Procuring new aircraft
 

I came across a video on line showing the development of the Buccaneer, in all from inception on to first flight it took a mere 33 months. Can't help thinking why is there always such a mess with delays in these days come new contracts,Typhoon, MRA4 (789 million over budget and 9 years late before scrapping), A330 etc? Now I understand that obviously things are a lot more technical and no doubt politics does it's fair share of damage more than those days, but back then they had their fair share of hurdles to overcome too, Blackburn for example had to manufacture their own machine tooling as the supply from America would take 2 years to deliver, quite something when they had never undertaken anything like this. The Beverley had been their previous offering, the Buccaneer developed into a superb aircraft in its own right, just what has gone wrong ?

I don't think things have gone wrong.

A good read is 'the quick and the dead'. The attrition rate of test pilots, especially on fast jets during the 50's to 70's was pretty horrific, pretty close to ww2 levels I believe.

Add in the levels of performance required, specialist materials design, often operating at the cutting edge of technology, its a wonder Anything gets released from production...

I'm no expert but I have to suspect that "design by committee", political interference, change of spec halfway through development and potential returns on future sales have all made the process of procuring a fighting machine something of a "dogs breakfast" nowadays. In the past, military aircraft were designs conforming to a War Ministry specification, this meant that usually the service got what it needed. Nowadays, it seems, a price is set, then a race to provide the cheapest bid is carried out. After awarding the contract, the cost then usually leaps by a factor of 5 and Politicians deny they have upgraded the spec. Maybe my understanding of procurement of major hardware is lacking ( due to my never having been involved at that level). I do know that looking at everything that's been bought since mid 90s it seems to have gone that way. Sorry for the verbosity !

Smudge

I suppose nowadays off-the-shelf technology is improving so fast, quicker than they can design aircraft.
Comes a point when they have to stop looking into what off-the-shelf kit to use and build the aircraft now as it is, or it will never get built, as the designers will be forever updating the plans.
Was there any truth that Nimrod MR2 was more up to date than MRA4? As they could keep on modifying existing MR2's as new kit came out, but had to stick to the plan half way through building MRA4.

There were more independent aircraft manufacturers in those days, all given a spec, all fighting for the contract. Competition is a good thing.

The Mustang was designed, built and had it's first test flight in 150 days.

Things are different now
 

The Buccaneer was designed and built on a single site by engineers; aircraft these days are designed multi-nationally and run by project managers (don't get me started about them) and built across multiple sites.

When they couldn't get the milling machinery for 2 years the Brough engineers decided to make them themselves because they could. Nowadays the engineers can still do their stuff - A380,QE/PoW but they ain't the ones making the decisions.

Brough were pro-active on the specification and talked the Navy out of wanting it supersonic - made it heavier and reduced the range. It also had a single design aim that wasn't compromised - low drag. In everything they made engineering decisions.

These days the gestation periods are prolonged by the increase in system complexity and the methodologies which gives ample scope for vast amounts of documentation and empire building.

A major problem is that by the time the system is ready for production you can't get the electronic parts anymore. Added to which the pilot will have a more powerful and capable system in his pocket at the minute, on his wrist in the next few years and probably implanted under his skin a few years after that.

While I agree with all the above, i suggest it's not down to technical
Factors. Look how long it takes to accept even well proven and widely used types such as the 330 into service.

Given the capabilities of computer aided design and testing these days, you'd expect the process to be much quicker than it is. I think that there were something like 20 pre-production Lightnings built to fully test it. Much of that work would be done by computer these days.

I think one of the reasons for the increased timescales is the use of computers for systems design, testing in the development phase and control in the air vehicle itself.

