While many of Australia’s defence commentators are in the US witnessing the roll out of the country’s first F/A-18F Block 2 Super Hornet, which is the metaphorical equivalent of unveiling a Polish cavalry rider and horse on the eve of WW II, the Boeing 787 is emulating the JSF program as being a screw up.
A flawed design. A graphic overview of the JSF by Dr Carlo Kopp
Peter Goon, co-founder of Air Power Australia describes the similarities.
The fact that design of the most critical of primary aircraft structure, namely, the B-787 wing root, and the determination of the amount of electrical power required to drive the JSF aircrafts’ systems can be gotten so wrong beggar belief.
What makes these major program SNAFUs of even greater concern (as if that were possible) is neither are isolated instances in their programs and common sense, let alone independent expert analyses, show there are more to come – a lot more.
Experience also shows there is going to be a lot more sophistry and spin (S&S) because S&S lead to SNAFUs which, in turn, beget more S&S to create the alternate realities to explain away the SNAFUs leading to what are likely to go down in history as two of the most significant aerospace FUBARs, ever.
If you think there is not much in common in these two programs, intended for totally different purposes, then think again, as the following less than exhaustive list demonstrates.
- Heavy reliance on simulation and modelling (S&M) in the development of the design with all the inherent risks this entails. S&M are really only very expensive, high powered video games until they have been independently verified and validated (IV&V), using real world data. This includes all the assumptions and boundary conditions, as the 787 Dreamliner Program is now finding out in the CATIA modelling of the wing root join.
- Much of the design work has been outsourced to component supplier sub-contractors and design ‘body shops’ around the world; the latter being manned by bright eyed, ‘Young Turk’ Design Engineers, firstly, because they know how to drive computers and software to build the virtual world model from which the aircraft will be built and, secondly, because they provide a ‘lower cost base’ (a.k.a. cheap).
- The few ‘design mentors’ that were resident in either organisation (that is, the Design Grey Beards with the necessary knowledge, experience and expertise) have either left in disgust or been asked to leave or are spread so thin that mentoring and the oversight required to produce quality designs play second fiddle understudy to the daily grind of keeping up appearances (i.e. attending management meetings, meeting ‘marketing’ deadlines, trying to explain Engineering to people whose expertise lies elsewhere, and administering to the young ‘Design Turks’ needs).
- Such mentors are now ‘always on tap, never on top’ when it comes to decision making on the expectations and direction of the design, now the province of marketeers and senior generalist management types (. . . till things go wrong, of course).
- Heavy reliance upon composite materials to perform tertiary, secondary, and, now, primary structural roles. One of the major problems with composites is they are difficult (and expensive) to inspect for damage, especially low impact damage.
- Inordinately high levels of concurrency in the research, design, development, testing/certification, manufacturing and production activities with the extremely high levels of risk this entails. Concurrency requires all the checks and balances as well as rigorous oversight governance to work properly. They clearly didn’t work in relation to the wing box-wing join issue on the 787, throwing doubt on its total design integrity.
- Heavy reliance upon modelling and simulation to qualify and certificate the aircraft and its components, to the point where the JSF Program is planning to sell more than 500 aircraft (many to its international partners) before completion of the initial ground and flight test programs. The intention to only qualify some 17% of the F-35 JSF aircrafts’ performance characteristics by actual flight testing should be sounding alarm bells in the heads of those who are members of the JSF coalition of the willing. Boeing recently claimed 80% of its certification work on the 787 had already been achieved through simulations.
- Both program products are significantly weight challenged and both are now years behind on schedules that have been re-scheduled a number of times.
And the list goes on to which readers are invited to contribute or, if you like and in the interests of critical and open debate on the merits, challenge the ones presented above.
In the interests of balance and objective thinking, we should also ask what these two programs do not have in common?
In the technical details, there is of course much that is different between these programs.
However, at the programmatic level, one obvious answer is that one program is privately funded and, thus, is subject to the checks and balances of competitive market pressures, commercial considerations, oversight of a Board of Directors who could be personally sanctioned, including face jailtime, if they get it wrong, and, at the end of the day, common sense.
Meantime, the other is not subject to any such checks and balances, being funded with tax payers money from around the world by politicians and military leaders who were captured quite early during the program’s Conception and First Trimester. This situation has been aptly and correctly described in ‘game theory’ terms, by at least one senior Defence official in Australia, as The Prisoners’ Dilemma – in which the best winning move, is to extricate oneself from the game.
The willingness of politicians and military leaders around the world to do this – to pull out or abort – has been and still is highly problematic since to do so would require admitting mistakes have been made. When do politicians let alone generals and senior public servants ever admit to making mistakes?
Such failings in governance which, undoubtedly, are well understood by the directors and senior executives of international conglomerates, have now put the holy grail of corporate greed within easy reach; namely, that of a monopoly and the status of being “too big to fail”.
The danger of such military monopolies is that should the JSF fail in air combat, the consequent loss of Western military superiority will have grave strategic ramifications.
The real question, though, for Mr & Mrs Joe Public who are going to be funding this 30+ year monopoly with all its incumbent risks, design flaws and capability shortcomings, is where will that leave the defence of their nation’s sovereignty, and, of equal importance, what legacy are they passing on to their children?
