Did NW_Pilot Cross the International Date Line?

[Gig 601XL Builder]

I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits Up.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225

[NW_Pilot]

"Gig 601XL Builder" <wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in message
...
>I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits Up.
>
> http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>

Not that I am aware of :-)

[Denny]

On Feb 27, 12:34 am, "NW_Pilot" >
wrote:
> "Gig 601XL Builder" <wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in ...
>
> >I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits Up.
>
> >http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>
> Not that I am aware of :-)

Ummm, this story seems unlikely to me... And, I did not see any of
the big news wires pick it up... It should be all over CBS given their
pathologic hatred of guns, Bush, the military, etc... CNN should have
talking heads bleating about it....
Caveat Emptor...

denny

[Kev]

On Feb 27, 8:22 am, "Denny" > wrote:

> > >http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>
> Ummm, this story seems unlikely to me... And, I did not see any of
> the big news wires pick it up... It should be all over CBS given their
> pathologic hatred of guns, Bush, the military, etc... CNN should have
> talking heads bleating about it....
> Caveat Emptor...

Wasn't there an old (and fake) story years back about the first fly-by-
wire jets turning upside down over the equator? That's what I
thought this was at first, but check out halfway down this CNN
transcript:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/24/tww.01.html

See also:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/27/f-22-raptors-systems-crash-mid-flight-over-pacific/

So it looks like it could be a true story. Fortunately this time, the
only lasting effect is that they'll add one more test situation when
validating future code releases.

Kev

[Gig 601XL Builder]

Denny wrote:
> On Feb 27, 12:34 am, "NW_Pilot" >
> wrote:
>> "Gig 601XL Builder" <wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in
>> ...
>>
>>> I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits
>>> Up. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>>
>> Not that I am aware of :-)
>
> Ummm, this story seems unlikely to me... And, I did not see any of
> the big news wires pick it up... It should be all over CBS given their
> pathologic hatred of guns, Bush, the military, etc... CNN should have
> talking heads bleating about it....
> Caveat Emptor...
>
> denny

It was mentioned on CNN. Look about half way down the page.


http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/24/tww.01.html

[Danny Deger]

"Gig 601XL Builder" <wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in message
...
>I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits Up.
>
> http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>

I am not convinced this is a true story. I googled/news "f-22,
international" and only got two hits for this story.

Having said this, this is the kind of error that gets past the programmers
and testers. But I don't see how the aircraft attitude displays and fuel
management software would be effected by a time error. I could see the
tactical displays relying on data links getting messed up, but not attitude
and fuel management.

Danny Deger

[Larry Dighera]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:07:54 -0600, "Gig 601XL Builder"
<wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in
>:

>
>http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>
ROBERTS: Twenty five years from development to deployment, the F-22
Raptor is the most advanced fighting machine in the air. But it was no
match for a computer glitch that left six of them high above the
Pacific Ocean, deaf, dumb and blind as they headed to their first
deployment. So what happened? We turn to a man who's at home in the
cockpit, Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. Don, let me set
the scene. These F-22s, eight of them, were headed from Hickam (ph)
Air Force base in Hawaii to an (INAUDIBLE) Air Force base in Japan.
They were approaching the international date line, pick it up from
there.

SHEPPERD: You got it right Don. You want everything to go right with
your frontline fighter, $125, $135 million to copy. The F-22 Raptor is
our frontline fighter, air defense, air superiority. It also can drop
bombs. It is stealthy. It's fast and you want it all to go right on
your first deployment to the Pacific and it didn't. At the
international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all
systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their
communications, their fuel systems. They were -- they could have been
in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers - they
tried to reset their systems, couldn't get them reset. The tankers
brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It
certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. It
turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in
the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple
lines of the code and everything goes.

ROBERTS: This is almost like the feared Y2K problem that happened to
these aircraft. We should point out that computers control almost
every aspect of this aircraft, from their weapons systems, to the
flight controls and the computers absolutely went haywire, became
useless.

SHEPPERD: Absolutely. When you think of airplanes from the old days,
with cables and that type of thing and direct connections between the
sticks and the yolks and the controls, not that way anymore.
Everything is by computer. When your computers go, your airplanes go.
You have multiple systems. When they all dump at the same time, you
can be in real trouble. Luckily this turned out OK.

ROBERTS: What would have happened General Shepperd if these brand-new
$120 million F-22s had been going into battle?

