21 ms·

The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

467 points by alrs 6y ago

jaytaylor 6y ago
Dupes / other identical submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322477 --- As an aside, does it still qualify as a dupe if there wasn't any significant discourse?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Re aside: Generally no. Some submissions just don't take due to poor timing (not lining up with when an interested audience will catch, upvote, and discuss it).
dmurray 6y ago
Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? So, the tinfoil hat interpretation of this story would be, of course the Pentagon has the original blueprints in quintuplicate, but it's identified reverse engineering as a key strategic advantage China has over the US (pretty reasonable so far, right?) and has announced this as a way to shuffle some money into building up domestic RE expertise in the defence industry.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when they shutdown production early, so it would be possible to restart if needed. You can't capture everything you need to know in blueprints and documentation.
  - benzene 6y ago
    >Long out of production. The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - hondo77 6y ago
      > The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. Actually, the B-2 was one of the first military aircraft designed with CAD. https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spirit-of-Innovation.pdf https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spiri... (search for "NCAD")
  - jyounker 6y ago
    Preventing the loss of manufacturing capability is one of the reasons for offering military aid to friendly countries. We give them money to buy weapons, but they are obligated to buy certain weapons systems with that money. For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active. It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    A friend of mine looked into building a P-51 from scratch, as buying a real one was too expensive. He ordered the blueprints, which are readily available. But then he talked to some P-51 owners, who told him the blueprints wouldn't be much use. The airplane was defined by the jigs used to build it, and the blueprints were just drawn up later as documentation and never checked. The jigs were scrapped when the airplane went out of production.
  - 6y ago
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Also, to quote Independence Day: > You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      One fears we'd be shocked by how much is actually going to General Smith's brother-in-law's toilet-seat dropship company. We'd like to think that Pentagon auditors could find that sort of thing, except that Pentagon people tell us continuously that they are unauditable. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...
- jandrese 6y ago
  As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project. That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
  - nullserver 6y ago
    My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work. Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
    - banana_giraffe 6y ago
      It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
      - mywittyname 6y ago
        It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
- time0ut 6y ago
  I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
    - est31 6y ago
      Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
      - KineticLensman 6y ago
        > Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there This was true of lots of things outside NASA. This was one of the problems that killed the UK attempt to modernise the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft [0]. They wanted to fit new wings to the old planes, but only discovered after the contract had been signed that the different airframes had not been built identically, but were different interpretations of a common plan. Each of the nine planes was in effect a completely new refit challenge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4
- godelski 6y ago
  Even if you're not innovating everything you want to reverse engineer enemy systems because you want to discover vulnerabilities. This is common practice.
- TheCondor 6y ago
  I've heard from various acquaintances that it's not unusual for the contractor to be required to destroy documentation and tooling for certain classified projects upon completion.
  - structural 6y ago
    It is absolutely standard practice for this to happen. At contract completion, the contractor must destroy or return all classified materials: these sorts of designs would certainly be included. It's pretty interesting, but a lot of this stuff is structured specifically so that the contractor organization doesn't retain knowledge that it's "not supposed to have", as wasteful as that ends up being. Even stuff like a list of personnel who worked on a project or production line might be included... so that a few years after the project is completed, the management of the contractor might not even be able to figure out who to ask, because they've destroyed even their knowledge of the list of people who worked on the component's design and manufacturing.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I wish my tax dollars were going to some galaxy-brain forward thinking group of men and women capable of making such reverse engineering challenges for itself; but it almost certainly is the case that what looks like sheer incompetence is just that.
  - prox 6y ago
    Most of the companies are Initech ;)
    - mjevans 6y ago
      Office Space (the movie) If you don't get the reference. Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.
- deleted 6y ago
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- enkid 6y ago
  Read about the history of NASIC and the other service intelligence centers [0]. Understanding foreign technology is one of their core missions. I'm pretty sure they have already been reverse engineering stuff for a long time. [0]https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/ https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. I though they already had enough practice reverse engineering the alien tech at Area 51?
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Nah, I think the one guy who knows the thing is gone, the data was on a hard drive that crashed and the backup system didn't work, and the papers copies are probably somewhere except no one knows where and it is faster to reverse engineer the damn thing. I have no reason to believe that defense projects are not plagued by bureaucracy, office politics and incompetence like in a lot of government entities and large companies. If anything, it is worse because secrecy is a convenient way to hide incompetence. And when information is shared on a "need to know" basis and we realize that no one "needs to know", then it gets lost. I have touched a bit on defense projects (not in the US) and generally, compared to civilian, open projects, if feels slow and primitive. I didn't get to the super-secret stuff but I have a feeling that the only parts where civilians don't do much better are the ones that only the army is interested in.
- alliao 6y ago