16 Comments
Russian design engineers at Sukhoi must be smiling tears of joy into their Vodka at some of the performance limitations in the F-35 JSF, after universal computer modelling by the so called young turks is failing to deliver projected outcomes. Russian aeronautical engineers have a reputation for putting more faith in their slide rules than electronic calculations and it shows. The comprehensive review by Dr Carlo Kopp in 2007, indicates that only the USA F-22 Raptor will be capable of matching the Sukhoi Flanker aircraft, which are being delivered to both Malaysia and Indonesia and unfortunately that now appears to leave Australia with a drawing board F-35 JSF lame duck to defend it’s shores
Catchy headlines, but nearly all the bullet point arguments are just plain b.s. !!!
>Modelling and Simulation are just video-games unless validated by real-world data?
Yeah, and next time you catch a plane, be very worried because the pilot probably did most of his training on one of those “video games”.
As for “real-world data”, I’d like someone to tell me how to measure something that’s flying at Mach 2.
>Design Engineers are just ‘Young Turks’ ?
It’s just a (dumb) opinion, not an argument.
>Quality designs play second fiddle understudy to the daily grind of keeping up appearances?
Yeah, better to have someone dream-up a design in a dark room for a multi-billion dollar project without any interference from pesky administrative processes.
>Extremely high levels of risk because of inordinately high levels of concurrency in the research, design, development, testing/certification, manufacturing and production activities?
It’s just impossible to assemble an aircraft from litterally millions of parts without high levels of concurrency in both the design & manufacturing phases. Failure of a single sub-assembly on a project of that scale does not mean failure of the whole project methodology.
I personally don’t support the JSF, and I welcome debate about the project short-comings but this article is more a silly rant than anything else.
Oh Contrarian…
M&S are just video games until something exists – the simulators used for training are constantly refined against real actual flying stuff (you know – planes…).
Even the best model is just that until you actually build it.
As for measuring something at Mach 2 – radar, laser, hey there are these things called wind tunnels!
But then you’d have to have built a physical model…
The ‘Young Turks’ argument goes to the heart of focussing on tools not results, thereby sidelining people who’ve learnt (often the hard and expensive way) to be suitably cautious in favour of people who know the latest tools but have no experience in failure – never trust someone who has never made a mistake, that just means that it hasn’t happened YET.
One of the key points of the heavy composite materials use in both projects is that they should use far LESS parts – but there’s no point in replacing an assembly of 5000 parts that works with two composite assemblies that DON’T.
All of which misses what I think is the fundamental point of the article – these programmes have been stage managed to be too far along to cancel before the general realisation struck that in a huge number of design areas they were a step too far.
I think the JSF will eventually be delivered working as designed, I just don’t think it will be much of an improvement over Super Hornet (or the Stealth Eagle if it goes into production) but lacking other choices I think it will be the F-16 of 2015-2030.
The Dreamliner is a whole other kettle of fish – while it needs serious editing before publication, I can’t recommend enough working through the Hans van der Zanden “Impossible Dream” draft that featured in the Plane Talking blog a little while ago.
Everybody – stand-down
We’re all wrong, lets work forward from this point
Hey not-Keith,
Don’t worry, I’m not starting a crusade.
However, as an engineer with experience on the subject (i.e. worked with CATIA on a wing design for BA), I can tell you that P. Goon technical “points” are so out of touch with reality that it’s actually funny!
I agree with you though that the best way is forward, but preferably not led by the blind!
You can tell us you are an engineer but you can’t express what the problem is. That is interesting.
As for the F-35, it is a Ponzi scheme of great spin and sophistry. There is only two percent of the flight testing done and that is way behind. Yet the program is going forward wanting to build hundreds of “mistake jets” — because they don’t know what they don’t know because they don’t have enough flight test discovery.
Worse is that the “experts” in Defence don’t seem to know what it costs, when it will arrive or well… much else. With no track record of large purchase order success ( C-17 and Super Hornet involve sending the maker your paint scheme )…
Defence leadership doesn’t have the skills to see this one through. They will take us all over the cliff with them based on hopes and dreams.
Well, I am not involved in the JSF program, nor do I have any insider information. So my point is not about the merits of the JSF (geez, you guys get really touchy sometimes).
So let me be clear, I actually don’t particularly like the JSF.
Now, having said that, I can recognise a bad generalisation when I see one (a la 4Corners Flying Blind), and that’s the only barrel that I am pushing.
The End.
Au contraire, mon frère Engineer – if, of course, your profession is as you claim.
Bit hard to say at the moment, given the absence in understanding you display of such things as S&M and the importance of ‘real world data’.
BTW, what do you think is so hard about gathering flight test data at Mach 2? Can’t think of many, if any, Engineers who would make such a claim, certainly not in the Aerospace fraternity.
But you say you worked with CATIA (i.e. 3 D solid modelling design software) on a wing design for BA (presumably BAe Systems -the company), so could it be you are one of the “Young Turk” Design Engineers to which I refer in the short monograph above?
