Spongebob Posted February 6, 2014 Share Posted February 6, 2014 TT....preach on brother. BTW, you left out the getaway driver, Robert Dorr. It absolutely baffles me that with the access to leadership that he enjoys he can get stuff so wrong. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 (edited) And I say to these "journalists": "Just the facts, please." One group tells us its utter crap and the other is blowing Sunshine up everyone's wazoos! No one can argue that this program isn't way late and way over budget though... -Gregg Edited February 7, 2014 by GreyGhost Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Horrido Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 No, it's right on schedule and in accordance with the amount of money it would take. Not their fault they got the initial estimates wrong in what they could accomplish with the guestimated time and money. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 So you're Thompson's ghost writer ? -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 And I say to these "journalists": "Just the facts, please." One group tells us its utter crap and the other is blowing Sunshine up everyone's wazoos! No one can argue that this program isn't way late and way over budget though... -Gregg In Loren Thompson's defense he isn't a journalist. He heads up a think tank, and gives interviews and writes. I don't blame him for not being a responsible journalist. That is not his job. Sweetman and co though... well. Thats an issue. especially as Aviation week is still claiming to be a "trusted publication that the professionals turn to" etc which goes out the window when you link to Axe and run the kind of stories they have. Which shows a bit of what I mentioned earlier, that its all basically a cabal that "peer reviews" each other and gives each other validity. AKA the blind leading the blind approving the blind. As for being late and overbudget, much like the video Horrido showed us its easy for the lines to blur. How much of this is the F-35 and how much of it is procurement, politics, and the system its being born from? There are technical challenges no doubt. In retrospect there will be plenty of things that could have been done better. I'm hoping in 10 years we get a solid book that tries to accurately tell the story of concept and development what went wrong when and why. One of the things that frustrates me is the inability to see the difference between the capability that will be delivered vs the delays and cost. a typical story goes like this. "The troubled and delayed F-35 continues to be troubled and delayed, and it sucks in air to air combat, and not only does it suck but its troubled and delayed! and its taking our money! and aircraft X, Y or Z would be awesome!! And I haven't checked but I bet it never had troubles in development, no sir! this is unprecedented in military procurement history!!" I hate how people leverage the delays into faults of future combat capability. It has troubles and delays, but I hate the arm chair air warfare experts everywhere that come out of the wood work to slag it on things they don't even comprehend even with unclassified info. Basic stuff. really basic stuff. I just wish for some context, some intelligence, some perspective, some background, some history, and perhaps most importantly some knowledge of the subject. I know that's asking waaaay too much. And its going to go beyond a lot of reporters even if they don't have an agenda. And thats if they are even reporters and not a couple of self proclaimed "experts" down under who make really snazzy looking powerpoint slides on a website, but have near zero background in the fields they claim other than riding in the back of a super bug once. (And no Boeing has not forgotten the glowing things Goon once wrote about them before completely reversing himself) APA continues to slag LM as criminal scammers worthy of prosecution every chance they have, while (and I can't figure this out) advocating another Lockheed Martin aircraft. I would be worried if we weren't finding cracks. That would be when the red flag shoots up. Gilmore seems to have an issue with the idea that a F-35B could take damage in combat and if engaged would destroy the aircraft, and is calling for a system that would give indication of possible damage. The USMC sees all of this as very remote as its primarily a combat problem and if there are doubts the F-35 can land conventionally else where, but people like Axe and Sweetman have locked onto this as a serious problem, and its not. Its just the risk of flying combat aircraft in war. the USMC doesn't feel the system is worth the money and weight penalty. So its essentially something that he considers unsafe but the military is fine with. Its an intersting detail that deserves more thorough explanation, but you won't see it. And Axe went whole hog trying to say that fragments from an AK round could kill an F-35B I like this better: Yes, it is possible that the JSF is the biggest hoax in aviation history: but at US$19 billion (the approximate cost of the System Development and Demonstration, or SDD, phase) it’s a bloody expensive joke, and the Pentagon simply doesn’t have a sense of humour.Secondly, it is possible that Dr Kopp is the only analyst who has uncovered the hidden weakness of the JSF, or the only analyst with the courage to say so out loud. I think that’s insulting to the many thousands of excellent scientists and engineers around the world who have contributed to the design and development of the JSF or who, on behalf of their respective governments, have carried out studies to validate (or not) the claims for it made by the manufacturer and the Pentagon. If the JSF was a complete dog somebody would have made the case convincingly by now – heaven knows there are enough alternatives on the market whose manufacturers would make it worth somebody’s while, and no government knowingly spends billions of dollars on unsuitable aircraft. Thirdly, no government which has joined the program has subsequently withdrawn from it on either cost or capability grounds; conversely, at least two