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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

#191

Post by ckozlowski »

ecpottinger wrote: post #165
b-mmxx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The same was done the Canadian Avro Arrow plane, and the British Black Knight rocket. What happens once you join government, they take away your brains?

F-14 as well. In all of those cases, it was decided that the cost to secure and account for the tooling to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands was more than they wanted to spend.

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

#192

Post by aidenn0 »

8bitsrule wrote: post #189

There has to be a way to transfer the massive yearly income of public money into the right private pockets.

People who put effort into spending money effectively eventually get beat out by people who put effort into convincing the government to give them money.

This isn't unique to public money; SEO, advertising, marketing &c. are all ways to get private people to part with their money.

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

#193

Post by slim »

alliao wrote: post #126
b-mmxx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

s/China/URSS/

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

#194

Post by 8note »

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…

How is that not a national security threat?

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

#195

Post by hef19898 »

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…

Yeah, very well might be. Usually so, these contracts include decades worth of spares. Things usually turn ugly when this period runs out, yet 25 years after delivery seems a bit short.

Nice tid bit for the B-52. These old birds, old in the sense of designed pre CAD, are quite hard to understand for modern manufacturing. Even manufacturers rely on retires sometimes to understand these old drawings for their own planes. Then again, the B-2 shouldn't fall in that category.

I suspect that people in the armed forces, at least some, understand maintenance but have no idea of manufacturing. A couple of years ago I had spontaneous "workshop" session where we discussed how we could leverage BoMs and data collected during production and assembly from the manufacturer for version and build tracking of military hardware. I used to work for that manufacturer in question, so I knew what data they collected during production. The only we would have had to figure out was which BoM to use. That was immediately shot down by middle management, because it would cost 10s of millions to get the rights for that data. Nevermind that it was there from day one, even in SAP so our client wouldn't even had issues with compatibility.

And none of the people I had these discussions with had any idea how BoMs and such are used. In these environments it is quite easy for crucial knowledge, especially of highly specialised parts and processes, to be lost.

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

#197

Post by triggercut »

mgarfias wrote: post #32

Somethign I haven't seen mentioned here is that the technology used to design this thing is waaaaaaaaaaaay old. I know for a fact it was designed on an IBM mainframe (dad ran the one that the YF-22 was designed on). I can't remember what CAD package they used there, but its definitely conceivable that the software doesn't even exist anymore. How would you go about building a new one if you can't read the CAD files, i…

Good callout. However, it might not be all that bad. CAD file formats are known to last for decades to maintain backwards compatibility, since the packages are expensive and upgrade paths of large companies slow.

CAD files (at least planar modeling as opposed to parametric or solid modelling) tend to have pretty straight forward data structures for geometry. Find the point or vertex struct and you're halfway there. The complexity is association and metadata which were nowhere near as bloated then as they are now.

As someone who works regularly for large asset owners, asset life-cycle information (digital and analogue) and the proper management of that information is often ignored because organizations pass that risk to the people working with the asset maintaining their own working knowledge to get their job done. We've had international Building Information Modeling standards since the turn of the century but there's often no business case or standard enterprise process to make leverage technology for asset management.

AI and ML are starting to appear more and more in the operations space, however many pilot projects have to start with digitizing the asset in the first place, which becomes a cost impediment for many getting off the ground.

It really frustrates me as there are great things that can already be done today but the initial step financially usually scares off anyone who has to know 5 years in advance what their operating budget is.

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

#198

Post by md_ »

ajarmst wrote: post #182

The B2 was designed to stealthily penetrate long distances into the USSR. It was a 1980s black program that eventually (at absurd cost) only shipped about 20 aircraft for a mission role that no longer existed. It's not surprising that the infrastructure and supply chain to maintain them into the latter parts of their operational life didn't materialize. I am curious about what the current role of the B-2 is, as the U…

It’s still a part of the so-called nuclear triad. Whether it’s actually critical for second-strike credibility (absent a 24/7 in-air alert, which I think no longer exists?) is up to debate, of course, but that would be the rationale.

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

#199

Post by kube-system »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #83
Daho0n wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet just landed on Mars, bringing a helicopter. Please don't spread FUD.

How much of the spacecraft was manufactured in the USA? Are we able to create another one without our trading partners?

From the manufacturer’s website:

> Manufacturing, assembly and integration operations are located at Decatur, Alabama, and Harlingen, Texas.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/about

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

#200

Post by neurotech1 »

dwheeler wrote: post #162
h0l0cube wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government program manager (PM) is under a lot of pressure to "get it cheaper" And let me guess, the 'pressure' comes from government decision makers that live in a perpetual revolving door with industry? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

While the revolving door is always a potential issue, and I'm sure it happens, I don't think that's a key problem for the DoD. When government officials leave office they're required to not do work, for a period of time, on things they controlled, and the penalties can be steep. That reduces incentives for the worst of abuses. Also: a US government employee who retires after 20+ years has a guaranteed pension; it's n…

The whole "Has to do everything to get funded" type problem, was very apparent with the Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle[0]. The result was so misguided, if not comically bad, they made a movie about it, Pentagon Wars[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars

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