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Posted on 02/26/2007 2:47:19 PM PST by SubGeniusX
Six Lockheed F-22 Raptors have Y2K-esque glitch of their own over the Pacific
Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighter in the world with its stealth capabilities, advanced radar, state of the art weapons systems and ultra-efficient turbofans which allow the F-22 to "supercruise" at supersonic speeds without an afterburner. The Raptor has gone up against the best that the US Air Force and Navy has to offer taking out F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18 Super Hornets during simulated war games in Alaska. The Raptor-led "Blue Air" team was able to rack up an impressive 241-to-2 kill ratio during the exercise against the "Red Air" threat -- the two kills on the blue team were from the 30-year old F-15 teammates and not the new Raptors.
But while the simulated war games were a somewhat easy feat for the Raptor, something more mundane was able to cripple six aircraft on a 12 to 15 hours flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Air Force's mighty Raptor was felled by the International Date Line (IDL).
When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to "reboot" the systems to no avail.
Luckily for the Raptors, there were no weather issues that day so visibility was not a problem. Also, the Raptors had their refueling tankers as guide dogs to "carry" them back to safety. "They needed help. Had they gotten separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they had no attitude reference. They had no communications or navigation," said Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. "They would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble.”
"The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad," Shepperd continued. "It turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes."
Luckily for the pilots behind the controls of the Raptors, they were not involved in a combat situation. Had they been, it could have been a disastrous folly by the U.S. Air Force to have to admit that their aircraft which cost $125+ million USD apiece were knocked out of the sky due to a few lines of computer code. "And luckily this time we found out about it before combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again, completed their deployment. But this could have been real serious in combat," said Shepperd.
Do these planes really have nothing"analog" on them for back-up at least?
This seems too stupid.
Uh... this sounds like an urban legend to me. The dateline appears on maps, not in the air.
I can't see how it would have any effect whatsoever.
Cylons infiltrated the US defense dept.
"There is a story about the F16 flipping to inverted flight after crossing the date line from years back."
I remember reading one notice on the bulletin board of an fighter doing an uncommanded loop shortly before final approach.
Whats more concerning is that this info was released. Shouldn't this be a secret?
LOL!
The blue screen of death strikes again.
Got to hate it when this happens. Some low level programmer may have sent a memo on this problem five years ago and got his ears pinned back for thanks.
By Your Command...
I have always carried a handheld GPS when I flew since they were made available.
It's awfully nice to have something that the aircraft and avionics designer don't know about!
Having said that, I hope they at least had a standby horizon!
It's amazing how people will believe anything they read, even if it is just on some blog.
Now that you mention it, isn't this what "Zulu Time" is for? Once in flight it seems that the only time that is relevant is GMT (Zulu). Am I right?
My Mac? My mac is the the fastest windows machine I've ever tried!
I could have told them
Google's net avionics
didn't come complete
with all the bells and
whistles as the Microsoft
real stand-alone apps!
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