Nothing wrong with being a “Young Turk”. Far from being derogatory, the term is used with admiration – we all go through this phase of our careers (e.g. “Young Turk” Lawyers, Accountants, Indian Chiefs, etc.)
What’s important is the enthusiasm, keenness, energy and bright minds of the Young Turks be encouraged, guided, oversighted and, importantly, fulfilled in their work and efforts by those who have gone before; those who hold the knowledge and the wisdom, including having made the mistakes and learned from the experience; and, who can guide their efforts and hard work to produce an exemplary, simple design that is both operationally and economically effective. This is called mentoring which, in this day and age of ‘de-skilling’, is obvious by its paucity, if not absence.
The reasons for this are many; some of which are touched on in the monograph above.
However, the effects are obvious as evidenced by the somewhat shallow, emotive based and factually unsupportable opinions provided in your posts.
Thanks for confirming, by such a practical demonstration, the thesis on the absence of mentoring (Third Dot Point, above).
As for your reference to the 4Corners program ‘Flying Blind’, on a mild day in Darwin (28 degrees Centigrade), with a standard air-to-air combat load plus a centreline fuel tank (needed to get any useable range), the Super Hornet will struggle to go supersonic let alone get to any altitude that would make it useable, say circa 2012, against, let alone competitive with, any of the RTAs (reference threat aircraft); namely, the Su-30MK series, MiG-35, later generation Chinese J-11, let alone the Su-35-1 and the PAK-FA.
Also, the survivability of the Super Hornet against any of the modern day SAM (surface to air missile) systems is highly problematic. Sure, it has some ‘wonderful, wonderful’ sensor systems and a lovely set of cockpit displays, but as a number of USAF Generals (and other experts) are on record as saying, ” . . .all that techno-glitter is going to do is tell the Super Hornet pilot how and when he is going to die!”.
Some things to remember from my days at PAX USNTPS, “ . . sensors systems do not an aircraft, make!” and “Beware of the techno-glitter; and those who market same as being the Aircraft”.
BTW – you can confirm much of this for yourself by taking a look at the Super Hornet Flight Manual, known as the Naval Aviation Training and Operating Procedures Standardization (NATOPS) Manual, A1-F18AC-NFM series.
Looking forward to a strong debate on the merits of these matters. As an Engineer, I commend you to look at the data and the facts, then test the evidence. This is a lot safer than relying upon hearsay and the emotive based opinions of non experts such as Aircrew and other non-engineering types who make sweeping assertions and pronouncements about matters in the domains of Engineering and Science. Also, beware of those people who ‘don’t know what they don’t know about things they struggle to understand’. They are often the.
very same people who are artisans in ‘displaying a total indifference to reality’.
Oops . . just goes to show one shouldn’t just rely on memory – this should read:
“BTW – you can confirm much of this for yourself by taking a look at the Super Hornet Flight Manual, known as the Naval Aviation Training and Operating Procedures Standardization (NATOPS) Manual, A1-F18EA-NFM series, particularly the -200 Performance Volume of the Manual.”
The NATOPS A1-F18AC-NFM series is for the F/A-18 A/B/C/D models which, BTW, have a higher top end speed than the Super Hornets.
Contrarian . .
What’s your real handle a.k.a. your real name?
Surely, no Engineer worth his/her salt and who is true to the profession needs to hide behind a nom-de-plume or other such artifice?
Ah……the Goon show……Dad used to love watching it. Didn’t realise it has a real-life component!
Why we don’t just buy Sukhoi’s I’ll never know………..:P
Now where did I put that damn broken Mobile Phone……
Yep. Second cousin removed to Spike on me Mum’s side . . . Woy Woy and all.
Quote: “As for your reference to the 4Corners program ‘Flying Blind’, on a mild day in Darwin (28 degrees Centigrade), with a standard air-to-air combat load plus a centreline fuel tank (needed to get any useable range), the Super Hornet will struggle to go supersonic let alone get to any altitude that would make it useable, say circa 2012, against, let alone competitive with, any of the RTAs (reference threat aircraft); namely, the Su-30MK series, MiG-35, later generation Chinese J-11, let alone the Su-35-1 and the PAK-FA”.
Be that as it may, Mr Goon, I do not however wish to “test” this so-called evidence.
What I find interesting is how an F-111 would go in this scenario? Supersonic perhaps, but fast enough to outrun all those terribly nasty R-77’s that would be howling in-bound?
No way in hell. Also, what is One Squadron’s role within RAAF’s Orbat again?
Videmus Agamus????
This has been an intriguing exchange of views by all, however from where I sit those wishing to enter a technical debate of this magnitude hoping to establish serious credibility and remain anonymous, are on a hiding to nothing.
Quite correct, David. Credibility and cowering behind anonymity are mutually exclusive terms.
The last poster (not real name) pops up every so often
Such posts typify those who, when provided with data and facts or politely asked to substantiate their opinions with same, display a total indifference to what is real.
Quote:
“Quite correct, David. Credibility and cowering behind anonymity are mutually exclusive terms.”
That’s a rather curious viewpoint from someone who calls himself, Horde, or is it Occam, or others on a frequent basis isn’t it?