F-35 Cancelled, then what ?
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I am surprised that nobody as commented on the F-35B fire above - which happened on 27th Oct, but which the press release was snuck out the day before the elections. What is it they say about hiding bad news?
Note that it was a weapons bay fire which resulted in Class A $2M+ damage.
Note that it was a weapons bay fire which resulted in Class A $2M+ damage.
ORAC: I am surprised that nobody as commented on the F-35B fire above...
Interesting. Perhaps worth noting that there was no grounding of the rest of the squadron or the high profile trials on the USS AMERICA, perhaps suggesting an isolated incident? If it were a major unknown or major flaw, it would seem a stand down or inspection order would have gone out by now. Seems to be a lot going on in the weapons bay, and heat build up being a known issue, as we saw the reports of the need to open the bay doors to cool off.
On a perhaps related note, I seem to recall the dry bay fire suppression system being deleted as part of the weight reduction program? Was that for the weapons bay or other parts of the aircraft?
I would imagine the SOP would be to land immediately.
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Link to the DOT&E Report that highlighted the weapons bay heat problems, these were in an A, I would have thought that a B would have more of a propensity to overheat.
It would be interesting to know if the flight was planned to avoid the known problem height speed and temperature envelope problems?
http://aviationweek.com/site-files/a...l%20Report.pdf
The following details discoveries in F-35A flight sciences testing:
- Testing to characterize the thermal environment of the weapons bays demonstrated that temperatures become excessive during ground operations in high ambient temperature conditions and in-flight under conditions of high speed and at altitudes below 25,000 feet. As a result, during ground operations, fleet pilots are restricted from keeping the weapons bay doors closed for more than 10 cumulative minutes prior to take-off when internal stores are loaded and the outside air temperature is above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In flight, the 10-minute restriction also applies when flying at airspeeds equal to or greater than 500 knots at altitudes below 5,000 feet; 550 knots at altitudes between 5,000 and 15,000 feet; and 600 knots at altitudes between 15,000 and 25,000 feet.
Above 25,000 feet, there are no restrictions associated with the weapons bay doors being closed, regardless of temperature. The time limits can be reset by flying 10 minutes outside of the restricted conditions (i.e., slower or at higher altitudes). This will require pilots to develop tactics to work around the restricted envelope; however, threat and/or weather conditions may make completing the mission difficult or impossible using the work around.
It would be interesting to know if the flight was planned to avoid the known problem height speed and temperature envelope problems?
http://aviationweek.com/site-files/a...l%20Report.pdf
The following details discoveries in F-35A flight sciences testing:
- Testing to characterize the thermal environment of the weapons bays demonstrated that temperatures become excessive during ground operations in high ambient temperature conditions and in-flight under conditions of high speed and at altitudes below 25,000 feet. As a result, during ground operations, fleet pilots are restricted from keeping the weapons bay doors closed for more than 10 cumulative minutes prior to take-off when internal stores are loaded and the outside air temperature is above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In flight, the 10-minute restriction also applies when flying at airspeeds equal to or greater than 500 knots at altitudes below 5,000 feet; 550 knots at altitudes between 5,000 and 15,000 feet; and 600 knots at altitudes between 15,000 and 25,000 feet.
Above 25,000 feet, there are no restrictions associated with the weapons bay doors being closed, regardless of temperature. The time limits can be reset by flying 10 minutes outside of the restricted conditions (i.e., slower or at higher altitudes). This will require pilots to develop tactics to work around the restricted envelope; however, threat and/or weather conditions may make completing the mission difficult or impossible using the work around.
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
So you suggesting that this all singing, all dancing, jet which can automatically almost land by itself, and which frustrates training because it defeats the instructor through its data fusion - will suffer Class A damage costing $2M+ to repair, and be out of service for an undefined period, each the pilot forgets to open the bay doors every 10 minutes? 
Perhaps they should fit the "Changi Mod" they fitted to the F3 crew helmets to solve the problem (I'd tell you what it was - but they'd shoot me...)
Perhaps they should fit the "Changi Mod" they fitted to the F3 crew helmets to solve the problem (I'd tell you what it was - but they'd shoot me...)
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So you suggesting that this all singing, all dancing, jet which can automatically almost land by itself, and which frustrates training because it defeats the instructor through its data fusion - will suffer Class A damage costing $2M+ to repair, and be out of service for an undefined period, each the pilot forgets to open the bay doors every 10 minutes?
Well I am just pointing out that the A has the problem, so it would seem probable that the B also has the problem.
