Posted on 02/29/2012 7:27:20 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Poseidon on the prowl
P-8A crew successfully hunts undersea targets
Soon to begin joining the fleet’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) force is the Navy’s newest multi-mission platform, the P-8A Poseidon, which recently flew four successful operational missions Feb. 20-24 against submarines that did their best to elude the aircraft during a single-plane detachment to NAS Jacksonville.
ASW is an enabling mission for the Navy to combat challenges posed by new generations of very quiet nuclear and non-nuclear submarines.
VX-1 Test Pilot Cmdr. John Verniest is the P-8A operational test director and NATOPS program manager at NAS Patuxent River, Md. “During our weeklong detachment at NAS Jax we conducted four ASW missions and flew more than 30 hours to see how well our P-8A aircraft and mission systems performed in an operational environment against real-world submarines,” Verniest said.
“What we learned from this det will be helpful in our upcoming operational test readiness review to assess the maturity of the aircraft and its systems in preparation for our initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) later this year.”
He explained that the submarine force was informed that the P-8A would be on station at certain times in an attempt to detect and track them. Naturally, Sailors of the “silent service” did not want to be detected.
For each mission, with flights ranging from six to almost nine hours and averaging four hours on station, the Poseidon combat aircrew located a real target (submarine) – somewhere off the east coast – and tracked it throughout the on-station period.
(Excerpt) Read more at jacksonville.com ...
Primarily because the P-3 was an entirely, and I mean completely new aircraft.
The wing carry-through structure (the bits that hold the wings to the fuselage) on the original/civilian version had a wee tiny little defect.
Certain combinations of power settings set up vibrations that caused the bird to lose wings.
IIRC, Braniff Airlines had two flights get turned into lawn darts that way, which killed a bunch of people, then put the airline out of business and left Lockheed with a very, very serious black eye. (Engineering schools still use Lockheed as a case study in proper application of computer simulations in lieu of actual flight testing and the number of cases those simulations should include; Lockheed simply didn't look at enough data points and missed the one that broke things and killed people.)
Good news: They learned from this FU, then rebuilt and sold what became the P-3, which is a very, very good bird.
P-8, LCS, DDG-1000, all dead on arrival. BAMS? Ain't gonna happen.
IIRC ....the Electra had vibration fatigue, and part of the problem was the engines were synchronized together (not a good thing.)
It was built before it was possible to do computer simulations. The big thing was that the Electra failures led to the development of studies about very high number of very low stress cycles - cyclic fatigue.
Some of the Electra’s had the disconcerting problem with a wing falling off ....but one plane flying in the Boston area lost both wings!!
It has better than winglets. Raked wingtips will always be a better choice over blended winglets. Raked wingtips have to be designed in from the basic wing design. Blended wingtips are if you are retrofitting an existing design. P8 wings are new, so the raked wingtips are designed in from begining. 737 wings are legacy design thus winglets are the answer. Raked wingtips perform better in general.
That’s very interesting, thank you. I haven’t seen a planform view of the wing, I’ll look it up, though.
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