F-22: Call Sign "Rusty"

You SURE this was an “oversight” and not a design feature?
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After all, think of the bucks that will be made by some contractor to correct this “oversight”.
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And don’t go blaming this on a matter of government involvement. Detroit built crap for a generation or two because they thought it would continue to bring in new customers, eager to trade in their “old” crap for “new” crap.
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They even had a term for it – planned obsolescence.

So much for Murphy’s Law of Combat that says “your weapon was made by the lowest bidder”.

“complex contracts cow contractors into performing precisely as prescribed” Love the alliteration, Mark. But it’s not just complex contracts. It’s all contracts.
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The Government is entitled to receive exactly what it specifies in the contract, no less — but also no more. Even if someone slips up while writing the specifications, the contractor has every right to follow the specs to the letter. The only exception is for the case where it is plainly idiotic to do what the spec says. If, for example, a specification somehow says to build the aircraft out of lead, not aluminum, the contractor isn’t entitled to build a lead airplane and demand payment without at least making sure the customer really wants lead.
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When it comes to the difference between “corrosion prevention” and “corrosion resistance,” it’s hard for the Air Force to argue retrospectively that the contractor should have asked whether the specification really meant what it said. At least, that must be what the Air Force’s lawyers concluded. Otherwise they’d be trying to shove the cost onto the manufacturer.
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Any given instance of this may look absurd in hindsight — of course they should have asked for “prevention” and not merely “resistance” — but when you’re designing an aircraft priced at three for a billion, it’s impossible not to overlook something. If this is the worst mistake, it’s a bargain.
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Do we have any commenters out there who never make a mistake? If you’re one such, you’re entitled to criticize. The rest of us should be thinking “There but for the grace of God go I.”

They even had a term for it – planned obsolescence.

Exactly. With the consumers footing the bill for their own lack of emphasis on quality. The US automakers have turned that around, somewhat.

It’s the same old story: complex contracts cow contractors into performing precisely as prescribed, with scant attention paid by world-class engineers to real-world problems.

Yes, it’s the fault of the contract, with no blame to be associated with the engineers who should have known better and management who skimped on the details.

The functional lifespan for aircraft is in the 30 year range. Shrinking that to 6 months is not planned obsolescence – especially when it takes a decade to go from concept to approval. And when you repeat business isn’t just your local government but your local government’s allies who could just as easily go for a company in a very different country, having it fall apart before they’ve signed on the dotted line isn’t a wise move.
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Not to mention, as a Software Engineer (with our failure rate making every other engineering field look like sheer geniuses), I can’t tell you how easy it is for an undocumented requirement to result in a complete oversight of a real world scenario. Just last September, due to a failure in business analysis, my company released a feature that would theoretically make people’s lives easier….by mapping a bunch of templates to their applicable equivalents, we could auto-push their templates and save our users a day of effort every year (or hire one of our people to spend a day doing it). Problem was, if we’d actually looked at the user’s situation, we’d have found they were trying to map 50 templates to 10,000 items. Even with some filtering controls applied, some of our customers were reporting that it took them as much as 3 days to do the work. The worst part: the original idea of how to build it would have prevented the problem but it was thought to be not worth the time to develop it.
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The real problem here is the guaranteed contracts: the government will take your contract, be responsible for the bid price and all cost overruns. Come on. If these companies were told “you have to pay for all design deficiencies and cost overruns”, these companies will double check the requirements and realize the problem the first time through. You can make a very good case that on a 30 year fighter, “corrosion resistant” doesn’t mean it won’t corrode for the first 6 months under normal, real world conditions.

Engineers don’t go reading a contract and hold it up to the light, looking for the minimum needed to fulfill it. Bean-counters do. Engineers know which alloys work and which ones don’t in an operational climate.
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Forget the parsing of the words “prevention” and “resistance”. I find it very hard to believe that, during the design, not one metallurgist looked at the specs and said, “You know, this alloy they are using will start to corrode the minute this beast rolls off of the assembly line. Anyone seeing any treatments or changes to address this?”
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Too many eyes involved in this to think of it as a simple “mistake”. More like the Challenger disaster where an issue WAS brought up and managers “took off their engineering caps” and donned “management headgear” to make a primarily-financial decision.
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Then, when all else fails, blame it on the “language” in the contract.

So, is the government suing Lockheed Martin or what?

F–k yeah military industrial complex!

I find it very hard to believe that, during the design, not one metallurgist looked at the specs and said, “You know, this alloy they are using will start to corrode the minute this beast rolls off of the assembly line. Anyone seeing any treatments or changes to address this?”

This is what has me confused. I’m not too familiar with aluminum, but I do know it is decent as far as corrosion goes. If I recall correctly from one of my classes, aluminum will create a protective, passivating layer that will protect it from further corrosion.
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My guess is this isn’t necessarily corrosion of the Al itself, but the result of the contact of two dissimilar metals. If you’ve got aluminum and stainless steel at a joint, you’ve got the opportunity for galvanic corrosion, pitting, crevice corrosion etc. Sounds more like a design flaw of whatever part corroded that a flaw in alloy choice.