What I do not know is if the all singing all dancing software reminds the pilot that they have to do these manoeuvres or if the mission planning software takes the known restrictions into consideration, might get expensive if it does not.
Mission planning could get very interesting, if the routes to certain targets only have certain ways for an F35 to get there due to this problem, brings back F117 memories...
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Some more info on the F-35/F-22 training issues
CAPITOL HILL: How smart is too smart? When F-35 Joint Strike Fighters flew simulated combat missions around Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, their pilots couldn’t see the “enemy” radars on their screens.
Why? The F-35s’ on-board computers analyzed data from the airplanes’ various sensors, compared the readings to known threats, and figured out the radars on the training range weren’t real anti-aircraft sites — so the software didn’t even display them. While the software and pilots on older aircraft hadn’t noticed the imperfections and inaccuracies in how the Eglin ranges portrayed the enemy, the F-35s’ automated brains essentially said, “Fake! LOL!” and refused to play.
The Eglin anecdote is just one example of how the F-35 Lightning and its twin-engine older brother, the F-22 Raptor — collectively called fifth-generation fighters — are overturning how the Air Force operates. The sophistication of fifth gen sensors, software, and stealth requires the Air Force to overhaul training and network infrastructure. They even challenge longstanding assumptions about who makes what decisions and who’s in command. If the pilot of a fifth gen jet infiltrating enemy airspace has a clearer picture of the battle than senior officers further back on a vulnerable AWACS command plane or back at base in Air Operations Center, why should they be telling him or her what to do?
Information — the sensors to collect it, the software to make sense of it — becomes the critical contribution of 5th gen aircraft, pilots argue, which means you need to evaluate them on different criteria than traditional fighters. “When I first started flying the Raptor, I was enamored with how powerful the airplane was,” said Lt. Col. David Berke, a Marine F-35B pilot who’s also served in Air Force units. “The F-22 is just so fast, (but) the least impressive thing the F-22 is is how powerful it is.”
What matters isn’t the G forces the plane can pull or the Mach number it can hit, Berke argued, but the awareness it can give you of what’s going on. “In the 21st century battlefield, without information, the fastest airplane out there is the first one to die.”
Berke spoke this morning alongside three Air Force pilots at a Capitol Hill event organized by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute. Presiding were Air Force Warfare Center commander Maj. Gen. Glen VanHerck and former Gulf War air commander David Deptula, a frequent contributor to Breaking Defense (and father of one of the pilot panelists).
It was Lt. Col. Scott Gunn, an F-35A pilot based at Eglin, who told the training anecdote. Eglin isn’t some backwater base with inadequate equipment. It’s the crown jewel of Air Force test programs, Gunn said, “but a lot of those precious resources are just not quite enough for what you need in fifth gen.
“A lot of the simulated threat surface-to-air emitters that we have are basically a little radar dish on a stick that’s attached to a computer,” which tells the radar what signals to emit to replicate a threat, Gunn said. “Well, the F-35 sees that and says, ‘nope, that’s not the threat.’ So it ignores it.
“We’re finding we almost have to dumb down the system a little bit to say, ‘all right, well, it’s not exactly the threat, but it’s good enough to display it,'” Gunn said. “If you don’t have something that’s really replicating the threat, you’re not getting the training you need, because the airplane is too smart.”
The sensors on the F-35 and F-22 suck up so much data, in fact, that the communications networks on the aircraft can’t transmit most of it. Compared to the amount of data you have to share, the network connections available to share it make you feel like you’re on an old dial-up modem, Gunn said: The Air Force needs to upgrade the network infrastructure to carry that data across the force.
Once the networks can carry the load, however, you have the potential for what airpower theorists like Deptula call the combat cloud. Just as commercial cloud computing services untether companies from proprietary data centers and let them access their data anywhere (in theory), the combat cloud could untether air warfare from purpose-built command posts — be it AOCs on the ground or AWACS in the air — and let frontline pilots get the vital data in their own cockpits.
“Before…we would need to have the entire intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance constellation of aircraft and satellites all working together to get us some information that’s going to be pretty old” by the time they reach the target, Maj. Andrew Stolee, an F-22 pilot, told reporters after the panel. “Now, instead of waiting for all that stuff to be built in at an Air Operation Center somewhere, that information is now being immediately displayed to people that are in aircraft in the AO (Area of Operations) that can immediately apply some sort of effect, either kinetic (e.g. missiles) or non-kinetic (e.g. jamming).”