other countries – Israel and Singapore – now want to join the program in some capacity. This suggests the claims made for its stealth capability are based on robust and realistic measures: stealth is so much a core feature of the design that a degraded RCS would undermine much of the justification for the project, regardless of the other attributes of the aircraft. Fourthly, the JSF has already fought and won its first battle: in spite of strong pressure from its Scandinavian neighbour, Sweden, Norway last year selected the F-35A as the replacement for its ageing fleet of F-16A/B fighters. Swedish aircraft manufacturer Saab was offering its Gripen NG fighter and a very attractive industry participation program but in spite of this pressure Norway’s own analysis showed the JSF was the superior aircraft and offered better value for money. Finally, the suggestion that there is a widespread conspiracy, involving nine governments and 12 separate air arms to conceal significant shortcomings in the design of the JSF doesn’t withstand scrutiny: the program itself has weathered plenty of hostile scrutiny from within the US armed forces as well as the Pentagon, the Senate and Congress, not to mention parliaments, defence forces and rival aircraft manufacturers around the world. There seems to have been no significant loss of faith that the aircraft will eventually deliver the capabilities promised, though plenty of concern about the cost and schedule of the project. Conspiracy theories tend to evaporate when examined rationally. http://rumourcontrolblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-hope-this-answers-your-question.html Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 BTW, you left out the getaway driver, Robert Dorr. It absolutely baffles me that with the access to leadership that he enjoys he can get stuff so wrong. Oh I did forget about him! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 From the end of the video... I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Devilleader501 Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 From the end of the video... I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Oh that's a good one. Lol Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 7, 2014 Share Posted February 7, 2014 -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” ― Michael Crichton Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 (edited) The preaching continues: In defense of Lockheed Martin, LM has taken a lot of bad press and some of it is certainly warranted, but in other cases it certainly isn't. The first most obvious issue would be the erroneous hook numbers from NAVAIR supplied to LM. If LM had ignored the USN's numbers and produced a poor hook design, then absolutely throw them under the bus. Screw them for blowing it! but they didn't. They followed the USN (The EXPERTS) and it was wrong. Now LM fell on the sword for that. It wasn't their fault, but they wouldn't dare try and blame the navy because the navy is a customer and you catch more flies with honey, and what was done was done, no point in airing the dirty laundry in public What bothered me was A couple years back it took some serious Google fu for me to even find a single article that mentioned the error was on the part of the USN, and not LM... That should not have been. Dave Mujumdar has done a wonderful job of late of making sure to mention that it was the USN's mistake and I thank him for that, but at the time the news broke, by acts of omission and commission by the aviation weekly/POGO types it was blamed squarely on LM. When LM got shown the underside of a bus none of them stepped up to clarify what happened, or who was really at fault. Or even what the errors were and what was specifically wrong, in order to educate the people who frequent their sites. It all just added to the poo storm they wanted so accuracy and honesty just took a back seat for a while... and when I say a while I mean some of them still fail to mention the NAVAIR mistake to this day. The hook is LMs fault. period. Its just easier to create the 2 minutes of hate directed at LM they desire than actually talk about what happened and why. apologies will not be issued, and indeed why should they? Defense is an ever moving target and if you can't find the dirt you are looking for in one area, there is always a new place to look. The F-22 is another example, there was some serious hate directed at LM and the hypoxia problems that were later traced back to the vest that is not produced by LM. As you can imagine all the aviation writers offered a mea culpa just kidding! They found something else to shout and point at and distract the masses. Its a great trick because it works and its favored by many. oh TT so LM is just innocent in all this huh? No absolutely not. Question LM, question the government, question the military. But dammit, ask intelligent questions. That falls on YOU. However there should be assistance by journalists who have more access to information and then they are supposed to pass that pertinent info to you. That is their JOB. That is the purpose of the journalist. When they offer you as much guess work, agenda, and lack of information and insight as an outsider who has a blog on the internet somewhere, then they become worthless. And many of them have become worthless. David Axe has zero qualifications. but he has a soap box, and the nerve to call himself a journalist and "journalists" link to him. Journalist is an important job, that they don't do very well and thats when they don't have an agenda. Bill Sweetman was once so outwardly hostile to the F-35 and LM that he was suspended from his job. they let you down. And they have an incentive to do their job poorly to make more money as much as they have claimed LM does the same. I get the "my tax dollars!!! RAWWRR!!" knee jerk, and yes it is real money. Your money. Real money you gave to the government with the expectation that it would be spent wisely and not squandered. The problem is how few of us are pilots? How few of us actually have first hand experience in aviation? How few us are military