  Yeah no. Back in the 2000s when Iraq war was happening and marines were using MSN Messenger and I asked whether the unencrypted nature of the chat program would adversely impacted on their missions etc, and he basically said "hell they can spy all they want WE don't even know what we're doing next" Which I thought he was joking at the time.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? I suppose they could always call the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed who designed it in the first place. Like getting tech support for your Huawei networking equipment, just use the Cisco guide! [0] [0] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-correcting-the-record https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
  - Bedon292 6y ago
    For anyone unaware Lockheed was hacked in 2007 and the hackers got away with technical documentation related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hack was attributed to hackers in China. So it is thought that the development of the Chinese J-20 was at least helped along by information from the hack.
- dokem 6y ago
  I think the US (and power nations in general) have a history of reverse engineering the foreign war tech they can get their hands on.
- dublin 6y ago
  We generally only reverse-engineer technologies from elsewhere (no, not other countries...)
whalesalad 6y ago
The B-2 is ancient, doesn't seem very surprising.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I had to check, it's not as ancient as some other bombers with B-2 first flight occurring in 1989. I met a pilot who flew on the same B-52 as his father, and his grandfather had flown some of the first B-52s. This was in the 00s, about 15-18 years ago.
  - aphextron 6y ago
    It's impossible to overstate how long these things have been in service. The oldest B-52 airframes still in active service were built longer ago than the first flight of the Wright brothers was when they were built.
    - rstupek 6y ago
      And likely to be in service for another 30 years. A 100 year airframe
      - deleted 6y ago
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      - koalahedron 6y ago
        I worked at Boeing Wichita (which is no more), and an engineer told me that the B-52 was getting heavier over time because the old wires weren't removed for avionics upgrades. Of course, they were always trying to put one over on me as a newbie (I worked on avionics S/W in Ada for the tankers). He also said a big problem was the expense of doing a modern engine upgrade. Anyone know if they ever re-engined it? Was he joking again? Having one of these fly over my apartment on Rock Rd. was a dish rattler--I used to see B-2s every once in a while too (fairly loud too, IIRC).
        6y ago
projektfu 6y ago
I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.
- LeonenTheDK 6y ago
  That's an interesting though, like software documentation that hasn't been updated over years of patches. Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Also sounds like a git repository where people were working on local branches to do production work and then when they left the company, never pushed their branch upstream.
    - kelchm 6y ago
      That's assuming there is a git repo or any kind of version control at all.
      - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
        They're not assuming. They're analogizing.
  - azernik 6y ago
    A long write-up of an equivalent for the F-1 engine is here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the... The analogy to out-of-date software documentation is very apt. As problems or inefficiencies popped up in the factory, they'd change things and just not write them down (because of deadline pressure, often). If you wanted to build new ones you'd have to either get the factory workers to show you how the thing was actually built, or tear down a working example to reverse engineer it. (Which has been done!)
rlyshw 6y ago
I've done installs of video streaming tech on USAF-managed NIPR net and we've had to reverse engineer some of the mechanisms on their own network... This does not surprise me at all.
magtux 6y ago
This happens even outside Defense in all specialized industry. I was once asked if I could reverse engineer a part for a 30 year newspaper stacking machine in a printing press. Very interesting stuff and a consequence of being niche.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Exactly. We're dealing with: - Limited production run. These aren't Ford Mustangs or Toyota Priuses with hundreds of thousands and millions being produced. There were 21 built over 13 years. This also leads to the consequence that each one should be considered a bespoke creation and not a "copy" of the others (even ignoring the 20+ years of individual maintenance work they've each had). - Time. It's been 21 years since the last one was produced in 2000. Whatever facility produced this has long since lost that capability. - Aging workforce. Whoever designed it is likely retired, and could even be dead at this point. Certainly the senior engineers who may have been 40+ when the project started in the 70s/80s. Even if they weren't retiring and dying, the people on the project have been doing other things for 20+ years.
  - lambda2001 6y ago
    The last part is extremely true. I have known many engineers that worked on the B-2 and have since retired. There's very little chance many of them would come out of retirement and honestly I don't think the government would pay for that.
    - azernik 6y ago
      And even if they did, no one remembers that well the things they did decades ago.
      - Bedon292 6y ago
        And even if they did, would that knowledge help reproduce it on modern equipment? Going to have to rebuild all of the tooling and processes anyways.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots. You see the real issue? Even if they have the blueprints, it will be difficult to even manufacture the parts here. There's so many more problems like this coming down the pipeline. We've effectively lost (or rather acquiesced) almost all manufacturing skill to other countries. This was a result of the largest corporations taking advantage of labor arbitrage and then flooding their home market out of business. If we really want to reverse this, we need to do what it takes to bring manufacturing back to the United States. It's a painful reversal of the open-trade policies of the past. Honestly, Trump was right to fight so hard for this, even going so far as to remove us from NAFTA. I don't have a good strategy for this, but probably some set of minimum manufacturing of everything should happen within our borders, say 10%, and accomplishing that target with a combination of sticks and carrots.
- wwww4alll 6y ago
  Unfortunately, your assessment is very correct. There will be no solution and only a slow decline as previous systems become obsolete and there no on to fix or upgrade to better systems. This country is producing more Tik Tok stars than engineers that can sustain civilization.
  - austinshea 6y ago
    What a confident proclamation that is backed up by nothing, aside from your limited perspective.
    - wwww4alll 6y ago
      Name a successful plane developed recently by US military or commercial enterprises?
      - robotresearcher 6y ago
        Boeing 787 series. Young in plane years. Best airliner in the sky. SpaceX makes working spacecraft.
aarongray 6y ago
Proof the B-2 was built using UFO technology :-P
deleted 6y ago
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Pokepokalypse 6y ago
