Posted on 06/12/2007 12:44:19 PM PDT by SmithL
Mariners just took the lead 4-3!!!!!
Ultra Sonic 007, nice job!! One thing people need to remember is that even in the Pentagon, there are liberals whose judgement we shouldn’t trust. Duncan Hunter is right far more often than he is wrong and I tend to trust his judgement more than most people in government. All his years in congress has shown him to be very consistent, along with his beliefs and ideals. No makeover necessary.
Indeed. After all, he opposed the amnesty bill...in 1986. One of the few Republicans to do so. Why? Because it was amnesty! The problems it would cause were obvious to people who had the foresight to look ahead, beyond the enforcement provisions (which weren’t even enforced by Kennedy’s 65’ bill either...funny, eh?).
Hunter was one of those few.
Duncan Hunter: The Right Man at the Right Time.
1 - the notion that you can find some folks in the Pentagon that "don't want it" is like saying you can find some freepers that have their own opinion on politics.
2 - Duncan Hunter has butted heads with the Pentagon ever since he got there. The average Pentagon planner, pro-curement types have a life span in the job of about 2 to 4 years. Then take the fact that the Pentagon leadership is political appointees.
3- Hunter fought the "pentagon" to retain far more in SDI/Missile defense funding than was "wanted" during the Clinton Years. He made the Pentagon invest in more stealth, more ships, more C-17 airlifters thatn they "wanted". He put the brakes on Rumsfelds desire to make the Army even smaller than it is, and he FORCED the Pentagon at various times to purchase ammo they were sorely lacking but not requesting.
4 - 63 million for this type of R&D is peanuts.
5 - This particular program had advocates in the Pentagon and the Military.
Here is the Statement of Thomas D. Taylor, Chief Scientist and Program Manager of Naval Expeditionary Warfare Science and Technology, Office of Naval Research in the 2001 testimony to the Armed Services Committee:
DP–2 PROGRAM STATEMENT
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
I would like to thank the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics for providing me with the opportunity to testify here today.
The DP–2 project is to develop the technology for a vertical take off transport aircraft that can be used in both military and civilian roles. The current design of the DP–2 aircraft is a 52-passenger airplane with a planned range of approximately 5,000 miles and a top speed of approximately 545 knots. The possible uses of the aircraft include search and rescue as well as special operations for the military. In the commercial world the aircraft could provide high speed, long range passenger service to airports with short runways or small landing areas.
The project was initiated in the Office of Naval Research in Fiscal Year 1997 with the goal of demonstrating the vertical take off system proposed by the duPont Aerospace Corporation. The development plan was first to perform unmanned ground tests with a half scale composite model to understand the thrust vectoring characteristics of the DP–2 aircraft. These tests measure the vertical and horizontal thrust for different setting of the louvered, engine exhaust flow deflection system. In addition they establish the reliability of the composite construction technology for the thrust vectoring system. The results to date indicate that the thrust vectoring system appears to work as proposed for single engine tests. Next, however, testing must be completed for two engine tests. From the results one could estimate the systems settings for free flight of the aircraft. Tethered tests of the vehicle are planned to understand the stability of the aircraft in vertical flight. This will allow definition of the range of operation of the control system for vertical flight.
Should the vertical hover test prove successful, the next step is to address the full flight characteristics of the aircraft. This requires detailed wind tunnel tests of the vehicle to define the conventional flight operational envelope as well as the flight envelope in transition from hover to conventional flight. This is the most sensitive and critical part of the development. In addition the full operational control system to deal with hover, transition and conventional flight needs to be developed and tested.
As the plan and tests have progressed, it has become clear that the risks of manned flight of the half scale DP–2 are great and the cost of testing to mitigate the risks was going to be greater than the available budget. This led to using smaller free flight models to reduce risk, minimize cost and gain understanding of the system performance. This approach has the promise of augmenting major aircraft development to reduce costs. Failures need no longer be a disaster since a crash is not a big loss of equipment, time or life. The model controls have advanced to the point that fly-by-wire models (unstable) are now possible. Also small, low cost, turbo jet engines are now available. As a result, model experiments can be run to examine critical stability and control problems before risking major equipment. This approach, however, will not replace the need for final full scale testing.
