US Air Force: Discussion and News

Arrow wrote:So the US already has a 6th generation prototype. They will again be a big step ahead of Russia and China.

So the US already has a 6th generation prototype. They will again be a big step ahead of Russia and China.

The US can afford hundreds of new aircraft. Russia is to introduce only 78 T-50s by 2028

I do not know what the orders will be, but the USA is the first to have a prototype of the 6th generation fighter when Russia and China are introducing only the fifth, and Russia is just starting a very small series production. They were ahead of their competitors by 20 years.

LMFS wrote:Great, they came up with some new BS in the line I was pointing out: the eSeries (TM)

https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2346441/secaf-unveils-new-eseries-classification-in-nod-to-departments-digital-future/fbclid/IwAR0YUclguLumOi0AOqlMP9mzo0V24PvbYNIlQlRZujUM50hQIPbyC73soNo/fbclid/IwAR2l5Im2bJfFyx1iS7aJVUjtzI2gxvOuMEMoA1xCIVzEleqktVINjFIC1dk/

Apart from being game-changing, unmatched and ground-breaking, I wonder... are they aware that literally everyone out there is using mathematical modelling to develop their systems from top to bottom, and additive technologies to build them? Is this digital engineering allowing them to do without technology demonstrators, prototypes and flight testing? The Zvezda spacial showed briefly the modelling department of Sukhoi and how they recreate such complex and specific phenomena as the spreading of fire / oxygen under combat damage inside the fuel tanks of the plane and how to contain it. Poor Russian guys, they just know about doing hard cold engineering and have no clue about BS marketing...

kvs wrote:The US is in love with supercomputers as a panacea for everything.   That is why they pushed for the nuclear test ban treaty since the clowns
decided they could do all the necessary development using computer simulations.     Even if these simulations are complex (e.g. full hydrodynamics
of nuclear detonations) they can never replace real world testing.   All models are approximations by definition.   Some approximations are better
than others and allow tedious work to be streamlined.   But reality will always be bigger than any simulation (by definition) so any real innovation
will require real world testing.   The key is innovation which is the search for new information which clearly is not a trivial part of any existing model.

The models involved in aircraft (and car) design are for mechanical parts and how they behave under various stresses.   You can make a new wing
shape and see how it behaves.   But wind tunnel tests are going to be needed anyway since wing boundary layer behaviour is something that
no finite element hydrodynamics code can simulate from the molecular scale on up.   There is some turbulence closure scheme involved and these
schemes are all over the map in terms of realism.   There really is no such thing as a closure since the parameterization is trying to use a reduced
set of variables (specifically ones that can be well simulated at the given grid resolution) to simulate a system where such pseudo-empirical
functional dependence is not there.   Good for writing academic papers but not so good for real world design.

Tsavo Lion wrote:

One of the main tasks of the developers is to recreate in the air the projections of Russian Su-57 fighters and Chinese J-20 fighters as realistic as possible.

Losses of aircraft and people in US military aviation from 2013 to 2019: 224 dead 186 aircraft lost More than 6,000 accidents More than $ 11 billion in losses.


http://charly015.blogspot.com/2020/12/el-informe-sobre-las-perdidas-de.html

kvs wrote:That is shocking.   The MSM clearly does not report on all of these cases.   I do not recall dozens of crashes being reported
in any year but that is what was happening.

Pilots, maintainers are worn out and under-trained, aviation safety commission says

A group of aviation experts tasked with getting to the bottom of a surge in deadly military aviation accidents during the last decade came back with its report on Thursday, and there’s a lot that needs fixing.


A confluence of cultural issues, budget shortfalls and a lack of oversight have contributed to a general malaise, according to the report, as well as a rash of deadly and costly mishaps from 2013 to 2018: 198 deaths, 157 aircraft destroyed and $9.41 billion lost.

Despite finding passionate professionals on flight lines around the world, the heads of the National Commission on Military Aviation Safety told reporters, a lack of flight hours, a stressed supply chain, high operational tempo and administrative distractions have left the community in a bit of disrepair.

“What we found was that morale was generally degraded,” Dick Healing, a retired Coast Guard pilot and vice chairman of NCMAS, told reporters in the morning, before he was due to brief the results of the commission’s investigation to members of the House Armed Services Committee.

