6 ms·

Air Force Designed, Built, and Flew a Brand-New Fighter Jet In One Year

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
carabiner 6y ago
Spoiler: they don't know anything about it, no pictures and no specs. The company that worked on it is not revealed. Really the most notable thing is that it took only a year. The P-51 Mustang was conceived and put into service (wartime) also in a year. It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a modern aircraft.
- dylan604 6y ago
  When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.
  - fred_is_fred 6y ago
    Also true for all software projects.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      That's exactly why I worded it without referencing airplanes. It's kind of a universal statement about committees.
      - sosborn 6y ago
        My theory: In any organization there is a magic number of committee members, that once achieved, assures that the project will fail.
        Yoofie 6y ago
        I was just thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on small nuclear reactors and how many organizations, governments and countries can't accomplish anything of significance in a timely, costly or efficient manner. I was thinking it should be written like a law: The success of a project or goal is inversely proportional to the number stakeholders, investors and/or general labour involved in the project/business/goal. This idea is closely related to the 80/20 rule, the cost/performance/quality decision triangle, etc.
    - disown 6y ago
      The mythical man month.
  - coredog64 6y ago
    The initial F-16 project faced that issue and the Fighter Mafia was pretty successful in preventing scope/mission creep.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Would love to hear if the Air Force Kessel Run program contributed to this [1] [2] (cc @AndrewKemendo). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326 [2] https://kesselrun.af.mil/ https://kesselrun.af.mil/
- qchris 6y ago
  I've only heard good things about that program; if they somehow contributed to this effort, it would be another huge feather in their hat.
kiba 6y ago
Reminds me of what I read from the memoir on Skunkwork. They specifically used off the shell components and other strategies to reduce engineering time and speed up prototyping. Not knowing anything about aircraft development, they are probably much less ambitious about design specs while at the same time iterated much faster.
- ISL 6y ago
  There are many lessons to be found within Skunk Works by Rich. Among them is the statement that the SR-71 was not at the edge of the design envelope. If I recall correctly, there were substantial safety margins in most areas, "like a Chevy truck" in order to ensure the speed of development and improve the likelihood that the entire project would succeed. The HN productivity/self-help crowd will find a lot more in there. This passage has had the highest personal impact per word as any text I've read: You don't need Harvard to teach you that it's more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don't half-heartedly wound problems - kill them dead. That's all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place. Also: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks/kelly-14-rules.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...
  - ylee 6y ago
    >You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision What I wrote in my journal after joining an investment bank's equity research team: "Good dinner with two traders, x and y; they have both been in the business for more than a decade and shared many interesting experiences and insights into the business. I did not realize that our traders very much need information flow, preferably proprietary, in order to entice their buyside counterparts to trade through them. It almost doesn't matter whether the information is accurate or not; what counts is being distinctive". I well remember one of the traders slamming his fist on the table complaining about how a former analyst was very bad at returning phone calls, and saying that being 52% right (meaning 48% wrong) is better than a higher correct percentage but not being available.
ufmace 6y ago
Would be interesting to hear more details on how they pulled that off. I would tend to assume the fast development speed involves using a bunch of existing tech instead of developing new. Maybe it's also unmanned, letting them drop a ton of life-support stuff and relax reliability requirements.
seattletech 6y ago
Yeah, but the defense budget is optimized to benefit multiple Congressional districts as a jobs program, this doesn't work...
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  The original article says that they aren't trying to reduce spending. They want to take money that used to go into long-term maintenance and put it into into R&D and manufacturing. Instead of keeping the planes flying for 30+ years, they want a steady stream of new, up-to-date specialized designs that they keep in the air for 13 years or less. They want to force China and Russia to play a never ending game of catch-up. It would be a shake-up in the current system, but is fully compatible with running a nationwide jobs program.
  - twic 6y ago
    It also means opponents have thirteen different aircraft they have to train against!
- spamizbad 6y ago
  In theory if the cycles are faster, and not 30+ years, there's not so much pressure to make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. If you're churning out brand new planes every decade, you can stagger the spread.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Indeed, awarding lots of smaller contracts instead of a few big ones would seem to be a good way to ensure more people get a piece of the pie.
jacques_chester 6y ago
Lots more detail in the original article this one links to: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  Yeah, that's a really good article, and discloses that what they're doing isn't about a single new airplane. They want to completely change the way the Air Force manages the entire airplane lifecycle: > The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about 50-80 aircraft every year. > The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half, Roper wrote in the paper. > “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”
  - twic 6y ago
    If a figher plane has a lifespan of 30 years, does this mean that at steady state, the air force would have 1500 - 2400 fighters of 30 different types? Did Hayao Miyazaki take over Air Force procurement, or what? EDIT: Ah, they also reduce the lifecycle to 10 - 15 years. Still wild!
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      I don't think you should be downvoted, it's a reasonable misunderstanding. The goal is to create a constant pipeline of new planes with short lead times, so that they don't need to have extended lifetimes with expensive maintenance. Personally I feel that's a better approach overall for many mobile capital-intensive systems: military hardware, public transportation and so on. As the interview points out, smaller, more-frequent procurements reduce the risk to suppliers as well. Currently every weapons system project is a existential risk to contractors, so they quite naturally try to push as much back as possible. And so we wind up with parts being built in every Congressional district at vast expense and added complexity.
mrbonner 6y ago
So basically they could do this because of limited budget, right schedule and no red tapes? Sound like a start up to me :)
duxup 6y ago
Not knowing much of anything about it, it's kinda hard to figure out how much of an achievement this is...
cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
I have no special knowledge, but I find myself wondering if it's just a variant of an existing fighter (F-22, F-35, maybe even F-23) or a manned variant of a recent drone prototype like the X-47B.
jjk166 6y ago
Given that a warplane has not been developed so quickly since WW2, part of me wonders if there has recently been some development which has given the air force a wartime sense of urgency. While it seems unlikely that we wouldn't hear anything about such a development, it also seemed unlikely that we wouldn't hear about a project like this.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  [1] maybe. How do you counter a fast follower with a knack for getting onto your development network? Misdirection and rapid development would be my guess. [1] https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-and-rafale-have-no-chance-against-the-j-20/ https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-a...
- heelix 6y ago
  They can if they need to... Both the U2 and the SR71 had a crazy short development time - months, not years. The history of both those aircraft from a build/design perspective is an amazing read. They knew the U2 would be obsolete for the original mission and got the blackbird in the air. Got to wonder if it is just significantly harder to hide things now than it was in the late 50's. Between satellites, cell phones, and globs of potential collaboration - it would be hard to keep something in the air a secret. http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    The irony is that the U-2 is still in service while the SR-71 is decommissioned. This doesn't take away from your point of course, I just thought it was interesting.
IanDrake 6y ago
I would think at this point we don't really need fighter jets. Wouldn't a vast number of cheap remote controlled/ai driven flying explosives be more useful?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Spoiler: they don't know anything about it, no pictures and no specs. The company that worked on it is not revealed. Really the most notable thing is that it took only a year. The P-51 Mustang was conceived and put into service (wartime) also in a year. It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a modern aircraft.