This is not new. Older planes and other hardware have LONG had to be reverse-engineered (including microchips).
flyinghamster 6y ago
This brings up an important principle: the higher the tech, the shorter its lifespan. A cellphone from the 1980s won't function anywhere but in a Faraday-caged lab equipped with a suitable cell site, while 2G and 3G systems are fast disappearing. Only recently have landline telephone exchanges begun to drop support for pulse dialing, but otherwise, a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today, and DTMF dates to 1963.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  > a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today This still amazes me, even though every time a call comes in on the landline, the 50-year-old rotary-dial phone in my living room rings alongside the cordless phone. It doesn't get used much, except for the loud ringer and during extended power outages.
- imtringued 6y ago
  You can get hundred year old manual lathes/mills and they still do their job. It's because the basic principle upon which they were built is still valid today. The only difference with modern machinist tools is that they are fully automated and you can just retrofit CNC parts to the old equipment.
mgarfias 6y ago
Somethign I haven't seen mentioned here is that the technology used to design this thing is waaaaaaaaaaaay old. I know for a fact it was designed on an IBM mainframe (dad ran the one that the YF-22 was designed on). I can't remember what CAD package they used there, but its definitely conceivable that the software doesn't even exist anymore. How would you go about building a new one if you can't read the CAD files, if you have them. Hell, the building in hawthorne where dad worked isn't even owned by northrop anymore. Its spacex.
- folli 6y ago
  Reverse engineering the files night be easier than reverse engineering the airplane.
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    Says the guy not constantly surrounded by aerospace engineers :) What are the odds someone said the phrase "those parts? I could mock up copies in a weekend!"
- adolph 6y ago
  Your story reminds me of what I read about the McLaren F1, that it had a particular 90s Compaq that had to be kept running in order to service them. As it turns out, this is recently no longer true. He also has "the laptop"—a mid-1990s Compaq running custom DOS software created by McLaren when the F1 was new. This gray brick was, for many years, required to access the car's engine control and body control modules. Today, McLaren uses a modern Windows computer running a software emulator for day-to-day computer maintenance. Hines keeps the vintage Compaq around just in case. https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453949/the-only-mclaren-f1-technician-in-north-america/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453...
- triggercut 6y ago
  Good callout. However, it might not be all that bad. CAD file formats are known to last for decades to maintain backwards compatibility, since the packages are expensive and upgrade paths of large companies slow. CAD files (at least planar modeling as opposed to parametric or solid modelling) tend to have pretty straight forward data structures for geometry. Find the point or vertex struct and you're halfway there. The complexity is association and metadata which were nowhere near as bloated then as they are now. As someone who works regularly for large asset owners, asset life-cycle information (digital and analogue) and the proper management of that information is often ignored because organizations pass that risk to the people working with the asset maintaining their own working knowledge to get their job done. We've had international Building Information Modeling standards since the turn of the century but there's often no business case or standard enterprise process to make leverage technology for asset management. AI and ML are starting to appear more and more in the operations space, however many pilot projects have to start with digitizing the asset in the first place, which becomes a cost impediment for many getting off the ground. It really frustrates me as there are great things that can already be done today but the initial step financially usually scares off anyone who has to know 5 years in advance what their operating budget is.
wwww4alll 6y ago
Unfortunately, this will result in failure. This country simply does not have enough skilled engineers to design and produce original parts to requirements. Let alone reverse engineer a worn out part. B2 is product of its time and the amount of engineering resources that went into design and development simply can not be replicated with current society. Tik Tok stars make multi millions of dollars, so why would any smart person spend years in school and solve complex problems to build state of art Stealth Plane. Boeing can’t even produce a simple jet without having it fall out of the sky few times, 737 Max.
- lambda2001 6y ago
  I would disagree on this point. I work in aerospace with a a lot of smart folks. Boeing's 737 issues are a product of many years of poor management choices, but I don't think represent the talent of the industry as a whole.
  - wwww4alll 6y ago
    737 Max is just the poster child for issues in aerospace. There are many other examples, F35, 787, F22, are just recent examples. The flow of smart folks in the pipeline are dwindling. You may be working with smart folks, but how many are going to retire in few years? Who are going to replace them? Does the current education system produce the number and quality of candidates needed?
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Project failures cannot be simply attributed to a workforce problem without a detailed analysis especially when the top example is a widely reported management failure.
      - wwww4alll 6y ago
        It’s an industry failure, society failure, not just a single project failure. This country can not build a new reliable airplane, like it did decades ago. It’s failed project after project. Ask yourself why this is the case? What has changed in this country? What has changed in the industry. What has changed in society? It’s not just aircraft. Where are US high speed rail systems, that other countries built 30, 40 years ago? Where are modern infrastructure? Who works in water treatment plants, providing clean drinking water for millions of people? What happens when all these guys retire in few years? Tik Tok is all fun and games, and no one wants to do the hard messy work of treating water for consumption.
lurquer 6y ago
For many reasons - limited production run, secrecy, and age — the need in this case for reverse engineering isn’t all that surprising. Nevertheless, these things may become more common if we are at the apex of our civilization. I could imagine a RFP in Rome from 300 AD or so soliciting bids to figuring out how the hell to make an aquaduct, amphitheater, or even cement!
YesThatTom2 6y ago
Why is the government allowed to reverse engineer AND create laws making it difficult for citizens to do so? Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. That said... I think there's an opportunity here: EFF and other pro-reverse engineering organizations should sue and demand that the DOD follow the same laws that citizens follow. If they lose the lawsuit, it be great ammunition (so to speak) for stopping anti-reverse engineering laws. If they win... bonus!