If I understand, corrosion is caused by currrent flow between dissimilar metals. But, once again, engineers/metallurgists would know the dynamics of a design in that regard.
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It’s NOT like we haven’t built technologically advanced aircraft before this, with all of these considerations in the mix. I HOPE we’re NOT re-inventing the wheel here.

I submit to you without comment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons

Update: F22 code name Newfreedomblog.

Hey, somebody had to say it.

Lockheed is one of my “hero” companies (or at least it was when Kelly Johnson ran the “Skunkworks”). The planes they built in the past were legendary and renowned for what they did (P-38, F-104, U-2, and SR-71 anyone?).
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Anyway, I suspect they are NOT the place they once were (any more than WalMart is STILL the place that Sam Walton founded).
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Profit is the watchword these days, and, since you and I aren’t privy to HOW the cost-cutting decisions are made (or maybe even that they are made), we can’t see the ways in which quality suffers in the trade-off.

@afguy: I think you’re right that Lockheed has changed. Massive consolidation within the industry and Lockheed is no longer just a defense contractor — it’s expanded beyond that into all manner of federal and local government service outsourcing. A public company’s obligation to produce quarter over quarter growth inevitably leads them out of their core businesses over time.

afguy:
I concur. This is something that shouldn’t happen. We’ve built planes to handle these environments before so we should know what to expect. I didn’t read the report linked, but I guess it may be possible that the new plane us using different alloys from previous planes that are interacting in ways we didn’t expect, creating the (galvanic) corrosion.
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As a side note, it is kind of funny to me how people will throw out their profession (like the “doctors”) as if it means their argument is automatically right. In this case, I actually am a metallurgist and can contribute to the discussion as such, although I only graduated from school back in May. Unfortunately in this case, most of my experience is with steel and nickel-based alloys. In this case, my company provides the metal for the landing gear and I think parts of the engines of the F-22.

Corrosion (usually) occurs due to the metal reacting with air. Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements in existence. The current flow thing is really just that the process of the reaction releases a bit of energy that can (theoretically) be harnessed as electricity, but the numbers we’re talking about are minuscule. The real application of current flows is actually the reverse – since the corrosion releases some energy, by pushing energy into the metal, we can “encourage” it to reverse the reaction and turn back to aluminum. If we start that early (before it begins corroding), the metal won’t be malformed in the process.
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There are a lot of other ways to do corrosion prevention, and Oxygen isn’t the only cause of corrosion. Acids (such as acid rain) are also very good at corroding materials – and if it’s rain, it’ll have the additional problem of being able to remove the corroded material from the vehicle. The solutions for those….require far more engineering knowledge than I have. However, the point stands.

It also highlights how the contract wording might’ve resulted in the legal claim: the corrosion resistance may not have properly addressed weather issues but actually deal with concerns about corrosion from Oxygen. Since it is resistant to Oxygen corrosion but not weather corrosion. Or maybe it’s the reverse

One other thing to note: oxidated aluminum might form a protective layer to prevent further corrosion, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be able to handle the same stresses applied for a high performance aircraft.

A classic example of a mainstream journalist adopting a preconceived storyline and running with it apparently without making any effort to ask obvious questions.

Thompson quickly adopts the cynical tone of the world-weary journalist: “It’s the same old story: complex contracts cow contractors into performing precisely as prescribed, with scant attention paid by world-class engineers to real-world problems.”

Is that really what happened here? There are plenty of reasons to question that conclusion. But that would require a much greater expenditure of journalistic effort. So why bother?

Instead, let’s just assume that this story is the same as every other story about government “waste”. Let’s assume that nobody is really to to blame. Sure, the government will foot the bill. But what do you expect from government bureaucrats?

Nobody needs to be investigated. Nobody need to get fired. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

npo42:
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I’ve only made it about half-way through the report, but, glancing through it, a few things jump out:

Corrosion is defined as the unintended destruction or deterioration of a material due to
interaction with the environment. It includes such varied forms as rusting; pitting; galvanic
reaction; calcium or other mineral buildup; degradation due to ultraviolet light exposure; and mold, mildew, or other organic decay.

Your comment about gavanic reaction was prescient, because a few pages later, the report states:

Efforts are under way to address corrosion problems with the F-22. Corrosion of the aluminum skin panels on the F-22 was first observed in spring 2005, less than 6 months after the Air Force first introduced the aircraft to a severe environment. By October 2007, a total of 534 instances of corrosion were documented, and corrosion in the substructure was becoming prevalent. For corrosion damage identified to date, the government is paying $228 million to make F-22 corrosion-related repairs and retrofits through 2016.