If you take the Buccaneer as an example, when I started at Brough in 1970, Mechanical Systems, as a department in its own right was relatively new. Until only a few years before it had been just another part of the Design Office and during the main Buccaneer design and development programme, the Draughtsmen, Mechanical and Electrical Systems engineers were all co-located. The logic of a Buccaneer fuel system is relatively simple and can be defined in systems diagrams and simple text which any engineer could understand. It was straightforward for the required information to pass from the fuel systems specialist to the electrical systems specialist who would design the logic into a wiring diragram that the fuel man could understand and check. Although many of the individual components had to be specified and bought in from suppliers the requirements specification was reasonably easy.

Step forward 30 years or so and the technical departments have grown in size and become more insular. Take another Brough example of introducing nosewheel steering on Hawk. Now the mechanical systems engineer has to specify the logic of the system in great detail, subject to all the internal design authorty checks required. This is passed to the electrical systems engineer who writes the specification for the steering control unit. This again goes through internal checks before being passed to the vendor who will design and manufacture it. Here the logic now has to be transformed into a software specification. The software designer who has probably no practical experience of aircraft systems operation or support, codes the software. Here you have a major disconnect, because the mechanical systems engineer can't read or understand the software code. The result is the need for a really exhaustive check on the software in its own right and then again when its operating on a development rig and finally in aircraft ground and flight test. Even this process cannot uncover every possible combination of logic or likely fault in the system so there are still lots of surprises waiting to come out when the system goes into service.

Modern aircraft and systems designs are much more capable and sophisticated than those of the Bucaneer era. Unfortuately even in the strictly technical aspects of the design, this results in much longer timescales. Throw in the requirements for greater documentation, health and safety, product liability, project management and customer contractual requirements, it's not surprising that timescales have increased.

we're at 17 years since development started and 7.5 years since first flight on the F-35 and god knows how many development aircraft

good job we've got all those computers eh? ;);)

The B-52 was designed in basic form over a weekend in a motel..................

i think you also need to factor in the history of the s1 and s2.

the original s1 - of which around 25 were built - were fundamentally underpowered and not really fit for purpose. they were eventually grounded i think for having unairworthy engines and could not be turned into s2s.

the s2 was what the buc should have been, but some years later, with engines 40% more powerful (err, thats alot).

modern development techniques go to great lengths to try and avoid making 25 examples of a non-fit for purpose product - it would just be unaffordable and unacceptable today to do so, but back then was a different time.

don't misunderstand me, the buc was a great platform from many perspectives, and the sometimes asked "what if - with tornado avionics" question is a good one, but be careful with the rose tinted hindsight specs!

And there you have it - silohed engineers managed to a standstill. There is a big problem in that there isn't the general knowledge spread across the Engineering discipline which gives rise to a great many disconnects that then needs all this documentation, control, management and checking

SW is actually very easy to understand these days with high order languages like Basic, Ada and good C.

There is a quicker way if you cut out the middle people.

On Hawk 200 we had a very clever chap who would figure out a solution, write and proved the solution in a computer program written in Basic (often over the weekend but these were not trivial problems). The solution could then be re-written into the mission computer's Ada directly - you could try reading the System Engineer's interpretation but what would be the point? - and job done. Did this several times with various weapon aiming problems and purely down to this guy's genius we had some impressive increases in accuracy.

The Germans got fed up with the delays in the Eurofighter Flight Control System SW and set up a small team that generated a fully working implementation in a few months and then proceeded to tell everybody but BAe (who I suspect they thought were the problem) how they had done it.

The trouble with having computers in the design process is you spend even longer checking and testing than just doing the old fashioned fag packet calculation and you don't get onto the real experience building of cutting metal/code and getting it working.

My experience is in a big-ish software company producing one huge fully integrated bit of software (for phones) probably has some small similarity with avionics in the sense of having to be some combination of hard and soft real-time, handle a lot of different sensors and communication devices and then present a pretty display to humans. Perhaps one a major exception would be not using formal methods in any way (not that I know if avionics software does that).

Like any project, people start out with some design goals (e.g. "it must be hard-realtime" or "every process must handle out-of-memory situations gracefully" or "must run on cheap hardware with one less ram chip so we can make $$$").