- deleted 6y ago
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- Jtsummers 6y ago
  > EFF and other pro-reverse engineering organizations should sue and demand that the DOD follow the same laws that citizens follow. They'd have to have standing for such a suit and they have none. NG and others involved in the design and manufacturing might have standing, but they're also unlikely to sue. This is not a novel activity for DOD.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. Or the contract allows it.
  - Wohlf 6y ago
    And the patents would have expired after 20 years anyways.
elevaet 6y ago
The only possible explanation is that the Stealth Bomber was indeed crafted using alien technology. /s
feralimal 6y ago
Yes, as the US cedes the economy to China, they will also surely become stronger militarily. And with the US (and other Western countries) in a perpetual lockdown in the coming years, which will accelerate the transition - we had better make sure we are able to copy the tech!
azernik 6y ago
A related story: One of the proposals for future upgrades to SLS (ugh) was liquid-fueled boosters using new-build F-1 engines (i.e. Saturn V main engines). Unfortunately, the specs were not complete; not only was lots of stuff different in the factory than in the drawings, but parts of the engine were literally hand-built. Think API documentation built on a tight deadline, and published while software is still under development. Luckily, some NASA engineers were already taking one apart and modeling the parts for previous SLS work. The new Dynetics version ended up much simpler and cheaper because of new manufacturing methods, but the reverse engineering process required to get there was a serious project in its own right. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
kgbier 6y ago
Here is a relevant lecture on the decay of specialised knowledge across civilisations. https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko Included is an anecdote about Texas Instruments and loss of knowledge between generations of silicon hardware.
mschaef 6y ago
The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state. Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the manufacturing process, decommissioned the plant that made it, and the people that knew how to do it weren't around any more. They figured it out, but it doesn't necessarily look easy to do (nor does the material seem easy at all to make in the first place). https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/ https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/ p20 here says more: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_... Edit: I somehow missed this other thread in this story, despite a search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367
workergnome 6y ago
My grandfather spent the last part of his career doing this sort of work—often on classified projects, I'm told. Usually there was an assumption made on the project about the useful working life of any part, and the expected duration of the program, and they made the "right" number of spares. Things change, and the factory/tooling/people are long gone. Also, often the underlying tech isn't available. But the part needs to weigh the same amount, meet the same guidelines, and fit in the same hole. It's cheaper to pay someone to spend the time to figure out how to make the replacement then to mothball the entire airplane—almost regardless of how expensive it might be.
jb1991 6y ago
This is exactly the sort of problem that Jon Blow talked about in his talk about preventing the collapse of civilization [0] -- the human race forgets how it does amazing things. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317
frakkingcylons 6y ago
One of my aerospace professors in college used to be the secretary of the Air Force and B2 development started during his time in office there (back when Carter was president). I remember him saying that one of the missed opportunities in his opinion for the U.S. was not buying more B2 bombers. They can reach anywhere on earth and we only have 20 of them. But Congress didn’t want to keep making them after the Cold War.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Why don't you ask China? They've already got that and everything else
aurizon 6y ago
Advances in additive fabrication, plus other advances in substractive machining and the use of sintered metal molded preforms, composites etc., explain most of this. The time saved with the newer methods yield a net efficiency.
dwheeler 6y ago
I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the cores, all technical data related to the stack up, vacuum brazing, and installation of the cores on existing units. The deliverables will also include all technical data related to the tooling needed..." It's clear they don't have the technical data. Here's how this can happen: the government asks for proposals, and the prospective contractors say "we'll create it for you for cheaper if you don't require the technical data & its related rights". The government program manager (PM) is under a lot of pressure to "get it cheaper", and this is cheaper in the short term, so the government PM agrees. The PM will be around for a few years, then leave. Later on, the contractor is the only one who can make the parts (because they're the only ones with the technical data & the technical data rights to do it). The government procurement system is all about competition, but now there is no possibility for real competition. Thus, the parts will cost 10x or more, and the government PM who approved this is long gone (probably with a promotion), and the contractor is happy with incredibly large profit margins. I don't know if that's what happened in this case. But it's very very possible.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised. It has happened with a lot of different acquisition programs. That was actually one of my first thoughts on reading the article, as I know people who've had to do this kind of reverse engineering for other aircraft due to a lack of tech data in the initial contract and refusal of USAF to purchase it later.
- b-mmxx 6y ago
  This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.” Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.
trasz 6y ago
Not the first time this happens. Reminds me of a case where they had to reverse-engineer parts for one of the stockpiled atomic warhead types.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
marshmallow_12 6y ago
depressing to read. We point to military technology as a sign of how ingenious we are. Then all that effort gets lost due to laziness and being overambitious. it's beyond belief, our much vaunted stealth technology will be completely worthless in a generation due to simple ineptitude. i'm not sure how the military can be trusted with a toy radio, let alone h bombs.
freedomben 6y ago
I was active duty Air Force in the mid 00s, and we had a tropospheric scatter terminal called the TRC-170 where the entire manual was reverse engineered. Air Force Technical Manuals aren't the most riveting of documents to read, but man that one was painful. The technology is badass though, and still useful even half a century later! The story (which I have no idea if is actually true, but it was widely repeated), was that the engineer who built it in the 60s didn't get paid the full amount that he thought he was owed, so he destroyed the technical manual as a middle-finger to the Air Force.