If you rewrite rules of engagement to reflect how fifth gen aircraft can sense, fuse, share, and act on information, Stolee argued, “it enables us to delegate decision-making from much higher levels down to individual cockpits.”
“That’s all because we’re seeing the same picture and able to operate in places others cannot,” Stolee emphasized. Compared to current 4th gen fighters like the F-15, F-16, and F-18, fifth gen planes can get closer to the enemy, maximizing the collection capacity of their sensors, the pilots on the panel said. Then their onboard computers can fuse the data into a coherent picture and their datalinks transmit it to other aircraft — including the fouth gen planes, multiplying their effectiveness.
Currently, “the limitation…on that airplane is me,” said the fourth panelist, F-22 pilot Maj. David Deptula (son of Lt. Gen. Deptula). “It’s the person sitting in the cockpit with the giant color display. (We want to) get to a point that we’re passing information from machine to machine seamlessly.” Then what one aircraft sees will display on other aircrafts’ screens, automatically and at machine speeds, without a human intermediary slowing down the process or garbling the information.
“The kind of ubiquitous and seamless sharing of information (among) fifth generation aircraft like the F-22 and F-35…could at some point render a new paradigm for the command and control of military forces,” the elder Deptula told me. “This new paradigm sees an evolution of the (Air Force) command and control tenet of ‘centralized control—decentralized execution, to ‘centralized command—distributed control—decentralized execution.'”
“Separate aircraft dedicated to command and control (e.g. AWACS) will become less necessary,” Deptula said, “(as) information from all aircraft, ships, spacecraft, land sensors, etc. is integrated.”
Instead of any one aircraft or command post, the fulcrum of the force becomes the network itself — and the artificial intelligences that, hopefully, make sense of the data for us. (This “human-machine teaming” is central to the Pentagon’s high-tech Third Offset Strategy). Instead of America’s advantage lying in any one aircraft, it would reside in the whole force — a complex system that, hopefully our adversaries will find much harder to replicate than our planes.
Why? The F-35s’ on-board computers analyzed data from the airplanes’ various sensors, compared the readings to known threats, and figured out the radars on the training range weren’t real anti-aircraft sites — so the software didn’t even display them. While the software and pilots on older aircraft hadn’t noticed the imperfections and inaccuracies in how the Eglin ranges portrayed the enemy, the F-35s’ automated brains essentially said, “Fake! LOL!” and refused to play.
The Eglin anecdote is just one example of how the F-35 Lightning and its twin-engine older brother, the F-22 Raptor — collectively called fifth-generation fighters — are overturning how the Air Force operates. The sophistication of fifth gen sensors, software, and stealth requires the Air Force to overhaul training and network infrastructure. They even challenge longstanding assumptions about who makes what decisions and who’s in command. If the pilot of a fifth gen jet infiltrating enemy airspace has a clearer picture of the battle than senior officers further back on a vulnerable AWACS command plane or back at base in Air Operations Center, why should they be telling him or her what to do?
Information — the sensors to collect it, the software to make sense of it — becomes the critical contribution of 5th gen aircraft, pilots argue, which means you need to evaluate them on different criteria than traditional fighters. “When I first started flying the Raptor, I was enamored with how powerful the airplane was,” said Lt. Col. David Berke, a Marine F-35B pilot who’s also served in Air Force units. “The F-22 is just so fast, (but) the least impressive thing the F-22 is is how powerful it is.”
What matters isn’t the G forces the plane can pull or the Mach number it can hit, Berke argued, but the awareness it can give you of what’s going on. “In the 21st century battlefield, without information, the fastest airplane out there is the first one to die.”
Berke spoke this morning alongside three Air Force pilots at a Capitol Hill event organized by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute. Presiding were Air Force Warfare Center commander Maj. Gen. Glen VanHerck and former Gulf War air commander David Deptula, a frequent contributor to Breaking Defense (and father of one of the pilot panelists).
It was Lt. Col. Scott Gunn, an F-35A pilot based at Eglin, who told the training anecdote. Eglin isn’t some backwater base with inadequate equipment. It’s the crown jewel of Air Force test programs, Gunn said, “but a lot of those precious resources are just not quite enough for what you need in fifth gen.
“A lot of the simulated threat surface-to-air emitters that we have are basically a little radar dish on a stick that’s attached to a computer,” which tells the radar what signals to emit to replicate a threat, Gunn said. “Well, the F-35 sees that and says, ‘nope, that’s not the threat.’ So it ignores it.
