The sky-high aircraft and aviation thread

Here's The Air Force's Questionably Ambitious Plan To Develop New Fighters In Five Years.

Next Generation whatever seems to be the new hotness at the DOD.

Excuse me for a minute but after how the DOD has handled F-35 (extremely poorly), I find this proposal and estimates laughable.

I don't question from an engineering standpoint that it can be done, it can be done. The question is how many fuck ups in the brass and contractors' executive branches are going to fuck it up and delay it? Without a serious overhaul (read: PURGE) of the DOD procurement and development system, I see this doomed to failure.

Is five years nearly enough?

It’s an interesting idea. Obviously they’re looking at the failures of the procurement process here and moving outside the traditional process with the 5 year iterations and open concept development. If they do go through with it I have to wonder how many of these new designs will be manned.

The thing is, 5th gen (and beyond) aircraft have proven to be massively difficult to develop. Basically the only way to do it seems to be to throw time and money at the problem, and the constraints they’re placing on both of those things here are very limiting.

That's a blatantly obvious sign of extremely poor project management, not inherent difficulties with the technologies themselves.

Not necessarily. A modern fighter is a pretty serious engineering challenge, as far as we know at this point even a well-managed project will be expensive and turbulent.

I found the first proposal!

It seems insane, but that’s actually a pretty standard way of clearing trees away from power lines. Trees brushing up against the lines is incredibly dangerous, and it’s impractical to have human crews go up and down the whole length. I’ve seen them using a trimmer like that near where I live.

Of course, no amount of logic can ever prepare you for the sight of a huge saw swinging free from a chopper.

Expensive maybe, depending on what the budget allocated for the project is. Turbulent no. A well managed project not only meets deadlines but meets its goals as well. Meaning for fighter development, that's a plane that never needs its standards lowered just to pass evaluation, that's a plane that always meets or exceeds the design parameters asked of it in both prototype and production, a plane that never needs an exercise or test rigged against its competition and it's ready to do the things it was designed for on time. Ideally this would also be within budget.

F-35 failed every point on that list. F-22 failed a fair few as well. Gotta go back a fair ways to find a properly project managed plane or helicopter for DOD procurement.

If F-200 and so on wants to avoid any of that, it needs an overhaul in project management. Then only then can we look at any inherent flaws and problems in the technologies associated with 5th gen aircraft.

Not only is that wrong on the whole “failed every point” part, not to mention a misleading argument from the start, the idea that a well-managed project never hits any snags simply isn’t compatible with reality. Though, reality has never had much to do with these conversations.

Pick any “well managed” aircraft development and you’ll find your fair share of trouble, and that’s for craft vastly less complicated than what’s being asked here. Hell, look at the 5th gen projects being run by other countries and you’ll see the exact same trouble, just minus the money to push the project through.

The gap from 4th gen to 5th gen is one that can only be crossed with a massive expenditure of effort and resources. Once we start seeing more 5th gen designs in the air, that’ll change, but for now we’re throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. That seems to be the whole idea behind this program, getting more (and more varied) 5th gen airframes out the door as fast as possible.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 19th 2019 at 7:49:18 AM

Are we going to? Russia threw in the towel on Su-50, China's gone quiet on J-20/J-38/whatever, F-35's been a disaster that's ruined the appetite for 5th gen planes for many, nobody else is making anything.

Are we really going to see a continuation of this so called fifth generation? I'm not convinced we are. If that Digital Century series is anything to think of, it might just be skipping what we think of in 5th gen and going straight to 6th.

We're going to have to.

Our current air fleet has a hard expiration date that we're hitting now and to do something like restart F-22 or even F-18 production would cost just as much as making a new plane

Yeah, we’ll absolutely be seeing more. Probably not from Russia and China, though.

If anything the F-35 has increased the interest. Just look at the sales. Everyone is seeing what the platform is capable of, and now that there’s one flying the technology base is starting to grow, which makes future development easier. The appetite for more 5th gen fighters has really only been ruined in the minds of journalists.