At this time the DP–2 development has not demonstrated any show stoppers. The program has a tethered hover test of the half scale vehicle with two full scale commercial jet engines operating at full power, in the next two months, that is critical to the success. This will be an unmanned test for safety reasons. This is a major milestone, which will define the future of the development.
This program should be viewed as a proof of principle and not an airplane development program. The budget for the program has been $4 million to $5 million per year except for the first year when it was about $11 million. This budget allows for modest R&D, but does not allow for full-scale aircraft development.
There has been some discussion that this aircraft could be a replacement for existing operational aircraft. This cannot be shown at this time because we are not far enough along in the testing. Assuming success, the time frame for a finished aircraft is five to fifteen years depending on the funding and development approach used. Because of the uncertainty of this technology, the Navy has not yet indicated a requirement for this airplane.
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy73333.000/hsy73333_0.HTM
Good job to both of you for defending his record against these liberal attacks.
If it has enough fuel for an unrefueled range of 5000 miles, the ground weight is going to be too much to take off vertically. You are talking about a plane with almost as much fuel as a 767 carrying about half as many folks as a 717, and flying only slightly faster than an Osprey.
I still say it smells like pork.
Someone wanted them...otherwise why TEST the plane:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/dp-2.htm
Here is an excerpt from Duncan Hunter’s testimony....
In terms of earmarks, let me say this. Members of Congress and particularly Members of the Armed Services Committee take their constitutional responsibility to, “raise and support armies…to provide and maintain a navy, and to make rules for …the land and naval forces,” very seriously. Every year the Armed Services Committee receives letters from nearly every Member of this body, which represent our Members’ efforts to share their ideas for the best ways to fulfill this responsibility. The Committee evaluates these requests and our Members are given three opportunities to amend and to vote on the requests included in our bill – at the subcommittee level, full committee level, and on the House floor. As Chairman, and now Ranking Member, of the Armed Services Committee I cede my constitutional responsibility to nobody, least of all the Pentagon. While some may cast aspersions on earmarks, I guess you could call it earmarking when I added more money to the President’s budget request for uparmored Humvees. I also added money to the budget for portable jammers that our soldiers and Marines could wear during dismounted operations. For that matter, we’ve added funds for body armor and have been relentless in our pursuit of alternative technologies and the development of testing standards. We have saved American lives with these earmarks, and I am proud of them.”
Osprey has been in development for more than 20 years, costing more than 30 Billion (in 1988)...don’t know about costs since. I do remember in the 1990s all the shrieks from the left to scrap the project. They said it wouldn’t work. Where are those whiners now? The Osprey didn’t begin production in 2005....and will be flying over Iraq/Afghanistan soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-22_Osprey
The Osprey didn’t begin production until 2005....and will be flying over Iraq/Afghanistan soon.
Read the link I posted....10 are on the way to Iraq.
The Osprey is scheduled to enter operational service with the Marine Corps in 2007. On 13 April 2007 the United States Marine Corps announced that it would be sending 10 V-22 aircraft to Iraq (the Osprey’s first combat deployment). Marine Corps commandant, Gen. James Conway, indicated that over 150 Marines will accompany the Osprey set for September deployment to Al-Asad Airfield.
aircraft elevator? nevermind.....
Primarily because the Cheney/Rumsfeld team killed it the first time around.
We shall need to brace for the inevitable accident report...
"I don’t recognize the screen names of most of the posters throwing mud at Hunter. $63M is close to the cost of one F22 coming off a PRODUCTION line. As an aerospace engineer, I spent a lot more than $63M on PAPER STUDIES of spacecraft that never cut a single piece of metal. Maybe Duncan Hunter actually saw some promise in the aircraft? I am inclined to reserve judgement rather than pile on with his dim attackers."
If memory serves, the current procurement cost is on the order of $120 million per airplane. If you factor in R&D costs and try amortizing them over the life of the production line, it comes out to close to $400 million.
