[MilCom] The Self Locking F-22

[Greg Brazil]

Slightly off topic, but have any of you heard about this?
Greg (SF Bay Area)

> 
>  From Military.com 05/19  (the cost per plane is over $361 million):
> The Self-Locking F-22
> Robert Bryce | May 17, 2006
> Last week, Lockheed Martin announced that its profits were up a hefty 60 
> percent in the first quarter. The company earned $591 million in profit 
> on revenues of $9.2 billion. Now, if the company could just figure out 
> how to put a door handle on its new $361 million F-22 fighter, its 
> prospects would really soar.
> 
> On April 10, at Langley Air Force 
> <http://www.military.com/Community/Home/1,14700,AIRFRC,00.html> Base, an 
> F-22 pilot, Capt. Brad Spears, was locked inside the cockpit of his 
> aircraft for five hours. No one in the U.S. Air Force or from Lockheed 
> Martin could figure out how to open the aircraft's canopy. At about 1:15 
> pm, chainsaw-wielding firefighters from the 1st Fighter Wing finally 
> extracted Spears after they cut through the F-22's three-quarter 
> inch-thick polycarbonate canopy.
> 
> Total damage to the airplane, according to sources inside the Pentagon: 
> $1.28 million. Not only did the firefighters ruin the canopy, which cost 
> $286,000, they also scuffed the coating on the airplane's skin which 
> will cost about $1 million to replace.
> 
> The Pentagon currently plans to buy 181 copies of the F-22 from Lockheed 
> Martin, the world's biggest weapons vendor. The total price tag: $65.4 
> billion.
> 
> The incident at Langley has many Pentagon watchers shaking their heads. 
> Tom Christie, the former director of testing and evaluation for the DOD, 
> calls the F-22 incident at Langley "incredible." "God knows what'll 
> happen next," said Christie, who points out that the F-22 has about two 
> million lines of code in its software system. "This thing is so software 
> intensive. You can't check out every line of code."
> 
> Now, just for the sake of comparison, Windows XP, one of the most common 
> computer operating systems, contains about 45 million lines of code. But 
> if any of that code fails, then the computer that's running it simply 
> stops working. It won't cause that computer to fall out of the sky. If 
> any of the F-22's two million lines of computer code go bad, then the 
> pilot can die, or, perhaps, just get trapped in the cockpit.
> 
> One analyst inside the Pentagon who has followed the F-22 for years said 
> that "Everyone's incredulous. They're asking can this really have 
> happened?" As for Lockheed Martin, the source said, "Whatever the 
> problem was, the people who built it should know how to open the canopy."
> 
> Given that the U.S. military is Lockheed Martin's biggest client, 
> perhaps the company could provide the Air Force with a supply of slim 
> jims or coat hangars, just in case another F-22 pilot gets stuck at the 
> controls.
> 
> As if the latest canopy shenanigans weren't bad enough, on May 1, 
> Defense News reported that there are serious structural problems with 
> the F-22. Seems the titanium hull of the aircraft isn't meshing as well 
> as it should. Naturally, taxpayers have to foot the bill for the mistake 
> (improper heat-treating of the titanium) which is found on 90 aircraft. 
> The cost of repairing those wrinkles? Another $1 billion or so.
> 
> Lockheed Martin's F-22 spokesman, Joe Quimby, did not return telephone 
> calls.
> 
>