Hmm. Engine fire, or did its carbon-carbon composite (basically cardboard) skin combust?
The Lancer hitting the emergency vehicle was odd, since another Lancer had an emergency at Qatar. Could these expensive toys be wearing out faster than their human masters?
How come I'm thinking about what happened to the batplane in the first Batman movie?
Seriously though, the current thought is that the CG was too far aft, and it over-rotated and stalled on takeoff.
they have been in constant use for 20 ome odd years...they start to break down eventualy. super sofistication is not the answer, and the air force has to relise that soon...raptor is anothe rbig mistake...swarms are goign to be the way to go very soon (lots of cheap, expendable, unmaned planes.)
You could be right about that, moonglum.
The Russians have always held this view. Their T-72s weren't all that hot, but they had a LOT of them to spend. I'm very glad to this day that we never had to try conclusions with these people someplace like the Fulda Gap. I doubt it would have gone the way the Army would like to think.
Have you ever gotten swarmed in a first-person shooter? Some of the third-party single-player maps for Quake II featured swarms of lightweight attackers. Mark Shan's maps were (in)famous for that.
Getting swarmed really sucks, because both your attention and your firepower are being split too many ways. It's really worse than Lanchester's laws might suggest.
Moonglum, you weren't playing Starcraft in earlier days, were you?
Wanderer:
The skin of the B-2 is made of carbon composites, not carbon-carbon. That means it's carbon reinforcing fibers embedded in some type of plastic matrix, likely some sort of epoxy. Carbon composites have achieved pretty deep penetration into the marketplace -- applications include aircraft of all kinds, sporting equipment, high performance cars and boats, motorcycle helmets, and so on. Various fiberglass composites have achieved even deeper penetration, and include all of the above plus many cheaper cars, boats, and household goods of various kinds.
Carbon-carbon is remarkably special stuff, very difficult to make, and it is neither possible nor desirable to make an entire airframe out of the stuff. It's amazingly heat resistant and very strong, but it's also relatively brittle and very, very difficult and time consuming to make. Common industrial applications include aircraft brake pads and some very high temperature scientific equipment.
Neither is in any way like cardboard (or even particularly flammable), and if you really think they are, then you likely have trouble remembering to breathe at regular intervals.
carbon-carbon composite (basically cardboard) skin combust?
Carbon-carbon composites are hardly cardboard. It may feel thin and light, but it is very strong.
The B-2 fire info is very sparse, but I'll bet it was electrical in nature, since the hidden fans are extremely well insulated against uncontained failure.
As for the Lancers, they were never very good maintenance-wise - the C5A and Bs were the only less-ready air force system. Very complex, purpose built jets that have been flying quite a bit lately - it was an accident waiting to happen.
Yes, B-1s and 2s are very expensive, but given the duty cycles they've been asked to undertake, these two accidents represent an extremely low combat loss rate.
Given that the then-new B-52 was plagued with massive fuel and engine problems during the first twenty years of its life, I won't go so far as to say accidents like these are par for the course, but that they could have been expected, given an ongoing commitment like the one in Iraq.
I don't believe moonglum's prediction is going to be borne out - at least not in the next 30-40 years. UAVs are not going to be able to target or engage aircraft they cannot either keep up with or get a clear shot at.
Okay. I'll shut up.
Ah, Starcraft - still waiting for the MMORG version.
Aircraft guy and Pierce, thanks for clarifying some carbon stuff - having used it for a brain bucket for a while, even very thin pieces are quite strong.
I have to disagree with Aircraft guy about the UAVs, with a caveat.
Wireless data flow is increasing exponentially, and miniaturization is also growing quickly. Couple that with the fact that UAVs are only limited by the airframe capabilities, instead of pilot G-susceptibility, and the case is actually pretty strong.
Caveat: I'm pretty sure it will be the USA and other highly industrialized nations that employ it - ability to mass-produce (not likely anyone is going to bomb a plant in Pennsylvania, Coventry, Rouen, or St Petersburg, vs. say, Mogadishu or Lahore) and a plentitude of recruits with videogame-trained reflexes.
Saroff:
If your info is correct, that's really shocking. Fucking up your CG that badly is an unforgivable mistake in a Cessna 152, let alone a functionally irreplaceable airplane.