These things, especially the ones described by short sentences, tend to have absolutely incredible impact on the difficulty of designing the whole system. They all sound like good things, of course and it's hard to argue against them.

Once you've set out on some paths, it is exceedingly difficult to turn back even if you find out that your initial idea was only partially valid or ceases to be important over time. Every "brick" is laid upon thousands of others.

This is why you need competition and people who rethink from scratch - throwing away some of the assumptions that others have made and seeing what can be done without them either in the light of experience or as a total "what-if". Big companies don't decide to do things like this - they are always trying to have "only one" of everything for efficiency which makes them sterile environments.

I get the impression that cars are becoming more like phones and moving from being all-microprocessors driven by assembly language to more complicated systems with all of that plus big general purpose computers that run user interface and provide conveniences for the driver. It's rather like the nervous system of an animal that's suddenly getting a large brain.

Perhaps aircraft were or are becoming like this too and if so then I imagine that there are few limits to the incredible things that are possible. I think it would be helpful for people who can at least fly and possibly fly fast to be embedded in the software teams however since it is very hard for programmers to make effective trade-offs without really understanding - they tend to get the wrong impression and make the wrong kinds of tradeoffs.

A rather naive and pointless comparison, not sure what you thought you were achieving there Harry.

"modern development techniques go to great lengths to try and avoid making 25 examples of a non-fit for purpose product - it would just be unaffordable and unacceptable today to do so, but back then was a different time."

I give you the Tornado F Mk 2..........:hmm:

Trouble is- whatever the very good reasons you make for the time it takes......and however that long lead time is justified, explained, rationalised and accepted as unavoidable...

If it takes you 17 years to get the new 'Wonder Jet' into service, said Wonder Jet is going to be obsolete either at the moment it enters service, or not long afterwards.

Or even before it enters service. :uhoh:

Only obsolete against that which is on the drawing board or in development surely. Everybody else has the same problem wrt development timelines.

Yes, everyone else has the same problems in terms of built in obsolescence after protracted development times. However, I would make a couple of comments on this point:

At post 4 gr4techie asked if it was true that the Nimrod MR2 was more up to date than the MRA4 (which I noticed nobody has yet answered), the answer is yes and no. Overall the MRA4 was a far more technically advanced design (in terms of avionics), but, because of the long development time, during which the MR2 received some updates, some of the individual systems in the MR2 were more advanced - for example the EO system. The EO system for the MRA4 was procured some when pre 2000 (anyone remember Nimrod 2000?) and presumably sat on a shelf for 10+ years before being installed. In the meantime the MR2 got an EO update several years later with a more advanced system (I think from the same company). I believe one of the many issues with the introduction of the MRA4 was that it would need a mid-life update just after entry into service - but I could be wrong, I wasn't that close to the project. But advances in technology, perhaps the introduction of a new comms system, during the long development of a new aircraft, can mean it needs updating also as soon as its introduced to be compatible with the rest of your assets.

Another issue is spares procurement, and the need for lifetime buys. Long development times can result in Company A, who make that vital widget for your aircraft, deciding it doesn't want to make them any more. This means you now have to go out and buy enough stock to last your fleet (exact size almost certainly unknown) to last it's entire life (also almost certainly unknown - but probably longer than you think) while fighting to justify the expenditure with the army of bean-counters and politicians who generally have most sway over the project.

Another thought....

It it takes 20 odd years to develop a modern combat aircraft these days, shouldn't Air Forces already be looking for replacements for all their aircraft currently in service, on the basis that almost as soon as you introduce a new type you need to start sourcing its successor? Or are 40+ year old combat aircraft going to become the norm in the future?

downwind, you make a good point about the f2.

my point was only that the buc was not perfect 5 minutes after the engineers had sketched out the design on the first fag packet.

i do however agree that things were simpler in the past, but as the above posts also show, current designs have got to the point where a single entity can't hold the whole design in their head - they are just too complex, and that complexity is driven by the requirements.