You mean F-35 parts are sourced from china? So why they fuss about secrecy!
Especially for military, the USA makes lots very notorious Expensive & Useless JUNKS!
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/magazine/air-force-hypoxia-pilots-navy.html
Pilots Kept Losing Oxygen and the Military Had No Idea Why. Now There’s a Possible Fix.
A pilot undergoes a hypoxia training scenario at Whidbey Island in Washington in December 2011.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
Image
A pilot undergoes a hypoxia training scenario at Whidbey Island in Washington in December 2011.CreditCreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
By
John Ismay
The United States Air Force and Navy appear to be closing in on a partial solution to a complicated set of problems that have for years caused pilots to experience adverse physiological symptoms midair, endangering them and the aircraft. Officials from both services said that by early 2019 they will replace faulty oxygen-supply systems with new hardware and software in their T-6 Texan trainer aircraft. They are also continuing to study how pilots in their trainer and combat aircraft are being affected by hypoxia — a physiological condition caused by low levels of oxygen in the bloodstream that can lead to a lack of concentration and muscle control, inability to perform delicate tasks and ultimately loss of consciousness.
Oxygen-deprivation and cockpit-pressurization problems have afflicted trainer and top-line aircraft in the Navy and the Air Force — including the F-22 Raptor, the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, the A-10 Thunderbolt, the T-45 Goshawk trainer and F/A-18 Hornet — for at least a decade. Until recently, the source of these episodes mystified military officials. Because so many different aircraft were affected, the services didn’t think they were being caused by one specific problem. In his testimony to the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee in February, Lt. Gen. Mark Nowland, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations, said that “there is no single root cause tied to a manufacturing or design defect that would explain multiple physiological event incidents across airframes or within a specific airframe.” Lawmakers, frustrated with the lack of progress made by the services, criticized Nowland for his remarks. “I could not be more disappointed by your presentation,” said Representative Michael R. Turner, an Ohio Republican and the subcommittee chairman. “There is something wrong with the systems that these pilots are relying on for their lives.” Many junior pilots, meanwhile, felt that their leaders were ignoring or playing down the episodes, because they couldn’t replicate the problem or find an easy fix.
[
Get a weekly roundup of Times coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.]
Finally, under pressure from Congress to change its approach, the Air Force completed a six-month study and announced in September that it had figured out the root cause of these physiological episodes: fluctuating concentrations of oxygen tied to the oxygen-distribution system. In conjunction with the Navy, the service is developing a new oxygen concentrator for the aircraft most commonly associated with the episodes, the T-6 trainer. Air Force pilots of the trainer aircraft reported an average of eight hypoxia-related episodes per month between February and July 2018, Aviation Week reported in August.
The Air Force’s entire
F-22 Raptor fleet was grounded for four months in 2011 after 12 separate incidents in which pilots of the $143 million fighter jet experienced a lack of breathable oxygen. One of those resulted in a fatal crash. By July 2012, the total number of incidents had climbed to 36. In the Navy, the greatest impact has been on its standard fighter-bomber, the F/A-18 Hornet. One report said that between 2010 and 2017, its F/A-18 Hornet pilots reported nearly 500 “physiological episodes” in flight and indicated that such problems caused four fatal Hornet crashes.
Similarly worrisome issues struck the military’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, in which the Defense Department is expected to invest $1 trillion by 2030. In May and June 2017, five F-35A pilots assigned to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona reported “hypoxia-like symptoms” while flying but managed to land their planes safely. All F-35A flights at that base were temporarily halted as a result.
An airman prepares to fly a T-6A Texan II at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., in September 2018.CreditU.S. Air Force photo
Image
An airman prepares to fly a T-6A Texan II at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., in September 2018.CreditU.S. Air Force photo
Earlier in 2017, problems with the Navy’s T-45 jet caused a near revolt of instructor pilots, whose jobs are to train student aviators. On March 31, 2017, T-45 instructors canceled 51 of 129 scheduled training flights because of safety concerns about physiological episodes they had experienced in flight. The Navy responded by having senior aviators visit the three T-45 training squadrons to assure instructors and students that they were taking the problems seriously. According to an official report, those visits were “not well received at any of the three sites.” The instructors cited what they perceived as a lack of attention on the part of Navy leadership in recognizing the seriousness of the problems and a lack of urgency in correcting them. Not long after, the Navy’s Pacific Fleet set these physiological episodes as its top aviation safety priority and said it would address the problem regardless of cost or resources required. Both the Navy and Air Force have appointed high-ranking officers to lead teams to identify causes and implement fixes.
