments

If there was one thing that you would think that the people managing could get right, it would be the rather prosaic ejection seat, which has been in fighter jets since the Korean war.

You would be wrong:

The US Air Force is looking into the possibility of replacing the Martin-Baker ejection seat on the F-35 joint strike fighter with the United Technologies ACES 5 model, Defense News has learned.

While still in the earliest stages, such a move could have have massive repercussions for the F-35 supply chain, impacting the workshare strategy that forms the backbone for the international fleet of the Lockheed Martin-designed fighter.

………

At the core of the Air Force’s move is concern over pilot safety following the discovery that F-35 pilots under 136 pounds were at increased, potentially fatal, risk of neck damage when ejecting from the plane aboard the Martin-Baker US16E design. The service has also acknowledged an “elevated level of risk” for pilots between 136 and 165 pounds.

Defense News first broke the news of that issue in October. As a result of the issue, pilots under 136 pounds are prohibited from operating the fifth-generation fighter, which went operational for the Marines in 2015 and is expected to be operational for the Air Force by the end of this year.

That pilot risk, Bunch said, is unacceptable.

………

Based on Bunch’s comments, it appears Air Force officials are concerned that another problem could occur with the Martin-Baker seat in the future, which raised the question of why the Air Force is only now starting to look at a backup option, eight months after the pilot safety concerns became public knowledge.

This is a big deal, particularly since changing the seats will mess up the work share with the UK. (Martin Baker is a UK firm)

The fact that this is still up in the air while the various branches are attempting to declare, or have declared, Initial Operating Capability (IOC) .

This is a definition of IOC that I was previously unaware of.

Might Make a Faster Pig

1 Comment

GE’s entry


Pratt & Whitney’s version

Or they might make a pig with longer range.

But it will still be a pig.

The pig in question is the F-35, and the addition of a variable cycle engine might increase its performance:

The U.S. Air Force is poised to award General Electric and Pratt & Whitney contracts for adaptive cycle technology development that will pave the way toward an active procurement program for a sixth-generation fighter engine as well as the potential reengining of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Contracts for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) are expected to be valued at up to $1 billion apiece for the two engine-makers, setting the stage for a 21st-century version of the “great fighter engine war” between GE and Pratt over dual-sourced engines for the F-15 and F-16. Although Pratt now runs both key U.S. military development programs with the F135 for the F-35 and the engine for Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber, AETP opens up potential competition for both the reengining of F-35s as well as proposed sixth-generation fighters for the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

AETP is specifically aimed at maturing three-stream engine technology now considered vital to achieving the high-speed, long-endurance performance requirements of the Navy’s future F/A-XX and the Air Force’s F-X sixth-generation fighters. Although it remains unknown whether the F/A-XX will emerge as a twin-engine design, the three-stream concept is designed to be scalable across a wide thrust range. The AETP is, however, targeted initially at a 45,000-lb.-thrust-class engine baselined to fit within the existing confines of the F-35A engine bay. This makes it a contender to replace the F135 from the mid-2020s onward.

………

The third stream provides an extra source of air flow that, depending on the phase of the mission, is designed to provide either additional mass flow for increased propulsive efficiency and lower fuel burn, or additional core flow for higher thrust and cooling air. It also can be used to cool fuel that provides a heat sink for aircraft systems. The third stream can also swallow excess air damming up around the inlet, improving flow holding and reducing spillage drag.

At the heart of adaptive engines are variable-geometry devices that dynamically alter the fan pressure ratio and overall bypass ratio, the two key factors influencing specific fuel consumption and thrust. Fan pressure ratio is changed by using an adaptive, multistage fan. This increases fan pressure ratio to fighter engine performance levels during takeoff and acceleration, and, in cruise, lowers it to airliner-like levels for improved fuel efficiency. The third stream, which is external to both the core and standard bypass duct, is used to alter the bypass ratio.

I think that the cooling application might be the most important.

Both the F-22 and F-35 are basically thermos bottles which rely on their fuel as a heat sink for cooling other systems, which creates issues when the aircraft sits on the tarmac too long, or when the fuel becomes hot sitting in the sun, which has the USAF repainting all their fuel trucks white.

Any potential improvement in range or performance would be important for the F-35, which is shaping up to be a major pig.

PICTURES: Saab rolls out first Gripen E fighter

No Comments

Saab has rolled out its first Gripen NG, which structurally is pretty much a new plane.

As compared to the travails of the F-22, where upgrades and modernization have been expensive and difficult, and the F-35, which is late, expensive, under performing, and unreliable.

By comparison, all the major systems for the new Gripen have flown, the first aircraft is a production unit, and it is expected to start flight testing this year:

Saab is targeting the on-schedule delivery of its new Gripen E fighter to the Swedish and Brazilian air forces late this decade, as it steps up export campaigns involving both the advanced model and its earlier C/D-model jet.

 The first of three Swedish test aircraft to be involved in the project was unveiled at the manufacturer’s Linköping facility on 18 May, in front of an international audience of current and prospective Gripen users.

 Lead aircraft 39-8 will be handed over to Saab’s flight test department “this summer”, and should make its flight debut at the end of the year, the company says. It will be used initially to verify the general systems, airframe and aerodynamics of the evolved design, which – while visually resembling earlier iterations – is entirely new.

