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From http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,97576,00.html

The Self-Locking F-22
Robert Bryce | May 17, 2006
Last week, Lockheed Martin announced that its profits were up a hefty
60 percent in the first quarter. The company earned $591 million in
profit on revenues of $9.2 billion. Now, if the company could just
figure out how to put a door handle on its new $361 million F-22
fighter, its prospects would really soar.

On April 10, at Langley Air Force Base, an F-22 pilot, Capt. Brad
Spears, was locked inside the cockpit of his aircraft for five hours.
No one in the U.S. Air Force or from Lockheed Martin could figure out
how to open the aircraft's canopy. At about 1:15 pm, chainsaw-wielding
firefighters from the 1st Fighter Wing finally extracted Spears after
they cut through the F-22's three-quarter inch-thick polycarbonate
canopy.

Total damage to the airplane, according to sources inside the Pentagon:
$1.28 million. Not only did the firefighters ruin the canopy, which
cost $286,000, they also scuffed the coating on the airplane's skin
which will cost about $1 million to replace.

The Pentagon currently plans to buy 181 copies of the F-22 from
Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons vendor. The total price
tag: $65.4 billion.

The incident at Langley has many Pentagon watchers shaking their heads.
Tom Christie, the former director of testing and evaluation for the
DOD, calls the F-22 incident at Langley "incredible." "God knows
what'll happen next," said Christie, who points out that the F-22 has
about two million lines of code in its software system. "This thing is
so software intensive. You can't check out every line of code."

Now, just for the sake of comparison, Windows XP, one of the most
common computer operating systems, contains about 45 million lines of
code. But if any of that code fails, then the computer that's running
it simply stops working. It won't cause that computer to fall out of
the sky. If any of the F-22's two million lines of computer code go
bad, then the pilot can die, or, perhaps, just get trapped in the
cockpit.

One analyst inside the Pentagon who has followed the F-22 for years
said that "Everyone's incredulous. They're asking can this really have
happened?" As for Lockheed Martin, the source said, "Whatever the
problem was, the people who built it should know how to open the
canopy."

Given that the U.S. military is Lockheed Martin's biggest client,
perhaps the company could provide the Air Force with a supply of slim
jims or coat hangars, just in case another F-22 pilot gets stuck at the
controls.

As if the latest canopy shenanigans weren't bad enough, on May 1,
Defense News reported that there are serious structural problems with
the F-22. Seems the titanium hull of the aircraft isn't meshing as well
as it should. Naturally, taxpayers have to foot the bill for the
mistake (improper heat-treating of the titanium) which is found on 90
aircraft. The cost of repairing those wrinkles? Another $1 billion or
so.

Lockheed Martin's F-22 spokesman, Joe Quimby, did not return telephone
calls.

Video of the story

http://www.wavy.com/Global/story.asp...6&nav=23iieWIY

when did we stop building fighters without a mechanical canopy release