The Self-Locking
F-22
By ROBERT BRYCE
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.
Here
are more photos of the incident.
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.
