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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

#81

Post by mavhc »

mywittyname wrote: post #67
banana_giraffe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.

It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.

Makes sense in the short term, but not the long term, as the entire article makes clear

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

#82

Post by jyounker »

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…

Preventing the loss of manufacturing capability is one of the reasons for offering military aid to friendly countries. We give them money to buy weapons, but they are obligated to buy certain weapons systems with that money.

For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active.

It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.

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

#83

Post by ed25519FUUU »

Daho0n wrote: post #52
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #18

> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots. You see the real issue? Even if they have the blueprints, it will be difficult to even manufacture the parts here. There's so many more problems like this coming down the pipelin…

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?

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

#84

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

Part of it may have been job protection.

Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.

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

#85

Post by jessaustin »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #16
Jtsummers wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.

Also, to quote Independence Day: > You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.

One fears we'd be shocked by how much is actually going to General Smith's brother-in-law's toilet-seat dropship company. We'd like to think that Pentagon auditors could find that sort of thing, except that Pentagon people tell us continuously that they are unauditable.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...

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

#86

Post by tpmx »

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?

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

#87

Post by azernik »

A related story:

One of the proposals for future upgrades to SLS (ugh) was liquid-fueled boosters using new-build F-1 engines (i.e. Saturn V main engines). Unfortunately, the specs were not complete; not only was lots of stuff different in the factory than in the drawings, but parts of the engine were literally hand-built. Think API documentation built on a tight deadline, and published while software is still under development.

Luckily, some NASA engineers were already taking one apart and modeling the parts for previous SLS work. The new Dynetics version ended up much simpler and cheaper because of new manufacturing methods, but the reverse engineering process required to get there was a serious project in its own right.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

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

#89

Post by mschaef »

The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state.

Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the manufacturing process, decommissioned the plant that made it, and the people that knew how to do it weren't around any more. They figured it out, but it doesn't necessarily look easy to do (nor does the material seem easy at all to make in the first place).

https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/

p20 here says more: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_...

Edit: I somehow missed this other thread in this story, despite a search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367

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

#90

Post by goatcode »

jandrese wrote: post #14
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…

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.

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