The USAF knew all about the F-22 Oxygen issue,

Article: news.yahoo.com...


This is very sad to me, it seems that cost cutting led directly to the problem being ignored. With a pilot dead, what was his life worth? The whole article makes me sick...

reply to post by steppenwolf86

It happens a lot (and in other militaries as well) that wrong decisions made way up the line, kill our own guys.

This is very sad to me, it seems that cost cutting led directly to the problem being ignored.

It makes me believe that the miltary has been cut enough, at least for the next few years. Let's reorganize, determine our priorities, and go from there. My own thought is that the Defense Department is still reeling from cuts, and they don't know where up is anymore. Let's not mess with their budget for a bit.

But, here on ATS? Good luck finding people that don't insist on cutting the military to four jeeps and a platoon of Boy Scouts on steroids.

The Air Force took a calculated risk after the problem was found. In cold hard logic, the risk worked in their favor, because the total number of incidents, compared to the number of sorties flown is actually very low.

The problem becomes the budget cuts, and the cut down fleets of aircraft. The more we cut, the more dangerous it will become to be a pilot or flight crew. Our aircraft are already extremely old for military aircraft, and getting older. Sooner or later, we're going to reach a tipping point, and we're going to see more aircraft failures, some catastrophic.

reply to post by Zaphod58


A cold calculated risk sure, but why manipulate the accident report from the crash in Alaska to conclude pilot error? Of course it was pilot error, he made quite a few mistakes while suffocating to death!

reply to post by steppenwolf86


They didn't manipulate it. If you read the full report, Capt Haney failed to maintain control of his aircraft while attempting to activate the secondary oxygen system. He allowed the aircraft to enter a dive that he was unable to recover from.

The ultimate cause of the crash WAS pilot error, exacerbated by the location of the activating system for the backup oxygen generator. All he had to do was get below 10,000 feet and he could have put the aircraft in level flight, activated the autopilot, and then activated the secondary O2 system.

I agree that the report shouldn't have solely blamed pilot error, but regardless of circumstances, the pilot was at least partially to blame. Other pilots had problems with their oxygen system and successfully activated the backup O2 system without problem.

No F-22 has ever been in danger of "suffocating to death". The symptoms include hypoxia like symptoms, which isn't suffocating, and a cough brought on by portions of their lungs collapsing, which has been known to happen at the high altitudes that the F-22 flies at. The same thing happens to U-2 pilots every flight.

reply to post by Zaphod58


You have got me there, I just associate Pilot Error with Air France 447. When I was 11 years old I saw a small plane flying low over the highway as if he wanted to land, while driving with my father near Oshkosh the weekend of the fly in. The Pilot had his gear down and did not notice power lines running across the road until it was too late. He pulled up and throttled up, but clipped the lines with his gear, stalled and nose dived into the grassy median. It later came out that he had suffered a heart attack and was just trying to set the plane down and get help. I suppose THAT is pilot error as well? If you get shot up in the cockpit and your thinking gets hazy due to loss of blood, is that pilot error?

Anyways maybe the pilot of said f-22 could have performed better, but I still believe that labeling the cause of the crash in such a way is done to deflect blame.

reply to post by steppenwolf86


No, those weren't examples of pilot error. Pilot error is when you are flying a healthy airplane, with a healthy pilot, and he makes a mistake that causes something to happen to the aircraft. When a perfectly healthy pilot flies a perfectly good airplane into the ground on a bombing run, THAT is pilot error.

Pilot error can be exacerbated by other causes, as in this case, the OBOGS problem, or in the AF447, with the frozen pitot tubes, but ultimately the pilot made a mistake that led directly to the loss of the airframe. Captain Haney in this case had other options that he could have used, and failed to use any of them. Therefore, ultimately it WAS pilot error, exacerbated by other conditions, such as the placement of the emergency oxygen generator handle, and the OBOGS problem.

There have been more than 10 incidents of OBOGS issues (I don't have time right now to find out exactly how many), but only one crash where it was even a factor to be considered. That tells me that he made mistakes in handling the emergency.

reply to post by steppenwolf86

So with cost cutting the planes cost $190.0 million?
And if they had spent the extra money the cost would have been 190.1 million?

0.1 million on a 190 million dollar aircraft doesn't seem like much when you consider the critical safety nature of breathing and that losing even one plane would be enough to cover 1900 of these 0.1 million dollar upgrades, and there aren't even that many planes.

There are 187 planes, so at 0.1 million each the total cost would have been 18.7 million.

So risk losing a $190 million plane (or possibly more than one) to save $18.7 million? The economics of this cost cutting make no sense. It wasn't a cost savings at all.

Even the geniuses at BP learned that cost cutting can end up costing you a lot more than the cost cuts, when they tried to save a few thousand dollars and it will end up costing them about $20 billion.

There's obviously some flawed decision making in the cost-cutting arena.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


If you read about the latest issues in the F-35 program, the new Air Force liaison/commander, has ripped Lockheed Martin's relationship with the Air Force. He said that it's the worst that he has ever seen between the military and a contractor in all the years he's been doing this job.

reply to post by Zaphod58


Sadly, that is what you get when you award a company contracts and create a monopoly. Even the Soviets/Russians were smart enough to have Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich pseudo competing against each other.

Originally posted by steppenwolf86
reply to post by Zaphod58

 

Sadly, that is what you get when you award a company contracts and create a monopoly. Even the Soviets/Russians were smart enough to have Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich pseudo competing against each other.

Would you like to elaborate on this?

As far as I can tell, Lockheed has cornered (I use that term loosely considering the amount of cooperation that goes on between contractors) the fighter market based on merit. They built the best aircraft that met the needs of the USAF. As far as other roles go, contractors like Boeing and Northrop are just as commonplace.