The F-35 program is mitigating corrosion risk associated with conductive gap filler 3 and
paint by using a gap filler that is less galvanically dissimilar from aluminum, an alternative to the conductive paint, a design with fewer seams that require gap filler, and more representative verification and qualification testing. Many of the F-22’s corrosion problems were linked to problems with gap filler materials and paint.

…so the galvanic reaction was brought on not by Al/steel contact, but by Al/gap-filler.
Also:

The F-35 drainage design is significantly improved with more, adequately sized drain
holes. Drain holes in the F-22 were found to be too small to enable good water drainage.

…drain holes! Just like my Olds! Who knew?
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And, finally:

According to the study, the F-22 and F-35 programs were similar in that they both followed a performance-based acquisition approach. This approach gives the contractor the flexibility to design the aircraft to meet high-level requirements set by the government. However, neither aircraft had a corrosion prevention user requirement 4 that would drive CPC as a design requirement. Further, the program offices for both aircraft only required “corrosion resistance” within the system specifications, a poorly defined and nonspecific term that is difficult to ensure incorporation into aircraft components and to verify.

So, the contractor was free to modify the specs to meet performance objectives. Unfortunately, corrosion resistance was not one of these objectives. D’oh!
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Let’s not try to do that with the F-35…

Your rimsh*t is well deserved! ;)

Having built the SR-71 out of alloys that really weren’t being used until that time, I would think Lockheed wouldhave a leg up on everyone regarding the use of exotic metal alloys. They had to invent a LOT of the technology just to get that plane off the drawing boards. The fact that it was designed back in the late ’50s never ceases to amaze me, since we really haven’t been able to approach its capabilities since (at least NOT publicly, though I suspect that something like it is rattling windows in remote Nevada).
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Kelly Johnson was just one of a kind.
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Dont recall the F-16 having corrosion problems but, IIRC, it uses a lot of carbon fiber technology in the skin.
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I think the difference is the “over-engineering” that used to take place. We have DC-3s that are still flying 80 years after being built and B-52s that are being piloted by the grandkids of the original pilots.
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Now we design right up to the edge of the specs and no further. We can always charge more to fix what was done wrong (even though we saw the problem coming before the thing left the drawing board).

“Well, for starters, note the government — surprise! — is footing the bill.”
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But, but isn’t it private industry that is delivering the product?

BTW, obvious questions that a journalist should be asking:

1. Why was the term “corrosion resistance” used instead of “corrosion prevention”?

2. Is “corrosion resistance” really “poorly defined” as the GAO claims. Is the term defined in the contract? Or in government regs? What is the definition? Common sense would tell us that a plane that experiences pervasive corrosion within 6 months is not resistant at all.

3. Is the government making a smart decision to not even ask the contractor to pay a portion of the repairs? One assumes that if the government sued Lockheed (or went through some administrative procedure or alternative dispute resolution) that Lockheed would probably be willing to settle for some fraction of the total cost. Who made the decision not to fight the contractor? Why did they make the decision and are there any conflicts of interest that are relevant?

4. If the F-22 is going to be killed as unnecesary in the post-Cold War world — contrary to the GAO report which claims that the “F-22 Raptor … will be the backbone of DOD’s tactical fighter fleet for decades to come” — as many hope, should we even bother paying to fix many of these planes?

1) Every metal will corrode given enough time and the right conditions. As pointed out earlier, there are a variety of different types of corrosion as well. Stainless steel, for example, won’t generally rust by itself, depending on the type of stainless, conditions, etc. But slap it next to the wrong alloy or coat it wrong and it will readily rust.
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2) Reading through my company’s specs, most alloys are rated for different corrosive environments as “Good,” “Moderate,” “Poor,” etc. Corrosion is not something that can be easily measured, such as strength or hardness. However, knowing the environments that these planes would be in, yes 6 months is horrible performance. As I and others have stated, it’s not necessarily the alloys used themselves, but the combination of alloys creating a galvanic cell that causes corrosion.

4. Having an Air Superiority fighter is fairly important for standard border patrol if nothing else. Whether you need it to be maintained at its current scale is a reasonable question, but an Air Superiority fighter is normally the backbone of any air force dealing with everything from aircraft escort (such as escorting a passenger plane with unknown intentions to the ground or escorting dignitaries including Air Force One) to fighter combat (which you only need at a low level deterrent level these days) to….whatever. This is one region where a reasonable level of modernization is useful and the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18s are all 70s and early 80s designs. Do you need a fighter with Stealth capabilities and absurdly high price tag? No. But considering you already bought them and how much more expensive it would be to build a more practical replacement for the F-teens rather than just maintaining these ones….it actually makes sense to maintain them.

The competition between the YF-22 and the YF-23 ended almost 20 years ago, and this thing still isn’t ready for prime time. The only “actual use” these planes have seen has been escorting Russian bombers along Alaskan airspace. An F-15 could have done that.

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