People are going to be putting their money on the next 5th gen fighter having the same capabilities as the F-35, with none of the mistakes thanks to the lessons learned there.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 19th 2019 at 9:25:35 AM

>Of course, no amount of logic can ever prepare you for the sight of a huge saw swinging free from a chopper.

Unless you saw it in a Bond film already.

TIL that the F-102 was sold to Turkey and Greece... and only Turkey and Greece.

Why only them? :S

"Hey, how do we keep those two from killing each other if things ever get serious between them?"

"Don't worry, I have a cunning plan which cannot possibly fail."

You see, pardner, If everybody has interceptors, nobody can drop a nuclear bomb.

Fatal B-17 crash at Hartford, Connecticut airport

The plane was lifting off with three crew and ten passengers when it failed to gain altitude an crashed while trying to return to the airfield. A half dozen aboard were taken to the hospital, and authorities aren't giving a final count until they've verified the identities of those aboard and the deceased. A crash investigation is expected.

I've always been of the mind that someday, it may just be better off to pass legislation banning vintage aircraft from actually flying and just having them taxi around on the runway to prove that they're "air worthy".

Why not just like, make replicas at this point, I am sure you could make some really damn convincing ones that are way more airworthy.

You can't make "replicas" because each aircraft consists of thousands of individual parts that required dozens of factories across entire countries to assemble simultaneously.

A B-52 costed $9.28 million to produce in 1962); this is $60.2 million in 2018.

A B-17 costed $238,329 to build in 1945, which would be $2.7 million in 2018. Obviously much cheaper than the jet B-52, but it's worth remembering that World War II countries were able to produce thousands of aircraft in five years because they mobilized their entire civilian economies and infrastructure for the purpose, not because the planes were cheap.

Thus, it's why the vast majority of World War II planes, tanks, and other vehicles were scrapped after in the years after 1945, since the governments wanted to move on and repurpose those materials for the civilian economy instead.

Edited by FluffyMcChicken on Oct 2nd 2019 at 4:08:55 AM

The thing to consider with vintage aircraft is that “airworthy” is a bit of a moving target. What might have been considered perfectly acceptable in the 50s is now considered massively unsafe, and so on.

If the aircraft are in proper working order I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be able to fly, but much like driving a vintage car with no airbags and seatbelts you have to understand the risks.

When production began on MemphisBelle the crew and producers said to Entertainment Tonight that warbirds had - at most - another "10-20 years" before it got too hard to keep them flying.

I think they were being pessimistic but the problem didn't go away.

• The aircraft were built to be maintained with shelves of spare parts, barrels of POL^note petroleum, oil and lubricants. Most were only built to last until metal fatigue or battle damage took them out.
• The parts, tools and jigs to make them have been out of production (most lost or scrapped) for over 50 years.
• There is a market to make parts of engines that we have the schematics for, but even then the cost and time to build parts by hand goes up.
  • The reason the CAF has a flying Zero? The plane's engine is a copy of an American one they can get parts for. A lot of "ME-109's" flying are the Spanish copies with the British Merlin engine.
• Metal fatigue is devil's bargain: sure designers made sturdy airframes but sooner or latter the cracks and fractures start to add up and doom that airframe- the devil will have her due.
• Don't ask about jets - most of the 60's and 70's era ones are out of the reach of all but the most well endowed organizations.

My niece will probly see some late 1950's P-51's and older warbirds flying. Those few orgs that can pay for some surplus jets may fly them over her head.

But someday the warbirds will have their wings clipped

Hell, keeping the last Vulcan flying cost six or seven digits a year and they recently had to ground that.

I imagine that some well-funded organisations might tinker with 3D printed parts to keep their warbirds flying, but it wouldn't be economical at all.

In other news, who would win: an entire military parade or one whirlyboi?