SHEPPERD: You would have been in real trouble in the middle of combat.
The good thing is that we found this out. Any time -- before, you
know, before we get into combat with an airplane like this. Any time
you introduce a new airplane, you are going to find glitches and you
are going to find things that go wrong. It happens in our civilian
airliners. You just don't hear much about it but these things
absolutely happen. And luckily this time we found out about it before
combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the
airplanes were flying again, completed their deployment. But this
could have been real serious in combat.

ROBERTS: So basically you had these advanced air -- not just
superiority but air supremacy fighters that were in there, up there in
the air, above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophisticated than a
little Cessna 152 only with a jet engine.

SHEPPERD: You got it. They are on a 12 to 15-hour flight from Hawaii
to Okinawa, but all their systems dumped. They needed help. Had they
gotten separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they
had no attitude reference. They had no communications or navigation.
They would have turned around and probably could have found the
Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there
could have been real trouble. Again, you get refueling from your
tankers. You don't run -- you don't get yourself where you run out of
fuel. You always have enough fuel and refueling nine, 10, 11, 12 times
on a flight like this where you can get somewhere to land. But again,
attitude reference and navigation are essential as is communication.
In this case all of that was affected. It was a serious problem.

ROBERTS: So the fact the computers run so much of the systems on these
aircraft, General Shepperd, is the -- is the military at risk of over
engineering here so if they did have a problem like that when they
were going into a hostile situation, they could be, as you said,
repeatedly in real trouble?

SHEPPERD: Well, you have redundant systems but it's just a fact of
life in the modern computer age. By the way John, you are going to
have the same problem coming up on your laptop computer as we
conferred from -- from standard time from daylight savings time to
standard time. Your program -- your computer is programmed for one
thing and we have changed the dates and you are going to have a
problem. It's going to have to be dealt with.

[Kev]

On Feb 27, 11:30 am, "Danny Deger" > wrote:
> I am not convinced this is a true story. I googled/news "f-22,
> international" and only got two hits for this story.

It does sound funky, but try google news with "raptor navigation" and
you'll find a dozen stories over a week's time about their having to
turn back midway across the Pacific.

> Having said this, this is the kind of error that gets past the programmers
> and testers. But I don't see how the aircraft attitude displays and fuel
> management software would be effected by a time error. I could see the
> tactical displays relying on data links getting messed up, but not attitude
> and fuel management.

I agree, it's hard to visualize that common a point of failure. One
of the precepts of good avionics software is that there's not supposed
to be a single code location that could cause global errors.
Obviously they goofed ;-) A guess is it went into an infinite cpu-
eating loop and that indirectly made everything else falter.

Kev

[gatt]

"NW_Pilot" > wrote in message
...

>> http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>>
>
> Not that I am aware of :-)

That could make for some screwy logbook entries.

-c

[Dave S]

Danny Deger wrote:
> "Gig 601XL Builder" <wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net> wrote in message
> ...
>
>>I know he didn't but that's what caused F-22's computers to go Tits Up.
>>
>>http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225
>>
>
>
> I am not convinced this is a true story. I googled/news "f-22,
> international" and only got two hits for this story.
>
> Having said this, this is the kind of error that gets past the programmers
> and testers. But I don't see how the aircraft attitude displays and fuel
> management software would be effected by a time error. I could see the
> tactical displays relying on data links getting messed up, but not attitude
> and fuel management.
>
> Danny Deger
>
>

Not being a software guru of any sort, but if the "working world" of
aviation works on GMT, which is the same time all across the world, why
would the plane's brain ever cared what the local time was? Obviously a
goof, but hard to see how it could even happen.

Dave

[Denny]

Something happened - but it still has the smell of mostly blogger
hype...

The F22 is a an aerodynamically unstable aircraft... It is strictly a
fly by wire where the computer+gyro+inertial-nav has to sense the
airframe diverging from the flight path called for by the pilot and
inputting flight corrections.. The flaperons and rudder literally buzz
inflight with many, albeit small, corrections per second...
Assuming the 'claimed' total computer shutdown was correct the
airplanes fall out of the sky... They didn't so right on we know the
computer glitch was less than total shutdown...

Anyway, the military is not going to release enough detail for us to
determine what really happened and to what extent the computer code
has glitches, so I'm losing interest...

cheers ... denny