That period dovetails seamlessly with congressionally-imposed budget sequestration that began in 2013 and was carried on by delayed proper budgets in the following years, but the commission did not blame it entirely on money.


Mandated by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, NCMAS stood up after Military Times investigation found that deadly mishaps rose 40 percent from 2013 to 2018

What’s going wrong?

Despite recovering that funding, the commission found that aviation units are still not getting enough flight hours, maintenance time and proper parts to keep everything running safely and smoothly, which is a likely contributor to accidents.

About 43 percent of mishaps are caused by human error, he explained, generally because someone didn’t follow procedure to the letter, or properly coordinate with the other aircrew or those on the ground. Another 38 percent were due to environmental factors, like weather and visibility.

The remaining 19 percent were split among organization issues ― among those, worn out parts or lack of proper manning ― and supervision issues, which include superiors making bad judgment calls or not enforcing policies.

Generally, human error is prevented by proficiency ― for example, pilots and aircrew with so much recent experience that they are operating on instinct and able to troubleshoot problems with ease.

But troops told the NCMAS members they, in many cases, they weren’t getting enough flight hours. In the past, the issue had been budget cuts slashing the amount of time they could afford to be in the air.

Now, according to retired Army Gen. Dick Cody, NCMAS chairman it’s more an issue of prioritizing.

Some young pilots are coming out of schoolhouses that lean heavily on hours in a simulator. That’s great for practicing emergency procedures, he said, but not for gaining proficiency in the aircraft.

So in order to get them up to speed, their first units of assignment are spending flight hours closing that gap, rather than spreading them more evenly up through more experienced pilots.

And that, in turn, is resulting in more waivers, or units making exceptions for pilots assigned to missions who are about to fall out of balance with the required number of flight hours they need every 60 days.

“We shouldn’t have pilots being tasked to do missions that have been waivered,” Cody said, adding that there have been “way too many accidents right on the 60-day current limit, and they’re out there flying a mission.”

While mishaps in general were down in 2019, the Navy and Marine Corps saw individual increases, including a 30-percent increase in the Corps.

The commission isn’t sure what caused that spike, Cody said, adding that the service is, anecdotally, “about as a stressed as any of the services that we saw” during their visits to 200 units across 80 installations over the past year and a half.

“We didn’t seen any new [types of] accidents,” he added, explaining that the most common causes of mishaps have largely remained the same.

But he did call out the physical conditions of the Marine Corps aviation community, which has been seen as taking a backseat to its other organizations.

“And some of their facilities were not facilities that we would want young Americans maintaining multi-million dollar aircraft [in],” Cody said.

How to fix the problem

While the report calls for cultural change and budget predictability, two factors that can’t be remedied with the snap of a finger, it does lay out several institutional changes that can happen right away.

Cody’s top recommendation is to start tracking those flight waivers, so that the services know just how common it is for borderline-current pilots to get in the cockpit and those trends can be traced.

Along those same lines, Healing made a plug to create a joint safety council within the defense secretary’s office, reporting directly to the deputy defense secretary, as an authority to centrally track aviation trends, factors and data that can be fed directly to high-level policy and funding decisions.

Such a council “basically gives them the information they need in order to make decisions that can seriously impact aviation safety,” Healing said.

Other remedies will require institutional motivation.

The report focuses heavily on the grinding combination of being overworked, untrained and under-incentivized.

The commission recommends increasing the ceiling on pilot retention bonuses to $100,000 per year. It also recommends boosting manning levels of administrative personnel in aviation units, so that pilots and maintainers don’t get sucked into doing paperwork rather than focusing on their intricate skill sets, which they have reported as a problem.

OPTEMPO a lingering issue

But the last part of the equation might be more difficult to tackle, as combatant commanders continue to request forces. The relentless demand for aviation units to support operations around the world, as they’re becoming more and more strained, is a recipe for disaster, both in safety but also retention of pilots and maintainers.

For example, carrier air wing deployments have stretched from the long-standing six-month underway to nine months or beyond ― and in the case of the aircraft carriers Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, having only a few months at home before heading out again.

In the Army, downsized aviation brigades are doing back-to-back rotations in Korea and Europe. Doing the same amount, or more with less ― fewer aircraft, fewer personnel, fewer parts ― has become part of the culture.

“And they always say, ‘Will do,’ " Healing said. “People need to understand that there may be a time when they need to say ‘no.’ "