aftbit 6y ago
"This engineering effort is to reverse engineer the core of the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers, develop disassembly process to remove defective cores, develop a stacking, vacuum brazing, and welding process to manufacture new heat exchanger cores and to develop a welding process to install the new cores on existing B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The requirement includes reverse-engineering the re‐core process for the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The B‐2 Load Heat Exchanger (NSN 1660‐01‐350‐8209FW) uses air and Ethylene Glycol Water (EGW) liquid to produce cold air for the cooling system." They need to change some plugged up radiators. Good to see that old bombers and old trucks have the same problems.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Everyone once in a while you'll see a story in the news like "Congress budgets $x million to keep open a factory that builds 20 tanks a year even though we don't need more tanks" Even though there's definitely a pork aspect, there is also actual value in being able to keep that sort of business continuity and institutional knowledge alive.
bdowling 6y ago
> Twenty-one years after the last Spirit was delivered... Isn't this just the Air Force not wanting to pay full-price for replacement parts from Northrop Grumman now that the patents have expired?
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Sort of related: in UK an entire skyscraper went up in flames, and it was obvious there were multiple breaches of fire safety. Over 100 people died. The inquery was told that the plans for the building were lost, and it was the intern's fault that he deleted them off his pc. https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lost-forever-after-laptop-wiped-inquiry-hears https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lo...
- doggodaddo78 6y ago
  I remember that. Shitty builders, developers, and inspectors. Are these both then "their dogs ate their homework" defenses?
doggodaddo78 6y ago
If I were a reporter, I'd have 3 questions for DoD: Aren't they spending tens of MIC billions on new bombers soon anyhow? Why aren't they cannibalizing other airframes and just making do? Why didn't they have a spares support contract for the entire lifecycle of the airframe?
williesleg 6y ago
Damn h1b's just doing the needful
waynesonfire 6y ago
Sheesh, who reads that job description and feels like they're the perfect fit?
torgian 6y ago
Kind of interesting, as this is essentially the plot for the universe of Battletech.
ajarmst 6y ago
The B2 was designed to stealthily penetrate long distances into the USSR. It was a 1980s black program that eventually (at absurd cost) only shipped about 20 aircraft for a mission role that no longer existed. It's not surprising that the infrastructure and supply chain to maintain them into the latter parts of their operational life didn't materialize. I am curious about what the current role of the B-2 is, as the US doesn't really have much need to bomb anywhere that it doesn't already have complete air superiority (and retaliatory strikes that wouldn't be preceded by pounding the local air force flat are best served by missiles, drones and other things that don't take a crew somewhere they might crash and end up confessing to war crimes on live TV). It was used to deliver a few bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not in a role that couldn't have easily been filled by a B-52. Or a B-17. (I checked. There are currently more than 40 B-17s still flying in the world. That's twice as many as there are B-2s. Hmmmm...)
- md_ 6y ago
  It’s still a part of the so-called nuclear triad. Whether it’s actually critical for second-strike credibility (absent a 24/7 in-air alert, which I think no longer exists?) is up to debate, of course, but that would be the rationale.
travisgriggs 6y ago
The B-2 pictured says "Spirit of Pennsylvania" on its gear flap. Are all of fleet named in similar spirit (pun)? Would seem kind of reminiscent of WWII battleships named after states of each is named "Spirit of a State".
- neurotech1 6y ago
  Yes. Spirit of (Something) is how the B-2s are named.
giftcard 6y ago
Reverse engineer? Just ask the Chinese Communist Party. I'm sure they have a copy of the blueprints.
8bitsrule 6y ago
There has to be a way to transfer the massive yearly income of public money into the right private pockets.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  People who put effort into spending money effectively eventually get beat out by people who put effort into convincing the government to give them money. This isn't unique to public money; SEO, advertising, marketing &c. are all ways to get private people to part with their money.
isolli 6y ago
Tangentially reminds me of this video by Jonathan Blow [0], "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization". The eye-opening moment, for me, was the importance (and neglect) of the inter-generational transfer of knowledge in maintaining technological complexity. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Not an exact reply to your comment/that video, but I think this dovetails well with it. Burke's "Connections" (1978) from the BBC is an interesting look at how technology has been developed and built on itself over time.
- vivab0rg 6y ago
  That was the first thing I thought. Jon Blow was spot-on.
crististm 6y ago
When you read the Skunk Works book you stumble upon passages where the government has to pay for tools maintenance and storage after the project is complete. Some bureaucrat entity always decides at some moment that paying for storage of an arbitrarily old project tooling is not worth it.
sandos 6y ago
I'm not surprised. I was recently tasked with a very simple change in a bootloader in an industrial product used in the nuclear industry. Part of the task was also to find the latest sourcecode that was actually compiled into the product. The last known changes was some 20+ years ago! I, as a contractor, and an employee (who was the one who actually coded the last change!) spent more than a week trying to hunt down any leads to anyone who could know where the source could be found. In the end we gave up, we had no leads at all it turned out. The code was not developed in the same company, and not even those working peripherally with these things were still working in the company. In the end, the 15 lines of assembly that was supposed to be reverted/removed was done, but the uncertainty of the C-code part of the bootloader and some evidence that the known code was in fact no the latest and greatest, the change was abandoned altogether and a workaround in another part used instead. I reverted to binary comparisons of machine code, and I also suggested editing the actual machine code to avoid recompiling other parts of the code, but it wasn't a very popular option and I advised against it if there were a possible workaround.
jedimastert 6y ago
This sounds like an awesome idea for the beginning of a sci-fi story: a test for a team the government wants to reverse engineer an alien spaceship or something. I also just remembered this is the beginning of the original Stargate movie...
jondiggsit 6y ago
Ask China, I'm sure they have a copy of the plans.
ajwmalcolm 6y ago
Wasn't there a joke about this in the x-files when the lone gunmen were at a poker game?

