On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:07:54 -0600, "Gig 601XL Builder"
wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in
:


http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225

ROBERTS: Twenty five years from development to deployment, the F-22
Raptor is the most advanced fighting machine in the air. But it was no
match for a computer glitch that left six of them high above the
Pacific Ocean, deaf, dumb and blind as they headed to their first
deployment. So what happened? We turn to a man who's at home in the
cockpit, Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. Don, let me set
the scene. These F-22s, eight of them, were headed from Hickam (ph)
Air Force base in Hawaii to an (INAUDIBLE) Air Force base in Japan.
They were approaching the international date line, pick it up from
there.

SHEPPERD: You got it right Don. You want everything to go right with
your frontline fighter, $125, $135 million to copy. The F-22 Raptor is
our frontline fighter, air defense, air superiority. It also can drop
bombs. It is stealthy. It's fast and you want it all to go right on
your first deployment to the Pacific and it didn't. At the
international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all
systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their
communications, their fuel systems. They were -- they could have been
in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers - they
tried to reset their systems, couldn't get them reset. The tankers
brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It
certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. It
turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in
the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple
lines of the code and everything goes.

ROBERTS: This is almost like the feared Y2K problem that happened to
these aircraft. We should point out that computers control almost
every aspect of this aircraft, from their weapons systems, to the
flight controls and the computers absolutely went haywire, became
useless.

SHEPPERD: Absolutely. When you think of airplanes from the old days,
with cables and that type of thing and direct connections between the
sticks and the yolks and the controls, not that way anymore.
Everything is by computer. When your computers go, your airplanes go.
You have multiple systems. When they all dump at the same time, you
can be in real trouble. Luckily this turned out OK.

ROBERTS: What would have happened General Shepperd if these brand-new
$120 million F-22s had been going into battle?

SHEPPERD: You would have been in real trouble in the middle of combat.
The good thing is that we found this out. Any time -- before, you
know, before we get into combat with an airplane like this. Any time
you introduce a new airplane, you are going to find glitches and you
are going to find things that go wrong. It happens in our civilian
airliners. You just don't hear much about it but these things
absolutely happen. And luckily this time we found out about it before
combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the
airplanes were flying again, completed their deployment. But this
could have been real serious in combat.

ROBERTS: So basically you had these advanced air -- not just
superiority but air supremacy fighters that were in there, up there in
the air, above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophisticated than a
little Cessna 152 only with a jet engine.

SHEPPERD: You got it. They are on a 12 to 15-hour flight from Hawaii
to Okinawa, but all their systems dumped. They needed help. Had they
gotten separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they
had no attitude reference. They had no communications or navigation.
They would have turned around and probably could have found the
Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there
could have been real trouble. Again, you get refueling from your
tankers. You don't run -- you don't get yourself where you run out of
fuel. You always have enough fuel and refueling nine, 10, 11, 12 times
on a flight like this where you can get somewhere to land. But again,
attitude reference and navigation are essential as is communication.
In this case all of that was affected. It was a serious problem.

ROBERTS: So the fact the computers run so much of the systems on these
aircraft, General Shepperd, is the -- is the military at risk of over
engineering here so if they did have a problem like that when they
were going into a hostile situation, they could be, as you said,
repeatedly in real trouble?

SHEPPERD: Well, you have redundant systems but it's just a fact of
life in the modern computer age. By the way John, you are going to
have the same problem coming up on your laptop computer as we
conferred from -- from standard time from daylight savings time to
standard time. Your program -- your computer is programmed for one
thing and we have changed the dates and you are going to have a
problem. It's going to have to be dealt with.