pilots? How few of us have first hand experience of military aviation. how many of us served in the military at all? Fewer than one percent of Americans have served in the military post September 11th. How many of us have designed an airplane? How many of us have been involved in procurement? This stuff is hard. It takes years of formal education, and years of practical experience. It took 3 years to fix the wing droop issues with the Super Hornet along with help from the USN and NASA. http://www.cobaltcfd.com/applications/abrupt-wing-stall click that link^ cool stuff awaits and I haven't provided my usual gifs and pics! http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/F-18.html NASAs part^ Its that lack of historical perspective that hurts too, and the quick amnesia. Bill Sweetman at the time bashed the Super Hornet into the ground. He now advocates it as a logical substitute for the F-35. He knows he can can get away with this. In an even and equal contest the JSF wins almost every time. but they really aren't interested in that. Thats no fun. Another problem is the difficulty with not just classified information, but inside information. LM and the US military basically had to say "trust us" on a lot of stuff. And thats not easy especially with so much "bad news" coming. The gulf widens when you have such information disparity. On one side you have all the first hand knowledge, access to classified and inside info, education and years of background on the subjects at hand and OTOH, you have the large majority of the public that has very little basic knowledge and info even when it comes to the unclassified stuff. So you have miitaries and governments that are in love with the JSF, and giving the public very little info, but spending their billions and asking "trust us". So the public thinks "it sucks" and in the mean time you have more and more governments with access to the info and the knowledge base to evaluate it signing onto the program. Here is a big spoiler: The JSF isn't going anywhere. Its won. It just won again in South Korea, before that it won again in Japan. More countries are signing on, not fewer. That might be because the JSF truly is the real deal, its worth waiting for, worth spending more money on. For LM its a pretty easy sell. It gives all the info to prospective governments, they give it their experts, the experts say "Get this jet NOW!" and then LM gives them a price that is better than other aircraft out there. So the F-35 offers the best value. Thats why it wins. It does more stuff better for less money. or if you want to say it another way it does more stuff better, costs a lot but its easily worth it. so basically the people in the know think its an excellent warplane, and the people who are ignorant don't think its any good. So the less you know, the worse it seems. Coincidence? the KPMG report (that is an independent, non political, non LM auditor) for Canada should have exonerated the JSF in a lot of ways and instead it was used to produce sticker shock amongst the JSF bashers. There it was. That is what it cost, not LM numbers, an independent study by a big four accounting firm. Womb to tomb cost. Unfortunatly there is no KPMG report to compare the rivals (Gripen Ng, F-18E/F, Eurofighter, Rafale) evenly. If there was the JSF would be a no brainer, just on the money and industrial offsets alone. Edited February 8, 2014 by TaiidanTomcat Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Spongebob Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 TT...concur entirely with your posts here. I want to throw Dave Majumdar another hat tip because he's never got the credit he's due, probably because he's usually right and counter to the lynch mob... I get the "my tax dollars!!! RAWWRR!!" knee jerk, and yes it is real money. Your money. Real money you gave to the government with the expectation that it would be spent wisely and not squandered. The problem is how few of us are pilots? How few of us actually have first hand experience in aviation? How few us are military pilots? How few of us have first hand experience of military aviation. how many of us served in the military at all? Fewer than one percent of Americans have served in the military post September 11th. How many of us have designed an airplane? How many of us have been involved in procurement? This stuff is hard. It takes years of formal education, and years of practical experience. It took 3 years to fix the wing droop issues with the Super Hornet along with help from the USN and NASA I can verify that he, pretty much alone, hits the group mentioned above to fact check what he writes. Spongebob Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Spongebob Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 Another comment about the Super Hornet wing droop...the root cause was they took out the wing twist from the A-D and added a dog tooth to the leading edge, which was supposed to generate a vortex to keep the air energized and attached at high AoA...that said, the computer models have consistently overestimated the effectiveness of this. Just for SA... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
MarkW Posted February 8, 2014 Author Share Posted February 8, 2014 Just to be accurate, the F-22 hypoxia event was never fully explained, and though the vest was a factor, it didn't explain all the events. But that was the USAF trying to keep crying widows off TV more than anything LM did, Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 Another comment about the Super Hornet wing droop...the root cause was they took out the wing twist from the A-D and added a dog tooth to the leading edge, which was supposed to generate a vortex to keep the air energized and attached at high AoA...that said, the computer models have consistently overestimated the effectiveness of this. Just for SA... 100 percent right on Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 How come LM's computer models didn't show the tailhook numbers were off beforehand? -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 (edited) How come LM's computer models didn't show