dylan604 6y ago
When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  Also true for all software projects.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    That's exactly why I worded it without referencing airplanes. It's kind of a universal statement about committees.
    - sosborn 6y ago
      My theory: In any organization there is a magic number of committee members, that once achieved, assures that the project will fail.
      - Yoofie 6y ago
        I was just thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on small nuclear reactors and how many organizations, governments and countries can't accomplish anything of significance in a timely, costly or efficient manner. I was thinking it should be written like a law: The success of a project or goal is inversely proportional to the number stakeholders, investors and/or general labour involved in the project/business/goal. This idea is closely related to the 80/20 rule, the cost/performance/quality decision triangle, etc.
  - disown 6y ago
    The mythical man month.
- coredog64 6y ago
  The initial F-16 project faced that issue and the Fighter Mafia was pretty successful in preventing scope/mission creep.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Would love to hear if the Air Force Kessel Run program contributed to this [1] [2] (cc @AndrewKemendo). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326 [2] https://kesselrun.af.mil/ https://kesselrun.af.mil/

qchris 6y ago
I've only heard good things about that program; if they somehow contributed to this effort, it would be another huge feather in their hat.

kiba 6y ago

Reminds me of what I read from the memoir on Skunkwork. They specifically used off the shell components and other strategies to reduce engineering time and speed up prototyping. Not knowing anything about aircraft development, they are probably much less ambitious about design specs while at the same time iterated much faster.