“We’re finding we almost have to dumb down the system a little bit to say, ‘all right, well, it’s not exactly the threat, but it’s good enough to display it,'” Gunn said. “If you don’t have something that’s really replicating the threat, you’re not getting the training you need, because the airplane is too smart.”
The sensors on the F-35 and F-22 suck up so much data, in fact, that the communications networks on the aircraft can’t transmit most of it. Compared to the amount of data you have to share, the network connections available to share it make you feel like you’re on an old dial-up modem, Gunn said: The Air Force needs to upgrade the network infrastructure to carry that data across the force.
Once the networks can carry the load, however, you have the potential for what airpower theorists like Deptula call the combat cloud. Just as commercial cloud computing services untether companies from proprietary data centers and let them access their data anywhere (in theory), the combat cloud could untether air warfare from purpose-built command posts — be it AOCs on the ground or AWACS in the air — and let frontline pilots get the vital data in their own cockpits.
“Before…we would need to have the entire intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance constellation of aircraft and satellites all working together to get us some information that’s going to be pretty old” by the time they reach the target, Maj. Andrew Stolee, an F-22 pilot, told reporters after the panel. “Now, instead of waiting for all that stuff to be built in at an Air Operation Center somewhere, that information is now being immediately displayed to people that are in aircraft in the AO (Area of Operations) that can immediately apply some sort of effect, either kinetic (e.g. missiles) or non-kinetic (e.g. jamming).”
If you rewrite rules of engagement to reflect how fifth gen aircraft can sense, fuse, share, and act on information, Stolee argued, “it enables us to delegate decision-making from much higher levels down to individual cockpits.”
“That’s all because we’re seeing the same picture and able to operate in places others cannot,” Stolee emphasized. Compared to current 4th gen fighters like the F-15, F-16, and F-18, fifth gen planes can get closer to the enemy, maximizing the collection capacity of their sensors, the pilots on the panel said. Then their onboard computers can fuse the data into a coherent picture and their datalinks transmit it to other aircraft — including the fouth gen planes, multiplying their effectiveness.
Currently, “the limitation…on that airplane is me,” said the fourth panelist, F-22 pilot Maj. David Deptula (son of Lt. Gen. Deptula). “It’s the person sitting in the cockpit with the giant color display. (We want to) get to a point that we’re passing information from machine to machine seamlessly.” Then what one aircraft sees will display on other aircrafts’ screens, automatically and at machine speeds, without a human intermediary slowing down the process or garbling the information.
“The kind of ubiquitous and seamless sharing of information (among) fifth generation aircraft like the F-22 and F-35…could at some point render a new paradigm for the command and control of military forces,” the elder Deptula told me. “This new paradigm sees an evolution of the (Air Force) command and control tenet of ‘centralized control—decentralized execution, to ‘centralized command—distributed control—decentralized execution.'”
“Separate aircraft dedicated to command and control (e.g. AWACS) will become less necessary,” Deptula said, “(as) information from all aircraft, ships, spacecraft, land sensors, etc. is integrated.”
Instead of any one aircraft or command post, the fulcrum of the force becomes the network itself — and the artificial intelligences that, hopefully, make sense of the data for us. (This “human-machine teaming” is central to the Pentagon’s high-tech Third Offset Strategy). Instead of America’s advantage lying in any one aircraft, it would reside in the whole force — a complex system that, hopefully our adversaries will find much harder to replicate than our planes.
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Well I am just pointing out that the A has the problem, so it would seem probable that the B also has the problem.
If the USAF would ever learn how to keep their mouths shut, it would be a great boon to the world. But that's a dream.
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For all the budding fire/mishap F-35B investigators out there - here are more clues:
US Marine Corps investigating cause of F-35B fire 08 Nov 2016 Leigh Giangreco
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/ar...b-fire-431286/
US Marine Corps investigating cause of F-35B fire 08 Nov 2016 Leigh Giangreco
"
Two systems, including the Honeywell-supplied integrated power package (IPP) linked to a previous aircraft fire, failed as a fire erupted inside the weapons bay of a US Marine Corps Lockheed Martin F-35B on a 27 October training mission.
Sensors onboard the aircraft detected a fire in the right weapons bay and failures of the IPP and a hydraulics system while the aircraft was flying in the airport's landing pattern, according to a mishap report released by the Naval Safety Center.
The center has classified the incident as a class A mishap, meaning the aircraft suffered at least $2 million in damages, but the results of the investigation could change the cost estimate, the USMC tells FlightGlobal. The Marines have not ordered a precautionary safety stand-down for the F-35B fleet.