the tailhook numbers were off beforehand? -Gregg Because you can't know things are "off" until you actually physically try it which is why test flights are flown? The same reason McD/Boeing struggled with the Super Hornets Wing drop? Edited February 8, 2014 by TaiidanTomcat Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 But the F-35 was going to breeze through flight test due to computer simulation ... That was what LM was saying anyway ... -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 But the F-35 was going to breeze through flight test due to computer simulation ... That was what LM was saying anyway ... -Gregg It has in areas that can be tested and validated by simulation. Other areas must be tested physically. Even then its not much of a leap to know that computers play a vital role. Unfortunately being able to predict the future is beyond even LMs computers. Technology has its limits. Can I see a link to what you are referring to as well? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 Its not about predicting the future, its about number crunching ... I remember reading articles years ago stating how flight testing on the F-35 whas going to be less critical due to computer simulation according to Lockheed ... -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
MarkW Posted February 8, 2014 Author Share Posted February 8, 2014 The dynamics of how the impact wave ripples through the cross deck pendant, the fixed nose wheel, main wheel and tail hook length/angle, as well as the damper on the tail hook can be modeled somewhat. But obviously nobody trusted it because the first real traps were at Pax, not the USS Roosevelt. The other factor to remember was nobody currently working at LM OR NAVAIR had practical tail hook experience. All in all it looks to be a relatively trivial fix. Funny how people complaining about the tail hook miss like it was intuitively obvious to design right the first time don't seem to applaud much about the other design features the F-35 is much better about than the Superbug, like not having a significant HGI issue. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TaiidanTomcat Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 (edited) Its not about predicting the future, its about number crunching ... I remember reading articles years ago stating how flight testing on the F-35 whas going to be less critical due to computer simulation according to Lockheed ... -Gregg Video from Naval Air Systems Command: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pgZz7o_VEjA Again it has been. At the risk of trying to prove a negative, How many F-35s have crashed in testing? How many additional test flights have been unnecessary thanks to computer simulation? Fleet wide groundings have been relatively rare, last year there was a crimped hose which pointed to a manufacturing defect that caused a cautionary fleet wide grounding of the F-35B. (Pratt and Whitney paid for the damages and delays.) As Mark W mentioned the Hot Gas Ingestion has not even been a factor on the F-35B, and that is quite a feat. Even simulating the forces as the F-35B transitions to vertical flight has been a challenge on the computer. The F-35B alone has done an incredible job thanks to simulation for a very complex sequence of events. What we have is a case of the Tail hook being beyond simulation but thousands of other potential issues across 3 variants have been avoided thanks to simulation. But as I always joke, no one reads a headline about "thousands of aircraft landing safely yet again today" Even then a hook redesign, and not a massive redesign of the aircraft itself is not bad at all. Edited February 8, 2014 by TaiidanTomcat Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Spongebob Posted February 9, 2014 Share Posted February 9, 2014 How come LM's computer models didn't show the tailhook numbers were off beforehand? It was NAVAIR's model, which was used to predict the behavior of the cross deck pendant. If you ran the model against an F-18, E-2 and EA-6B, it accurately predicted the wire/hook interaction based on live demonstration. LM (& NGC for the X-47) used this to design their arresting systems and layouts. When flown (both JSF and X-47) it was discovered it was not accurate. F-35 and X-47 have much shorter main gear to hook distances than legacy aircraft. Basically, the current platforms did not have a sensitivity to the error. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
GreyGhost Posted February 9, 2014 Share Posted February 9, 2014 So, no one at LM double checked NAVAIR's formula? I'm reminded of when the Hubble Space Telescope was made ... -Gregg Quote Link to post Share on other sites
MarkW Posted February 9, 2014 Author Share Posted February 9, 2014 And the endless "Popular Science" level of arm chair quarterbacking continues. Specious arguments don't help credibility, they just come off as argumentative. That NAVAIR data was provided as GFI--government furnished information. LM was contractually bound to use it, as they are contractually bound to use all the data the govt tells them too. NAVAIR are THE experts of the world for carrier aviation, where would LM get the expertise to challenge it? More importantly, if LM did verify the NAVAIR model, then all the "I just read this in the paper but don't really understand what it is" crowd would be complaining that those bozos down in landlocked Ft Worth are wasting tax dollars re-validating the model our NAVAIR experts told them was the truth. What exactly any of that has to do with Hubble is so beyond a connectable point it is mind boggling. So NASA not only uses the instruments and specs out what performance they want, they are supposed to understand the intricacies of manufacturing processes involved in large glass grinding on earth for a low earth orbit application? Or that the manufacturer had a bad instrument? Oh, I get it. The connection is blaming both parties when one party (LM, NASA) couldn't possibly have identified the error by themselves. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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