467 points by alrs 6y ago

Dupes / other identical submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322477 --- As an aside, does it still qualify as a dupe if there wasn't any significant discourse?

Jtsummers 6y ago
Re aside: Generally no. Some submissions just don't take due to poor timing (not lining up with when an interested audience will catch, upvote, and discuss it).

dmurray 6y ago

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? So, the tinfoil hat interpretation of this story would be, of course the Pentagon has the original blueprints in quintuplicate, but it's identified reverse engineering as a key strategic advantage China has over the US (pretty reasonable so far, right?) and has announced this as a way to shuffle some money into building up domestic RE expertise in the defence industry.

tablespoon 6y ago
I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when they shutdown production early, so it would be possible to restart if needed. You can't capture everything you need to know in blueprints and documentation.
- benzene 6y ago
  >Long out of production. The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hondo77 6y ago
    > The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. Actually, the B-2 was one of the first military aircraft designed with CAD. https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spirit-of-Innovation.pdf https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spiri... (search for "NCAD")
- jyounker 6y ago
  Preventing the loss of manufacturing capability is one of the reasons for offering military aid to friendly countries. We give them money to buy weapons, but they are obligated to buy certain weapons systems with that money. For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active. It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  A friend of mine looked into building a P-51 from scratch, as buying a real one was too expensive. He ordered the blueprints, which are readily available. But then he talked to some P-51 owners, who told him the blueprints wouldn't be much use. The airplane was defined by the jigs used to build it, and the blueprints were just drawn up later as documentation and never checked. The jigs were scrapped when the airplane went out of production.
- 6y ago
Jtsummers 6y ago
US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Also, to quote Independence Day: > You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    One fears we'd be shocked by how much is actually going to General Smith's brother-in-law's toilet-seat dropship company. We'd like to think that Pentagon auditors could find that sort of thing, except that Pentagon people tell us continuously that they are unauditable. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...
jandrese 6y ago
As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project. That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
- nullserver 6y ago
  My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work. Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
  - banana_giraffe 6y ago
    It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
time0ut 6y ago
I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
  - est31 6y ago
    Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there This was true of lots of things outside NASA. This was one of the problems that killed the UK attempt to modernise the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft [0]. They wanted to fit new wings to the old planes, but only discovered after the contract had been signed that the different airframes had not been built identically, but were different interpretations of a common plan. Each of the nine planes was in effect a completely new refit challenge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4
godelski 6y ago
Even if you're not innovating everything you want to reverse engineer enemy systems because you want to discover vulnerabilities. This is common practice.
TheCondor 6y ago
I've heard from various acquaintances that it's not unusual for the contractor to be required to destroy documentation and tooling for certain classified projects upon completion.
- structural 6y ago
  It is absolutely standard practice for this to happen. At contract completion, the contractor must destroy or return all classified materials: these sorts of designs would certainly be included. It's pretty interesting, but a lot of this stuff is structured specifically so that the contractor organization doesn't retain knowledge that it's "not supposed to have", as wasteful as that ends up being. Even stuff like a list of personnel who worked on a project or production line might be included... so that a few years after the project is completed, the management of the contractor might not even be able to figure out who to ask, because they've destroyed even their knowledge of the list of people who worked on the component's design and manufacturing.
mattnewton 6y ago
I wish my tax dollars were going to some galaxy-brain forward thinking group of men and women capable of making such reverse engineering challenges for itself; but it almost certainly is the case that what looks like sheer incompetence is just that.
- prox 6y ago
  Most of the companies are Initech ;)
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Office Space (the movie) If you don't get the reference. Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.
deleted 6y ago
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enkid 6y ago
Read about the history of NASIC and the other service intelligence centers [0]. Understanding foreign technology is one of their core missions. I'm pretty sure they have already been reverse engineering stuff for a long time. [0]https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/ https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. I though they already had enough practice reverse engineering the alien tech at Area 51?
GuB-42 6y ago
Nah, I think the one guy who knows the thing is gone, the data was on a hard drive that crashed and the backup system didn't work, and the papers copies are probably somewhere except no one knows where and it is faster to reverse engineer the damn thing. I have no reason to believe that defense projects are not plagued by bureaucracy, office politics and incompetence like in a lot of government entities and large companies. If anything, it is worse because secrecy is a convenient way to hide incompetence. And when information is shared on a "need to know" basis and we realize that no one "needs to know", then it gets lost. I have touched a bit on defense projects (not in the US) and generally, compared to civilian, open projects, if feels slow and primitive. I didn't get to the super-secret stuff but I have a feeling that the only parts where civilians don't do much better are the ones that only the army is interested in.
alliao 6y ago
Yeah no. Back in the 2000s when Iraq war was happening and marines were using MSN Messenger and I asked whether the unencrypted nature of the chat program would adversely impacted on their missions etc, and he basically said "hell they can spy all they want WE don't even know what we're doing next" Which I thought he was joking at the time.
908B64B197 6y ago
> If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its parts were made and machine replicas if needed? I suppose they could always call the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed who designed it in the first place. Like getting tech support for your Huawei networking equipment, just use the Cisco guide! [0] [0] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-correcting-the-record https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
- Bedon292 6y ago
  For anyone unaware Lockheed was hacked in 2007 and the hackers got away with technical documentation related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hack was attributed to hackers in China. So it is thought that the development of the Chinese J-20 was at least helped along by information from the hack.
dokem 6y ago
I think the US (and power nations in general) have a history of reverse engineering the foreign war tech they can get their hands on.
dublin 6y ago
We generally only reverse-engineer technologies from elsewhere (no, not other countries...)

