snip

Please give the engineers the benefit of the doubt. They did not develop
this
sight in isolation, they did it with the full cooperation and knowledge
of the US Army. USA has been using red dot sights for over a decade in
very trying conditions, and I think they know what they want and what the
reliability is under the proposed service conditions.

If it wasn't for forward thinking government and private engineers, the
Army would still be using Trapdoor Springfields and .45-70 ammunition.

Arguably, the push for better weapons has never come from the tip
of the spear, it's always come from the labs and their desire to support
those men.

Fire away...

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur


The problem with being "Tip of the Spear" is that every time you turn
around, all you see is the shaft!


I have the utmost respect for the abilities of engineers. I just wish
that the maintainers had more to say about the design as it is being
designed. I started out on F-4S's which when designed, MacAir's policy was
"If you could put your hand in a compartment, something is missing". As a
result on a good day it would take about four hours to change out a fuse on
our electrical fusing power supply. On the other hand, I could sit in the
cockpit and depending on what worked with the switches in different
positions I could tell you exactly what was broken. Basically you could
have forked hay all of your life but if you had common sense you could fix
the aircraft. For the sidewinder missile system, we had an AN/AWM-20B test
set. It had two knobs one on top of the other and a meter. Each step of
the test you would move a knob to a different position and read the meter.
If a step failed you instantly knew what was wrong. It was dead nuts
simple. Then we transitioned to the F/A-18. OH MY GOD! It's all about
computers talking to computers. And if some totally unrelated to your
system isn't working right it can still cause your system to fail making it
very difficult to figure out what the problem is. The engineers learned from
the F-4 and made "single layer", but we became box changers. The Tech Pubs
say "If it doesn't work, change this box. If that doesn't fix it change
this box", and so on and so forth. The result is that maintainers are
pulling out perfectly good computers and sending them to MALS (AIMD, Back
Shop) for testing and troubleshooting. We had an Air Force Maj. Come by our
hanger one day to see how we did maintenance. He said that he was from an
F-16 community and they averaged about 60%-65% good computers being sent to
their back shop because that was the way their maintenance was done. I don't
know our percentages, but it was probably about the same as theirs. There
is a memory inspect system in the Hornet that is supposed to tell you what
is wrong. I got it to work twice in almost ten years. Needless to say we
only used it as a last resort. You often hear about former military pilots
being part of R+D programs but I personally have never heard of a maintainer
being there to say "Are you nuts!"

I went though boot camp with an M-16A1 (on the magazine well were it
normally has the Colt seal, mine said "manufactured by the hydrodynamic div
of the GM Corp"). It worked but I didn't care for it. While I don't have
a lot of faith in what the 5.56 mm will do when it hits the target, I do
have faith in the M16A2 to work and hit what I am aiming at. I have never
had a jam with either my service weapon or my personal AR-15. I have been
led to believe that the modifications making the A1 into the A2 came from
one or two USMC GySgt's (shameless plug for my service).

I cannot count how many times I have heard from either engineers or
tech reps "It worked fine in the lab". I just wish that it would work fine
in the freezing cold, hot and humid, dusty, and ship borne environments as
well. I am afraid that until it is standard policy that the high school
graduates (with experience in the field) who will maintain and operate these
systems have a role in the design phase we are going to end up the standard
"The babies ugly, see you later".



Your Shot



Evan Williams

VF-101, VMFA-232, VMFA-122, VMFA-251, HMH-461