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The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

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Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#121

Post by WalterBright »

tablespoon wrote: post #6
dmurray wrote: post #3

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…

I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when…

During the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Air Force ran short of jet transports and decided to pull a bunch of WW2 era propeller transports out of mothballs and put them back in service. The mechanics, however, complained that they followed the instructions to the letter on tuning the engines but could not get them to develop the power they were supposed to.

The AF finally hired a bunch of old WW2 airplane mechanics. Those mechanics never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engine, made few adjustments, and the engines were soon singing at full power.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#122

Post by b-mmxx »

dwheeler wrote: post #116

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

This reminds me of the following:

“In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.”

Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#124

Post by dfox »

tpmx wrote: post #86
projektfu wrote: post #5

I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.

I only worked tangentially in the field, but I get the feeling that modern semiconductor manufacturing is sort of the same, except with more excel sheets and the like?

Semiconductor manufacturing is essentially the interchangeable parts engineering taken to the extreme. The tolerances are so large (relative to the feature size) that instead of trying to eliminate them you exploit the relations between various manufacturing tolerances such that the errors cancel out.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#125

Post by Wohlf »

macspoofing wrote: post #70
YesThatTom2 wrote: post #42

Why is the government allowed to reverse engineer AND create laws making it difficult for citizens to do so? Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. That said... I think there's an opportunity here: EFF and other pro-reverse engineering organizations should sue and demand that the DOD follow the same laws that citizens follow. If they lose the lawsuit, it be great ammunit…

>Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. Or the contract allows it.

And the patents would have expired after 20 years anyways.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#126

Post by alliao »

b-mmxx wrote: post #122
dwheeler wrote: post #116

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were…

China didn't steal a copy did they? Ah got the dates wrong.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#127

Post by throwaway0a5e »

goatcode wrote: post #90
jandrese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still ne…

>This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories And, possibly, before the 1960s.

Employees are either clock punchers or workers.

Small departments in poor cities occasionally wind up highly competent because they wind up staffed with a high enough ratio of workers to get things done and everybody above them has bigger problems than micro managing so they have the freedom to get things done. And it runs for awhile then comes under scrutiny and gets made back into junk because politics.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#128

Post by alliao »

dmurray wrote: post #3

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…

Yeah no. Back in the 2000s when Iraq war was happening and marines were using MSN Messenger and I asked whether the unencrypted nature of the chat program would adversely impacted on their missions etc, and he basically said "hell they can spy all they want WE don't even know what we're doing next"

Which I thought he was joking at the time.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#129

Post by geomark »

nullserver wrote: post #23
jandrese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still ne…

My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete th…

As some siblings have commented, it's probably the failure to get back and document it. But the desire for job protection is not uncommon. I saw it when I worked on testing satellite power converters at a large aerospace company. There were procedures and paperwork for everything, but the test procedure for one series of power converters did not work. Only one technician knew how to actually test them. He led me through it, and he had plenty of time to update the procedures, but refused to do it. It was gross and obvious what he was doing, but somehow he was allowed to get away with it. There was no union.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#130

Post by marshmallow_12 »

depressing to read. We point to military technology as a sign of how ingenious we are. Then all that effort gets lost due to laziness and being overambitious. it's beyond belief, our much vaunted stealth technology will be completely worthless in a generation due to simple ineptitude. i'm not sure how the military can be trusted with a toy radio, let alone h bombs.
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