ISL 6y ago
There are many lessons to be found within Skunk Works by Rich. Among them is the statement that the SR-71 was not at the edge of the design envelope. If I recall correctly, there were substantial safety margins in most areas, "like a Chevy truck" in order to ensure the speed of development and improve the likelihood that the entire project would succeed. The HN productivity/self-help crowd will find a lot more in there. This passage has had the highest personal impact per word as any text I've read: You don't need Harvard to teach you that it's more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don't half-heartedly wound problems - kill them dead. That's all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place. Also: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks/kelly-14-rules.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...
- ylee 6y ago
  >You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision What I wrote in my journal after joining an investment bank's equity research team: "Good dinner with two traders, x and y; they have both been in the business for more than a decade and shared many interesting experiences and insights into the business. I did not realize that our traders very much need information flow, preferably proprietary, in order to entice their buyside counterparts to trade through them. It almost doesn't matter whether the information is accurate or not; what counts is being distinctive". I well remember one of the traders slamming his fist on the table complaining about how a former analyst was very bad at returning phone calls, and saying that being 52% right (meaning 48% wrong) is better than a higher correct percentage but not being available.

ufmace 6y ago

Would be interesting to hear more details on how they pulled that off. I would tend to assume the fast development speed involves using a bunch of existing tech instead of developing new. Maybe it's also unmanned, letting them drop a ton of life-support stuff and relax reliability requirements.

seattletech 6y ago

Yeah, but the defense budget is optimized to benefit multiple Congressional districts as a jobs program, this doesn't work...

OldHand2018 6y ago
The original article says that they aren't trying to reduce spending. They want to take money that used to go into long-term maintenance and put it into into R&D and manufacturing. Instead of keeping the planes flying for 30+ years, they want a steady stream of new, up-to-date specialized designs that they keep in the air for 13 years or less. They want to force China and Russia to play a never ending game of catch-up. It would be a shake-up in the current system, but is fully compatible with running a nationwide jobs program.
- twic 6y ago
  It also means opponents have thirteen different aircraft they have to train against!
spamizbad 6y ago
In theory if the cycles are faster, and not 30+ years, there's not so much pressure to make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. If you're churning out brand new planes every decade, you can stagger the spread.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Indeed, awarding lots of smaller contracts instead of a few big ones would seem to be a good way to ensure more people get a piece of the pie.

jacques_chester 6y ago

Lots more detail in the original article this one links to: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...

OldHand2018 6y ago
Yeah, that's a really good article, and discloses that what they're doing isn't about a single new airplane. They want to completely change the way the Air Force manages the entire airplane lifecycle: > The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about 50-80 aircraft every year. > The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half, Roper wrote in the paper. > “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”
- twic 6y ago
  If a figher plane has a lifespan of 30 years, does this mean that at steady state, the air force would have 1500 - 2400 fighters of 30 different types? Did Hayao Miyazaki take over Air Force procurement, or what? EDIT: Ah, they also reduce the lifecycle to 10 - 15 years. Still wild!
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    I don't think you should be downvoted, it's a reasonable misunderstanding. The goal is to create a constant pipeline of new planes with short lead times, so that they don't need to have extended lifetimes with expensive maintenance. Personally I feel that's a better approach overall for many mobile capital-intensive systems: military hardware, public transportation and so on. As the interview points out, smaller, more-frequent procurements reduce the risk to suppliers as well. Currently every weapons system project is a existential risk to contractors, so they quite naturally try to push as much back as possible. And so we wind up with parts being built in every Congressional district at vast expense and added complexity.

mrbonner 6y ago

So basically they could do this because of limited budget, right schedule and no red tapes? Sound like a start up to me :)

duxup 6y ago

Not knowing much of anything about it, it's kinda hard to figure out how much of an achievement this is...

cheaprentalyeti 6y ago

I have no special knowledge, but I find myself wondering if it's just a variant of an existing fighter (F-22, F-35, maybe even F-23) or a manned variant of a recent drone prototype like the X-47B.

jjk166 6y ago

Given that a warplane has not been developed so quickly since WW2, part of me wonders if there has recently been some development which has given the air force a wartime sense of urgency. While it seems unlikely that we wouldn't hear anything about such a development, it also seemed unlikely that we wouldn't hear about a project like this.

rmrfstar 6y ago
[1] maybe. How do you counter a fast follower with a knack for getting onto your development network? Misdirection and rapid development would be my guess. [1] https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-and-rafale-have-no-chance-against-the-j-20/ https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-a...
heelix 6y ago
They can if they need to... Both the U2 and the SR71 had a crazy short development time - months, not years. The history of both those aircraft from a build/design perspective is an amazing read. They knew the U2 would be obsolete for the original mission and got the blackbird in the air. Got to wonder if it is just significantly harder to hide things now than it was in the late 50's. Between satellites, cell phones, and globs of potential collaboration - it would be hard to keep something in the air a secret. http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf
- lokedhs 6y ago
  The irony is that the U-2 is still in service while the SR-71 is decommissioned. This doesn't take away from your point of course, I just thought it was interesting.

IanDrake 6y ago

I would think at this point we don't really need fighter jets. Wouldn't a vast number of cheap remote controlled/ai driven flying explosives be more useful?