The pilot assigned to VMFAT-501 at MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina, landed safely without injuries or further incident, the USMC adds...."
Two systems, including the Honeywell-supplied integrated power package (IPP) linked to a previous aircraft fire, failed as a fire erupted inside the weapons bay of a US Marine Corps Lockheed Martin F-35B on a 27 October training mission.
Sensors onboard the aircraft detected a fire in the right weapons bay and failures of the IPP and a hydraulics system while the aircraft was flying in the airport's landing pattern, according to a mishap report released by the Naval Safety Center.
The center has classified the incident as a class A mishap, meaning the aircraft suffered at least $2 million in damages, but the results of the investigation could change the cost estimate, the USMC tells FlightGlobal. The Marines have not ordered a precautionary safety stand-down for the F-35B fleet.
The pilot assigned to VMFAT-501 at MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina, landed safely without injuries or further incident, the USMC adds...."
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
A cause or a symptom perhaps?
........The integrated power package (IPP) provides conditioned air and liquid cooling for the aircraft systems.......
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Gentlemen SWAP Your ENGINES: First F-35B Power Module, Engine Swap Take Place on USS America
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http://breakingdefense.com/2016/11/m...f-35bs-videos/
"◾The first Royal Navy pilot was carrier qualified"
Last edited by SpazSinbad; 21st Nov 2016 at 04:59. Reason: add JPG & text
Nice links spaz.
I think we see BF-01 (the first B) in the video- nice to see her still earning her keep, she has been flying for quite awhile now, unlike some pre-production aircraft which seem to retire early.
-------
Also of note this memo highlighting some very serious problems with the testing schedule and other issues. Seems there is great pressure to cut testing now, but that will surely increase problems later. What a fiasco.
http://aviationweek.com/blog/pentago...ill-challenged
http://aviationweek.com/site-files/a...16/F35memo.pdf
First I had heard about the yaw movements with the A firing the gun (and suspected pitch movements with the belly mounted gun on the B and C).
I think we see BF-01 (the first B) in the video- nice to see her still earning her keep, she has been flying for quite awhile now, unlike some pre-production aircraft which seem to retire early.
-------
Also of note this memo highlighting some very serious problems with the testing schedule and other issues. Seems there is great pressure to cut testing now, but that will surely increase problems later. What a fiasco.
http://aviationweek.com/blog/pentago...ill-challenged
http://aviationweek.com/site-files/a...16/F35memo.pdf
First I had heard about the yaw movements with the A firing the gun (and suspected pitch movements with the belly mounted gun on the B and C).
Last edited by sandiego89; 21st Nov 2016 at 16:15.
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'KenV' may be interested in this PDF...
Enhancing HMD-Based F-35 Training through Integration of Eye Tracking and Electroencephalography Technology
7th International Conference, AC 2013 Held as Part of HCI International 2013 Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 2013, Proceeding
Enhancing HMD-Based F-35 Training through Integration of Eye Tracking and Electroencephalography Technology - Springer (PDF 200Kb)
Available at: http://www.f-16.net/forum/download/file.php?id=20448 (PDF 155Kb)
+ Good HMDS story: https://www.f35.com/news/detail/f-35...ad-of-our-time
Enhancing HMD-Based F-35 Training through Integration of Eye Tracking and Electroencephalography Technology
7th International Conference, AC 2013 Held as Part of HCI International 2013 Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 2013, Proceeding
Enhancing HMD-Based F-35 Training through Integration of Eye Tracking and Electroencephalography Technology - Springer (PDF 200Kb)
Available at: http://www.f-16.net/forum/download/file.php?id=20448 (PDF 155Kb)
+ Good HMDS story: https://www.f35.com/news/detail/f-35...ad-of-our-time
"The latest revelations by the US Department of Defence further deepens my concerns that the F35 programme may be the biggest and most costly white elephant in military history.
@sharpend, was that your testimony to Congress, or someone else's?
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Ukip”s[sic] Mike Hookem MEP said the 'sharpend' quote along with this:
And... Sharkey gets a Guernsey....
https://reportuk.org/2016/11/21/mods...-experts-warn/
"...“Having flown a simulator of the aircraft, I know the concept is cutting edge; but the reality is, the engineering and software are simply not working in practice, and may never do so...."
https://reportuk.org/2016/11/21/mods...-experts-warn/
OK, testimony before Parliament. I see that Commander Ward remains in full curmudgeon mode ... though in this case, I find some of his basic reasons rational.