IL,
31 years in Transportation and Logistics Management for the Air Force and DOD you see a lot of good and and you see a lot of bad stuff.
Here is one that can really freak you out.
Rockwell B1-B Bomber. 100 produced and furnished to the SAC in the early 90s. The idiot’s who developed them never thought about an ability to de-ice the aircraft before low level missions. It cost several aircraft and crews being killed before somone wised up and decided they needed to be de-iced. Second, B1-B bomber was supposed to have a computer that would tell supply to order parts that would fail within 24 to 48 hours so it was on the shelf when needed. Millions spent and it never was realized.
31 years in Transportation and Logistics Management for the Air Force and DOD you see a lot of good and and you see a lot of bad stuff.
Would you happen to know if the development problems with the V-22 Osprey were ever straightened out? I’ve heard the V-22 cited as an example of the principle that “flight manuals are printed in blood.”
What about the SDI of Ronald Reagan? Amazing how ambitious that idea was. Roughly 30 years later and about a million times as much computing power for the same buck/square inch and still a challenge to take a missile out never mind a swarm of them. I’m sure some interesting tech came from it….it better have for the billions and billions spent.
V-22 Osprey is in production and the Marines and Air Force are using them in Afgahanistan, Iraq, and Other theatres. It was a problem child from the beginning and without getting too tech savy it was a venture purchased with lot of test pilot blood. Exact figures as to how many crashed and how many died in protype tests are really not released. What you find on Wiki and other sites is the PR release data for this.
Exact numbers built is still speculative at best. I currently do not know what Air Force units are flying them.
I suspect it is Special OPS out of Hurlburt Field Florida the same unit flys our C-130 gunships with 105mm Howitzers and 40 mm guns, which the Air Force denied we had in use for years. As a Airman 1st Class I landed in the Azores and there was 4 of the blasted non-exsistant gunships sitting on the ready ramp with all thier guns sticking out. In my carreer I never saw one V-22 in actual flight operations. I think there was a cover up of any additional losses since it became fully operational.
SDI I will provide an update later. I can till you this the name has changed multiple times since President Reagan and its nickname of Star Wars. It scared the crap out of the Russians and the Warsaw Pact that they feared it would knock out their ability for MAD Mutually Assured Destruction. More on this later.
So is there more than one kind of V-22 fighter? I saw they deployed 2 of them over New jersey do to 2 planes invading air space during the UN meeting. Probably F-22’s. The 2 things I heard about the V-22 was pilots passing out and all kinds of electronic problems.
F-22 are supersonic air superiority jet fighters, V-22 Osprey is a roto-tilt aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but in flight fly like a prop driven aircraft.
Sorry, my mistake. Then the 2 things I heard about were with the F-22’s. Thankyou Warrior.
V-22 Osprey is in production and the Marines and Air Force are using them in Afgahanistan, Iraq, and Other theatres. […] I think there was a cover up of any additional losses since it became fully operational.Â
Thanks for the info. There were quite a few articles about the Osprey in Jane’s Defense Weekly, way back when I used to subscribe to it, but I haven’t seen the magazine in years so I lost track of what happened to this project. I think one of the things which made the V-22 prone to crashing was some kind of tricky aerodynamic phenomenon which tended to occur at a particular point of the rotor transition from horizontal to vertical flight (or vice-versa), but I can’t recall the details and in any case I don’t have any technical expertise on this subject.
Coincidentally, here’s a news story on the V-22 Osprey which appeared just today:
1 October 2012
US Osprey military aircraft begin Okinawa base move