whalesalad 6y ago

The B-2 is ancient, doesn't seem very surprising.

Jtsummers 6y ago
I had to check, it's not as ancient as some other bombers with B-2 first flight occurring in 1989. I met a pilot who flew on the same B-52 as his father, and his grandfather had flown some of the first B-52s. This was in the 00s, about 15-18 years ago.
- aphextron 6y ago
  It's impossible to overstate how long these things have been in service. The oldest B-52 airframes still in active service were built longer ago than the first flight of the Wright brothers was when they were built.
  - rstupek 6y ago
    And likely to be in service for another 30 years. A 100 year airframe
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - koalahedron 6y ago
      I worked at Boeing Wichita (which is no more), and an engineer told me that the B-52 was getting heavier over time because the old wires weren't removed for avionics upgrades. Of course, they were always trying to put one over on me as a newbie (I worked on avionics S/W in Ada for the tankers). He also said a big problem was the expense of doing a modern engine upgrade. Anyone know if they ever re-engined it? Was he joking again? Having one of these fly over my apartment on Rock Rd. was a dish rattler--I used to see B-2s every once in a while too (fairly loud too, IIRC).
      - 6y ago

projektfu 6y ago

I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.

LeonenTheDK 6y ago
That's an interesting though, like software documentation that hasn't been updated over years of patches. Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Also sounds like a git repository where people were working on local branches to do production work and then when they left the company, never pushed their branch upstream.
  - kelchm 6y ago
    That's assuming there is a git repo or any kind of version control at all.
    - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
      They're not assuming. They're analogizing.
- azernik 6y ago
  A long write-up of an equivalent for the F-1 engine is here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the... The analogy to out-of-date software documentation is very apt. As problems or inefficiencies popped up in the factory, they'd change things and just not write them down (because of deadline pressure, often). If you wanted to build new ones you'd have to either get the factory workers to show you how the thing was actually built, or tear down a working example to reverse engineer it. (Which has been done!)

rlyshw 6y ago

I've done installs of video streaming tech on USAF-managed NIPR net and we've had to reverse engineer some of the mechanisms on their own network... This does not surprise me at all.

magtux 6y ago

This happens even outside Defense in all specialized industry. I was once asked if I could reverse engineer a part for a 30 year newspaper stacking machine in a printing press. Very interesting stuff and a consequence of being niche.