Officials from both services have pointed to two main causes of these events: flaws in the system that provides oxygenated air for pilots to breathe, and an environmental-control system that is unable to maintain the appropriate air pressure inside the cockpit. The former has resulted in episodes of hypoxia. The latter caused some pilots to suffer decompression sickness, comparable to what deep-sea divers can experience if they do not surface slowly enough for nitrogen to be removed from their bloodstream and expelled through their lungs.
In earlier decades, fighter jets carried liquid oxygen onboard for pilots flying at high altitudes. But over the past 20 years, both services have been transitioning to a system that collects air from outside the aircraft and filters nitrogen from it until it is safely breathable. The change was an attractive safety feature because liquid oxygen can be a fire hazard, and the new system offered, in theory, a functionally limitless supply of air. But the newer system also lacked sensors to monitor the air quality and had no alarm that could alert pilots to any problems. After Navy pilots reported increased physiological problems as these oxygen concentrators aged, the devices were taken apart and examined. Sailors who work on the planes found a surprising amount of wear inside, including contamination from engine exhaust. This led Navy officials to recommend that certain oxygen-system parts be regularly inspected regardless of their performance and to redesign the internal nitrogen filter.
Editors’ Picks
Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon
The Aperol Spritz Is Not a Good Drink
The Best Green Salad in the World
While hypoxia is problematic, both the Air Force and the Navy point to uncontrolled cockpit-pressurization changes as a potentially greater threat to pilots than the air they breathe. Just like commercial airliners, warplanes are usually pressurized to match a constant altitude inside the aircraft no matter how high they fly. The higher up in the atmosphere a plane flies, the lower the outside air pressure is — at a certain point very low air pressures can have a negative effect on the human body, so maintaining a more or less constant pressure inside the plane is important for the health of those inside. “When you’re flying in an airliner at 38,000 feet, it pressurizes somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 feet,” said Brig. Gen. Edward L. Vaughan, who leads the Air Force’s physiological-episodes action team in the Pentagon. “Same thing with our military aircraft. The difference is military aircraft can change altitude very rapidly on purpose,” in instances where warplanes regularly train in dodging missiles or during an aerial battle.
Cockpit pressure can sometimes swing up or down by 2,000 feet without warning, and this is a prime suspect in causing decompression sickness. “We know that in most pilots on most days, that oscillation doesn’t result in any symptoms,” Vaughan said. “But some pilots on some days, those oscillations under a given condition result in these symptoms.”
The Navy has introduced a number of measures to combat the problems with cockpit pressurization, including outfitting F/A-18 pilots with commercially available smartwatches that contain barometric sensors to alert them of pressurization problems; this was necessary because the plane’s built-in altimeter gauge is in a position that makes it difficult to read. The Navy also started deploying hyperbaric chambers operated by specially trained medics onboard the aircraft carriers U.S.S. George H.W. Bush and U.S.S. Carl Vinson in January 2017, so that pilots could receive treatment after landing on the ship instead of having to be medically evacuated to a chamber ashore.
According to Vaughan, the Air Force has rebuilt spare oxygen concentrators for its T-6 trainer aircraft and is installing a redesigned model that incorporates sensors to alert pilots of certain problems like insufficient oxygen or particle contamination and will include software that can be rewritten as needed based on data it collects. The new design has been completed and is being delivered to T-6 squadrons. Vaughan’s team works in tandem with a similar Navy team led by Rear Adm. Fredrick R. Luchtman, whom the Navy declined to make available for an interview. Neither service said whether it had a plan to address hypoxia-related symptoms in other aircraft.
Sign up for The New York Times Magazine Newsletter
The best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week, including exclusive feature stories, photography, columns and more.
Correction: Dec. 30, 2018
An earlier version of this article misspelled Fredrick R. Luchtman’s military rank. He is a rear admiral, not a read admiral.
John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.
Sign up for
our newsletter to get the best of At War delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit
nytimes.com/atwar.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/b...-take-your-breath-away-and-not-good-way-32422
Subscribe
October 2, 2018 Topic:
Security Blog Brand:
The Buzz Tags:
F-35Stealth FighterNATORussiaHypoxia
The F-35 Will Literally Take Your Breath Away (And Not In A Good Way)
Is the F-35 in trouble?
by
Task and Purpose Jared Keller
The oxygen-deprivation problems aren’t just constrained to training aircraft like the T-45. As War Is Boring points out, in 2011, the Air Force grounded its fleet of F-22 stealth fighters, supposedly “the most capable aircraft in the world,” due to a hypoxia rate that was nine times more pronounced than in other U.S. fighters.
The Air Force and Lockheed Martin are making a big fuss out of the first-ever acrobatic demonstration of the much-hyped F-35 stealth fighter at the Paris Air Show this week, for one good reason: to astound and astonish allies and enemies alike with a lung-crushing display of American engineering prowess.
