Lockheed's F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:10:05 -0600, Roberto Waltman wrote (in article ):

al+Dat

What is most distressing is that the "pilots" of the aircraft could not navigate by conventional means in the absence of their electronic nav systems. Once upon a time, the USAF taught actual navigation to its flight crews.

--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those 
 who have not got it."  - George Bernard Shaw

Did you miss the part where it said that _all_ the navigation systems, including a simple attitude reference, were out?

How exactly would _you_ navigate with no compass, no artificial horizon, no ASI, no altimeter, and - since these craft were not designed for computerless flight - probably no paper maps and not even a calculator or slide rule in the cockpit?

Visibily in most modern fighters is pretty limited - I haven't seen the YF-22 cockpit though. Fly-by-intuition doesn't work really well over the Pacific. Even the old timer pilots had some basic nav gear and they didn't fly 12 or 16 hours at a stretch with mid-air refueling. It's a different world out there.

[OT] I gained a lot of respect for WW-II navigators when I got my pilot's license. Although I did not complete it there, I did most of my training in Texas, in the Dallas / Forth-Worth area.

In cross-country flights, after the few lakes around Dallas became invisible, every thing looked exactly the same in every directions. It was very easy to get lost, even with the some helping landmarks (highways, towns, etc.) On my first long flight with an instructor on board, when we returned to the home airport, he bursted into the flight school and shouted to everybody "He found Abilene all by himself!". Obviously I was expected to lose my way ...

To be able to find your destination after hours of flying over water, and with only the instruments available at the time is a remarkable feat.

Roberto Waltman

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It would have been a silly excercise since they had a big fat tanker to follow home.

It would have gotten interesting if it had not been there. My first thought is that someone could feed them radar vectors home, but that would depend on how stealthy they were. I could imagine them taking turns slowing down and putting down the gear long enough to get a vector.

Had the weather turned bad they would have been seriously screwed.

According to some reports, they lost all their communications as well as navigation. The offical AF line is

"The aircraft experienced a software problem involving the navigation system en route from Hickam to Kadena. For operational security reasons we will not discuss specific aircraft systems or locations."

One would hope that the comm and nav stuff would not be so tightly coupled that a bug in the nav systems could take out all of the comms as well, but dumber stuff has been done...

Holding crumpled tin-foil left over from lunch out the window?

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I think I am an
                                  at               overnight sensation right
                               visi.com            now!!

Maybe Micro$oft wrote the software, and it had to be tightly coupled so that they couldn't use another company's browser, errr I mean comm system?

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266

Not really. On VFR (grin) I suspect most people - pilot or no - could find the ground or water - and those waters are warm enough for extended survival. The pilots carry PLBs. So it would have meant a lot of expensive hardware wasted, but then that's the military's speciality, so...

I think that most pilots would consider a forced ditching at sea as being "seriously screwed"

I know I would.

A "water landing" (as the airlines euphemistically call it) in something with with as high a stall speed as a jet fighter is probably going to kill you. Ejecting can bust you up pretty good as well, but it's not _supposed_ to kill you. An article in Jane's that I read once upon a time said that the design guidelines for jet fighter ejection systems was that two broken bones (one of which was usually a compression fracture of a vertebrae) was considered acceptable. IIRC, broken arms and legs due to the limb-retracter/restrainer thingys are common as well.

In either case, loosing an aircraft probably doesn't move you up the promotion list.

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  HELLO, everybody,
                                  at               I'm a HUMAN!!
                               visi.com

You know, if MS really did write the software, I'd laugh so hard I'd bust...

--Yan

Screwing up the software, however, won't prevent you from getting multi-billion dollar contracts to build more...

Marc

Nope. It will probably get you a nice big contract to fix it.

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  ... Um...Um...
                                  at               
                               visi.com

I'd push the accelerator through the floor. I've been looking at the video from Pres. Ford's flyover and must believe that better scenarios involve getting up and out of it. LS

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:40:05 -0600, larwe wrote (in article ):

Did you miss the part where even private pilots with nothing but single-engine ratings have to be able to handle that?

Exactly. Pretty much fundamental rule of being a pilot is to have backups for things that can fail. Once upon a time SAC crews flew all over the globe with celestial navigation, basic manual nav aids and dead reckoning, and didn't die as a result.

--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those 
 who have not got it."  - George Bernard Shaw

The pride that they had the software fixed in 45 minutes is as scary as all the systems had date calculation as series term in the software reliability equations. Imagine an altimeter saying, "Better check the date before I display the value".

Maybe the 45 minutes is not so surprising after all they did run their regression tests.

w..

Marc Ramsey wrote:

?

The report says "We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again"

but even that is fast, and suggests they had an inkling of just where the stuff-up was....

Of course, they could have fixed it even faster, by flying back over the date line ?!

-jg

IIRC then early Tornados would flip onto their backs when crossing the equator.

On Feb 27, 3:35 am, Randy Howard

OK, I'll bite: what magical method do general aviation pilots use to navigate back home when they only have the sun as a reference, no comms, compass, airspeed indicator, maps or computational instruments, and they're over thousands of miles of featureless water? Butter on their feet?