 Powered by a GE Aviation F414 turbofan engine capable of generating 22,000lb (98kN) of thrust, the Gripen E has an empty weight of 8,000kg (17,600lb) and a maximum take-off weight of 16.5t. The latter represents a 2.5t increase over the C/D. At 15.2m (49.8ft), it is also 30cm longer than its predecessor, while its wingspan has increased by 20cm, to 8.6m. With 40% more internal fuel, the new model has increased range, payload and endurance, and features an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, other updated avionics and new electronic warfare equipment.

 Saab chief executive Håkan Buskhe reveals the cost of developing the Gripen E and producing its three Swedish test aircraft will be less than $2 billion.

This is chump change by the standards of modern fighter development.

………

 Stressing that aircraft 39-8 is not a prototype, Ydreskog says: “Assembly of the first test aircraft – with 60,000, mostly new parts – was shorter than number 204 for the C/D.” The programme’s other test units are in different stages of structural assembly and only minor adjustments are expected as the shift to series production occurs. “There is some optimisation to do – we can reduce some weight,” he notes.

 But Saab believes one of the biggest advances with the Gripen E comes through its use of an all-new integrated modular avionics system, which splits flight-critical and tactical management software. It says the latter’s software, hardware and algorithms can be rapidly changed – like apps on a smartphone – to keep pace with evolved operational requirements or technological advances in computing over the life of the type’s use.

(emphasis mine)

The updated software has been in development for far less time than the (still not up to snuff) avionics package for the F-35 JSF, and it will be trivial for countries using the aircraft.

The reason is that critical functions are segregated from one another, which, as any programmer can tell you, simply works better than tightly integrated all in one software as used in the JSF, even after billions of dollars have been spent.

Of course, for Lockheed Martin, their hairball of a software platform is not a bug, it’s a feature, because it allows charge tolls on users who want to make upgrades.

As Aviation Week notes:

………

Gripen E is scaled up from the early Gripen C/D with 40% additional fuel capacity, more thrust from its General Electric F414 engine and more weapon stations. Internally the aircraft has been given a new sensor suite, with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and infrared search and track (IRST).

Key to the aircraft is a federated software system that separates critical flight control systems from the tactical systems. Saab claims this will make the Gripen E’s avionics and mission systems more easily and quickly upgradable. Just 10% of the aircraft’s system code will be devoted to flight-critical systems; the remaining 90% will be mission-system related. Saab officials say tactical upgrades could be tested and introduced in weeks rather than months.

(emphasis mine)

The direct operating cost, as well as the fly away cost, of the Gripen looks to be less than that of its competitors.

Compared to its competitors, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, and the Lockheed-Martin Lightning II, this aircraft should better suit the needs of most countries out there, but Sweden lacks the connections behind the other platforms, so it looks likely that while it will be a market success, it will be a only a modest success.

Gee, You Think?

No Comments

The director of the F-35 (aka the Joint Strike Fighter) program, General Christopher Bogden, has admitted that the “Jointness” part of the program was a mistake:

Perhaps the only thing U.S. military leaders know about their next fighter jet is this: they want the program to go better than the F-35’s did.

The sixth-generation fighter effort is still in its infancy; the aircraft it produces may not fly for decades. The Pentagon hasn’t even decided whether to build separate planes for the Navy and Air Force. But the services’ leaders are already cooperating to figure out how the futuristic fighter will fit into the battlefield of the future — and how they can avoid another tactical aircraft program that winds up so late, over budget, and short of its goals.

Ask the F-35 program’s current director for advice, and you’ll get this gentle warning: joint programs are hard.

“I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m not saying they’re good. I’m just saying they’re hard,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said Thursday. “You ought to think really hard about what you really need out of the sixth-generation fighter and how much overlap is there between what the Navy and the Air Force really need.”

When the F-35 was conceived in the 1990s, the goal was to buy a common plane for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and even America’s allies. The Air Force version would fly from traditional runways, the Navy version would operate from aircraft carriers, and the Marine version would be built to take off from short runways and land vertically. The goal was to have all three have 70 percent of their parts in common, which was meant to save billions of dollars in development and logistics costs.

But engineering changes have produced three variants that have only 20 percent of their parts in common, Bogdan said at a conference sponsored by McAleese and Associates and Credit Suisse.

………

“We will have some different requirements for what we need based on the different things we are expected to provide for the joint force,” Lt. Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and requirements, told reporters last month. “We will use common technologies and maybe some common things, but at this point we think it will be a different enough mission that it won’t be the same airplane.”

The only joint US Navy/US Air Force fighter that ever achieved a modicum of defense was the F-4 Phantom, and that was developed exclusively for naval use.

Bogden also ignores the elephant in the room, which is that the jointness that most seriously compromised the program has been the jointness with the US Marine Corps.

The STOVL version has added about 2000 lbs to the weight of just the engine, led to poor rear visibility from the cockpit, made the wings smaller than they should have been for either the Air Force of Naval variants to save weight, and the volume occupied by the lift fan restricted the placement and the utility of the inner weapons bays.

This is not the only reason that the JSF is shaping up as a clusterf%$#, but it is a lot of the problem.