The daily peacocking of the
deeply flawed and
notoriously expensive combat fighter in the skies above Paris is meant to “reassure (allies) that we are committed to NATO 100 percent and that we have got the capability to respond to any action necessary,” F-35 joint program administrator Brig. General (Select) Todd Canterbury
told the Associated Press on June 19 — despite recent, uh,
ambiguity around the U.S. commitment to NATO.
10
seconds
Do You Know What Happened On This Day?
(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in 2017.)
But the tests also have another important purpose: to “
crush year of misinformation” about the fighter, as Lockheed Martin test pilot Billie Flynn told Aviation Week on June 18. And boy howdy, is the F-35 getting the job done!
So what’s the verdict on the F-35’s breathtaking debut in Paris? Here are seven reasons the most advanced combat fighter on the planet will actually take your breath away.
The plane suffocates its pilots
Since May 2, five F-35A pilots with the 56th Fighter Wing out of Luke Air Force Base in Arizona have
reported experienced hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in one’s tissue) while operating the fifth-generation fighter. The Air Force ordered a stand-down on flights on June 12 to investigate the problem.
Nobody knows why
While Luke Air Force Base recently
announced it would
resume flight operations on June 21, “no specific root cause for the physiological events was identified during recent visits from experts and engineers,” according to a
statement by 56th Fighter Wing public affairs officials.
Despite the head-scratching from a cadre of technical minds employed by Lockheed Martin and the Air Force Research Laboratory, “specific concerns were eliminated as possible causes including maintenance and aircrew flight equipment procedures.” Which means that engineers know something is wrong, but everything looks okay. That’s extremely reassuring.
The Air Force seems pretty okay with all of this
Read that last section again: Luke AFB is resuming flight operations despite the fact that fact that the most brilliant “experts and engineers” in the military-industrial complex can’t figure out the source of the problem. No wonder more than 100 instruction pilots in the Navy’s aviation program
went on strike until the branch dealt with rampant oxygen-deprivation issues in its T-45 Goshawk training squadrons.
It’s the most expensive suffocation ever
The F-35 was already the most expensive weapons system in military history (trebuchets didn’t cost nearly as much, even in their historical context), and it’s only getting more expensive: An April 2017 GAO report
found that the 16-year-old program was delayed by another year and $1.7 billion over budget. That’s really, really depressing when you consider that the Pentagon is shelling out billions for a fighter that
can’t even outmaneuver the fourth-generation F-16 in a dogfight.
The Air Force has known about this issue for years
On June 15, the Air Force
told Military.com that 15 F-35 airmen had experienced incidents of hypoxia since 2011, a trend the branch didn’t disclose to the public until the string of oxygen deprivation incidents at Luke Air Force Base prompted an investigation into the problem. Of those 15 incidents, only five occurred in F-35s operating out of Luke; the other 10 cases “were considered isolated incidents,” Air Force spokesman Capt. Mark Graff told Military.com.
And it’s not just the F-35
Cockpit hypoxia has
remained a top safety issue for Navy aviators for years, reported in fourth-generation aircraft like the F/A-18 Hornet and EA-18G Growler variants. On June 16, the Navy
revealed that four pilot deaths were the result of oxygen system failures in the Hornet.
The oxygen-deprivation problems aren’t just constrained to training aircraft like the T-45. As War Is Boring points out, in 2011, the Air Force grounded its fleet of F-22 stealth fighters, supposedly “the most capable aircraft in the world,” due to a hypoxia rate that was nine times
more pronounced than in other U.S. fighters.
The Air Force will send you downrange regardless
As Task & Purpose’s Adam Weinstein
observed in May, the USS George H.W. Bush and USS Carl Vinson reportedly
deployed to the Persian Gulf in January of this year with “hyperbaric chambers, ‘slam sticks,’ and even store-bought Garmin wristwatches” to deal with the hypoxia issue. At this juncture, cockpit hypoxia seems likelier to kill a pilot over Syria than a surface-to-air missile does, but
time will tell.
Given how hard flacks are flogging the aircraft in Paris, it appears that the Air Force isn’t just okay with its own pilots taking the risk — it’s very okay watching airmen stick their necks out, even though neither the Air Force or Lockheed Martin can promise F-35 flight operations won’t end up endangering their pilots as much as enemy targets.
This article by Jared Keller originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.
More Articles from Task & Purpose:
- 7 Veteran-Friendly Manufacturers That Are Hiring
- The 6 Types Of Contractors You Encounter Overseas
- Here’s How Marines Fared On The New Physical Fitness Test
KliaAn aerial view of the Penang International Airport.
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/OPA5OITFFFHYLM4POZVOQJL56M.jpg)
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/HP3VU2IBIZF3RNC2LAZLSUWNPA.jpg)
