Originally Posted by
davejb
A vast improvement would be made, regardless of any other consideration, if the RAF would pay for competent computer consultancy (alliteration yet!) rather than turning to BAe etc and saying 'here's 50 squillion quid, please hire a computer geek'.
A CCC? Almost as great an oxymoron and intelligence officer. Even if the CCC is found and makes the right choice you still need the money and politicial balls to make it work.
As for not turning to BAe, as soon as you set up a bid all the likely contenders go "Oooh, TFD, lets set up a consortia led by . . . "
Unfortunately, from my very limited experienece of 'design committee' style work, what you get is a civil servant chair who knows very little, some company men who know about the same, a few tech rep types who know which side the butter is on, and a bunch of RAF guys who eventually die of frustration or start spin-off businesses to supply the glaring need. Due to poor business acumen their company folds inside 5 years.
Indeed.
(There is also a fair amount of 'free lunch' in this - I, personally, was always more than a little annoyed at how cheaply the company thought I could be bought, and how readily my colleagues went for it).
The home PC boom in the 80's saw huge numbers of aircrew getting into programming and stuff, the odd square peg made it to the square hole (others pretended to be square so they could avoid flying), the net result being that whilst the RAF quite rightly (in my view) distrusts complete automation/computation in favour of man hour intensive skill development (which is why we're the best, naturally) it lost out on the ability of computing to streamline decision making - and perhaps more importantly, to provide even the weaker practitioners with a safety net that ensured a basic level of competence.
On the Magic Mushroom a complete software lab was set up and highly skilled technicians set to with a will to learn Jovial and make Mr Boeing's software really zing. But how much do you pay an SAC or a Cpl?
As I (used to) lean out of radar, on all those sorties where we concentrated on wet stuff, I couldn't help but wonder why so many people in 'the loop' were gut-feeling location, course, depth, speed when it's trigonometry.... computers are good at trig - I used to wonder why the various players weren't maybe looking at a computer generated set of solutions, picking the most likely, instead of doing it all from scratch?
Gut feeling because the target was driven not by computers but by humans. yes, it might be following a line x=y+2 but could the computer anticipate a manouevre?
I remember (dry) 55 plus contacts on the screen, chinagraph of course, on the ASV21. Got the target on the 3rd contact. Why, it was a gut feeling and operator intuition and skill - Mr Murgatroyd - who just know it was the target. Why not straight there? Partly covert and partly because the first 2 were en route.