P-175 Polecat Crash!!

Well either way if it was sabatoge there is talk of Lockheed making a replacement for the Polecat. The fact that there is mention of this maybe a clue or a look into the black as this project could disappear agian. I'm not sure of the chances though as most other companys are making headline planes out of their UAV's and maybe thats what is making Lockheed do the same.

Nothing has been firmly decided, but it is certainly being discussed," says the company's Skunk Works advanced development organisation. The Polecat was a Lockheed-funded research programme that began in March 2003, with the flying-wing UAV flying secretly towards the end of 2005.

link: www.flightglobal.com...

From Ananomus posts
If the article is correct about the crash and the reason, it is very sad. In March 1999, an inadvertent flight termination signal from the Nellis range complex brought down a perfectly functioning Global Hawk AV-2. It appears that the lessons from that terrible event have been forgotten in the last eight years.

For those who aren't aware, just about any unmanned vehicle (rocket, missile, aircraft, etc) flying on a test range has to have some range-approved way to bring it down in a controlled crash if the range determines that the vehicle is behaving in such a was as to be dangerous to lives or property. These mechanisms are called flight termination systems, or FTS. For an aircraft such as the Polecat (or a Global Hawk), the FTS typically responds to the range-generated flight termination signal by shutting off the engine and setting the flight control surfaces to positions that ensure departure from controlled flight, causing a near-ballistic (predictable) trajectory.

After the Global Hawk inadvertent terminate accident, the flight test range allowed the range-specific flight terminate equipment to be removed from the remaining Global Hawk aircraft, removing the inadvertent termination risk; this was acceptable because of redundant command and control links to the aircraft made the removal of the range FTS palatable.

It is a real shame that an apparently properly functioning aircraft has once again been destroyed by test range equipment and/or human malfunction.

I just found this intresting tidbit in the Anomymous Posts file! I though I would drag it out and share it with the main list to give readers a little bit of insight into the Flight Termination Safety system that is built into UAV's. it may also give us another perspective on what went wrong with Polecat.

Tim

After the Global Hawk inadvertent terminate accident, the flight test range allowed the range-specific flight terminate equipment to be removed from the remaining Global Hawk aircraft, removing the inadvertent termination risk; this was acceptable because of redundant command and control links to the aircraft made the removal of the range FTS palatable.

It is a real shame that an apparently properly functioning aircraft has once again been destroyed by test range equipment and/or human malfunction.

Thanks for the post Ghost. Only found a small flaw in the posters logic.

The problem is that the Polecat wasn't at the same stage that the Global Hawk was at. The Global hawk that was lost was much firther tested then the Polecat which had only made 3-5 flights. The intial point remains they should of learnt from the lessons of others many others.

1) I wasn't able to find any substantiating evidence that the P-175 was operated out of Yucca Lake for any flights. So, I did a quick OSINT investigation of my own. I was able to verify it did operate at least what appears to be twice at Yucca.

P-175 Video

Yucca Lake Overhead Imagery

Watch the video and pause it at 2:01 and then at 2:02 and load the overhead imagery of Yucca Lake airstrip. The overhead imagery shows a NNE pointing shadow of a water tank just north of an adjacent building. This looks to be the same water tank in the background at 2:01 in the video.

In addition, you'll see in the video at 2:02 the rectangular patch of foliage in the background, west of the runway. You can see the patch in the overhead imagery about 1,100 feet east of he water tank.

Additionally, there is foliage on the runway threshold in the overhead imagery, consistent with the footage in the video. The air vehicle is apparently landing heading SSE on Yucca airstrip on lakebed.

The video shows the airframe departing heading NNW (play the video again) and it landing heading SSE. During takeoff, the camera appears to be looking east (guy had hands in pocket (he was cold) and sun glare on morning takeoff) and on landing looking west from chase plane. It seems unlikely the winds would change so quickly during a one or two hour sortie.

In addition, from experience, the flight ops crew would unlikely be comfortable taking off one way and recovering another if just for range safety issues. Or perhaps it's the RC pilot waiting to flip the switch to take over manually wanting to keep the plane flying from his left to right. All of this would tell me this footage is from at least a couple of flights.

2) I understand the P-175 did experience an event. However, isn't exactly as was reported in Av Week. The airframe may not have been a total loss.

From other experiences, I was running a flight op where the software engineers were linking in to the packet data stream of the avionics onboard and inadvertently signaled to the onboard CPU to reset itself. This sent the throttle actuator to zero percent on takeoff and the airframe lawn darted.

3) From some simple research a while back, I understand another lake bed may have been used in flights prior to the Yucca Lake ops.

All is speculation and was derived from open sources.