In comparison, when I was in high school, an F-4E Phantom II cost $4.5 million and Grumman was threatening to shut down the F-14 Tomcat production line because Congress was complaining about spending 13.2 million dollars per copy.
And this puts us in an interesting situation. $120 million is what you pay for a frigate or a destroyer. (And an Arleigh Burke class ship isn't really a destroyer, but rather is a thin walled guided missile cruiser.) And airplanes are, by their very nature, assets that you hazard in battle and expect to lose from time to time.
Considering that, it's pretty obvious that we're getting into a situation where we have weapons that we can't procure in any kind of quantity because they're too expensive to build and to irreplacable to hazard.
That bothers me, because like a lot of us, I see a war with China on the horizon. Back in 1947, a basic change was made to how we figure wars would be fought. The assumption was made that nuclear weapons would make the idea of an industrial base that can produce weapons in wartime, obsolete and irrelevant.
So adopting the Air Force's primary assumption, it came to pass that all of our estimates were based on the concept of a 90 day short war.
We assumed that we'd presite stocks of weapons, munitions and petroleum, oil and lubricants and when a war started, we'd do a REFORGER type deployment, draw our gear from climatically controlled warehouses and then sally forth, to do battle with the evil empire. And during this time, our aircraft and other defense industries began a long and destructive binge of merging and then closing plants and RIFing, (Reduction In Force) entire design teams.
In the 70's, 80's and 90's, it wasn't a really good time to be an aeronautical engineer. First off, odds were that you'd get to work on maybe one project, and because of excessively long design cycles, (the F-22 has taken what, to reach IOC, 25 years? (IOC = Initial Operational Capability.)
What that means is that if we start a project and it's not working, we're stuck, because we have nothing else in the pipeline. Contrast that with the good old days when you had multiple design teams with guys who had designed not one, but often dozens of airplanes!
This provided us with a technological defense in depth so that when Donovan Berlin, hit his slump, Lee Atwood and Ed Heinemann and Kelly Johnson among others were there with competing designs that allowed us to retain our technological excellence and the military examples that these provide.
Now we don't have that. And while we're a technological country, we're not an industrial one anymore. We've offshored or run out of business just about every critical convertible industry that might have contributed to an ability to do a prewar buildup and handle war production as well.
Compare that with the Peoples Republic of China that is a rising technological power not to mention being the preeminent industrial power on the planet. That industrial base gives them the ability to not only hazard aircraft and other weapons, but to expend them, and in the end, we dare not do that.
So, we're stuck. We can buy any fighter that we want to, as long as it says Lockheed Martin, or Boeing on it. And every engineer there probably has gotten to work on a fraction of a single development program instead of being able to demonstrate some talent and rise to head their own teams that could bring forth the kind of miracle that our guys could during the Second World War, and even the first.
And because we're stuck, we get to pay $60 some odd million for airplanes that have been badly designed and which don't work, simply because we no longer have the industrial base and the time to simply cancel a project and put out a Request For Proposal or to test competing designs that have been produced on speculation by private firms seeking to keep their design teams together and who don't mind selling a few planes here and a few planes there.
And changing that is going to take what amounts to a revolution because the guys doing the procurement from the Air Force and the other services, don't want competing designs being sold freely because if somebody produces a better plane than the one that the Air Force buys, then those orders go to the better plane which means that they don't get to amortize development and tooling costs over a longer production run.
The Air Force gets a paper saving, (it gets eaten elsewhere) and our industrial base gets narrower and narrower while the Aeronautical Engineers who design those weapons become progressively more incestuous in their thinking.
And this needs to be changed, before the Chinese clean our clock. (They don't need a lot of better planes than we have, just more of them and the willingness to handle them aggressively and accept losses. And they seem willing to do that.)
In the meantime, until somebody over in Congress and the Pentagon starts to show a little backbone and worry a little more about our national security and a lot less about post retirement jobs, we're going to see more boondoggles like that nonfunctioning VSTOL transport that we've wasted Sixty Megabucks on.
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