Aircraft Guy:
I agree. No-one to date has built even a prototype UAV that's even close to air combat capable. The US is trying, but it turns out that it's a bit more difficult of a problem than it at first appears. Swarms of air-combat UAVs are not a near-term threat. UAV swarms may turn out to be a threat to ground forces, but that is a different issue.
That's what Aviation Week says, but since it's behind a subscription firewall, I'll pimp my own blog post on this.
Basically, there are a couple of factors, the first is that the CG tends to be further aft on long ferry flights than it is in training (less fuel) and on a strike (bomb bay is forward of the CG).
Additionally, the B-2, like the B-1, has active CG management by shifting the fuel between different tanks.
Ironically, the first B-1 crash was caused by the same thing.
Also, the pitch up might have caused a compressor stall, the airflow through those stealthy inlets is not that straight, and possibly the shedding of blades.
Personally, I want it to be Jack Nicholson as the Joker with a pistol.
CluelessJoe nope 40k table top...swarms allways worked well.
kenga: i think we are less tehn a decaded away from viable quantom networking ...instantanious communications, unjammable and infinate range....that solves a lot of problems. Just load the puppies up with fire and forget missles...no it wouldn't win a one on oen dog fight...but thats not the point...the hradcore air geeks are in for a bit of a suprise when asymetrical warfare hits their area. it will be interesting to see their face when it sets in jsut how much we wasted on the raptor and jsut how useless it is for the types of actions we need from aircraft.
Hell look at the air tigers...raiding airstirps and haveign there way with a mig based airforce...the uav's aint goign to try and dog fight with jets, thats what cheap missles are for, they are goign to hit airfealds and keep your fancy, billion dollar planes from takeign off.
Give the computers another decade or so to mature.
By that time, we'll have the power requirements way down, we'll be routinely writing OSes and apps that can really use multiple CPUs (which we don't do today), and the core count per CPU will be in the 10 to 100 range.
And the people who tinker with algorithms will have a better grip on their end of the problem.
It may not take 30 to 40 years at all.
Personally, I want it to be Jack Nicholson as the Joker with a pistol.
Comment of the day.
Give the computers another decade or so to mature.
It's not the computers, rather the infrastructure to field "swarms" of UAVs.
You need ground personnel to handle fuelling, arming, and recovery, not to mention the remote pilots and their support teams.
Wireless bandwidth can be effectively increased by adding cells to an infrastructure, but bandwidth isn't the problem in fielding many UAVs - intelligence is.
Another stumbling block is airframes. It's harder than it looks to make a UAV that will carry Air-to-Air long range missiles - a Sparrow or even a sidewinder (short range) weighs quite a bit.
Not if the UAVs are the missiles.
and recovery,
I do not understand the meaning of that word, in this context.
What is to recover, and why?
More transparently, why bother recovering a vehicle that is not much more in cost than the payload on a typical F-16 for a combat flight?
Particularly if you may be able to "land" it at mach2 into/on an enemy target.
kenga,
Recovery in this sense means getting the UAVs back after they've flown their missions. And there are other non-obvious problems with fielding swarms of remotely-piloted UAVs relating to bandwidth (live video in particular takes up lots), interference, and vulnerability to jamming. The last is particularly important if the target is the US -- the US military services are the undisputed masters of electronic warfare. Your UAV zerg rush is distinctly less impressive when they all go to their loss of communications mode because the lead bandit is jamming their comms.
Even if you do want to, in general, use the UAVs in a hit to kill mode, you still need a recovery infrastructure for training flights.
And autonomous armed UAVs are a) AI-complete and b) not something any industrialized country (required to implement the notional tactic) is going to contemplate any time soon, for what ought to be fairly obvious reasons.
we seem to have two diffrent view points here...the standard, planes are cool, mand flight is the way to go, we got the best planes in teh world crowd...and thos of us say..hey, we just drop a billion dollars on a pice of scrap that was taken out by a buzzbomb...UAV's, 4th gen warfare is comeign to the skies (again see the tigers adn what they are doign to a modern airforce) cheap plans, cheap bombs hittign air fealds and ground support. the raptor dosn't do you a damm bit of good if it isn't in the air.
your thinking way too hard..cheap and easy is the next wave.
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