Jtsummers 6y ago
Exactly. We're dealing with: - Limited production run. These aren't Ford Mustangs or Toyota Priuses with hundreds of thousands and millions being produced. There were 21 built over 13 years. This also leads to the consequence that each one should be considered a bespoke creation and not a "copy" of the others (even ignoring the 20+ years of individual maintenance work they've each had). - Time. It's been 21 years since the last one was produced in 2000. Whatever facility produced this has long since lost that capability. - Aging workforce. Whoever designed it is likely retired, and could even be dead at this point. Certainly the senior engineers who may have been 40+ when the project started in the 70s/80s. Even if they weren't retiring and dying, the people on the project have been doing other things for 20+ years.
- lambda2001 6y ago
  The last part is extremely true. I have known many engineers that worked on the B-2 and have since retired. There's very little chance many of them would come out of retirement and honestly I don't think the government would pay for that.
  - azernik 6y ago
    And even if they did, no one remembers that well the things they did decades ago.
    - Bedon292 6y ago
      And even if they did, would that knowledge help reproduce it on modern equipment? Going to have to rebuild all of the tooling and processes anyways.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots. You see the real issue? Even if they have the blueprints, it will be difficult to even manufacture the parts here. There's so many more problems like this coming down the pipeline. We've effectively lost (or rather acquiesced) almost all manufacturing skill to other countries. This was a result of the largest corporations taking advantage of labor arbitrage and then flooding their home market out of business. If we really want to reverse this, we need to do what it takes to bring manufacturing back to the United States. It's a painful reversal of the open-trade policies of the past. Honestly, Trump was right to fight so hard for this, even going so far as to remove us from NAFTA. I don't have a good strategy for this, but probably some set of minimum manufacturing of everything should happen within our borders, say 10%, and accomplishing that target with a combination of sticks and carrots.

wwww4alll 6y ago
Unfortunately, your assessment is very correct. There will be no solution and only a slow decline as previous systems become obsolete and there no on to fix or upgrade to better systems. This country is producing more Tik Tok stars than engineers that can sustain civilization.
- austinshea 6y ago
  What a confident proclamation that is backed up by nothing, aside from your limited perspective.
  - wwww4alll 6y ago
    Name a successful plane developed recently by US military or commercial enterprises?
    - robotresearcher 6y ago
      Boeing 787 series. Young in plane years. Best airliner in the sky. SpaceX makes working spacecraft.

aarongray 6y ago

Proof the B-2 was built using UFO technology :-P

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Pokepokalypse 6y ago

This is not new. Older planes and other hardware have LONG had to be reverse-engineered (including microchips).

flyinghamster 6y ago

This brings up an important principle: the higher the tech, the shorter its lifespan. A cellphone from the 1980s won't function anywhere but in a Faraday-caged lab equipped with a suitable cell site, while 2G and 3G systems are fast disappearing. Only recently have landline telephone exchanges begun to drop support for pulse dialing, but otherwise, a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today, and DTMF dates to 1963.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
> a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today This still amazes me, even though every time a call comes in on the landline, the 50-year-old rotary-dial phone in my living room rings alongside the cordless phone. It doesn't get used much, except for the loud ringer and during extended power outages.
imtringued 6y ago
You can get hundred year old manual lathes/mills and they still do their job. It's because the basic principle upon which they were built is still valid today. The only difference with modern machinist tools is that they are fully automated and you can just retrofit CNC parts to the old equipment.

mgarfias 6y ago

Somethign I haven't seen mentioned here is that the technology used to design this thing is waaaaaaaaaaaay old. I know for a fact it was designed on an IBM mainframe (dad ran the one that the YF-22 was designed on). I can't remember what CAD package they used there, but its definitely conceivable that the software doesn't even exist anymore. How would you go about building a new one if you can't read the CAD files, if you have them. Hell, the building in hawthorne where dad worked isn't even owned by northrop anymore. Its spacex.

folli 6y ago
Reverse engineering the files night be easier than reverse engineering the airplane.
- curiousllama 6y ago
  Says the guy not constantly surrounded by aerospace engineers :) What are the odds someone said the phrase "those parts? I could mock up copies in a weekend!"
adolph 6y ago
Your story reminds me of what I read about the McLaren F1, that it had a particular 90s Compaq that had to be kept running in order to service them. As it turns out, this is recently no longer true. He also has "the laptop"—a mid-1990s Compaq running custom DOS software created by McLaren when the F1 was new. This gray brick was, for many years, required to access the car's engine control and body control modules. Today, McLaren uses a modern Windows computer running a software emulator for day-to-day computer maintenance. Hines keeps the vintage Compaq around just in case. https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453949/the-only-mclaren-f1-technician-in-north-america/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a14453...
triggercut 6y ago
Good callout. However, it might not be all that bad. CAD file formats are known to last for decades to maintain backwards compatibility, since the packages are expensive and upgrade paths of large companies slow. CAD files (at least planar modeling as opposed to parametric or solid modelling) tend to have pretty straight forward data structures for geometry. Find the point or vertex struct and you're halfway there. The complexity is association and metadata which were nowhere near as bloated then as they are now. As someone who works regularly for large asset owners, asset life-cycle information (digital and analogue) and the proper management of that information is often ignored because organizations pass that risk to the people working with the asset maintaining their own working knowledge to get their job done. We've had international Building Information Modeling standards since the turn of the century but there's often no business case or standard enterprise process to make leverage technology for asset management. AI and ML are starting to appear more and more in the operations space, however many pilot projects have to start with digitizing the asset in the first place, which becomes a cost impediment for many getting off the ground. It really frustrates me as there are great things that can already be done today but the initial step financially usually scares off anyone who has to know 5 years in advance what their operating budget is.

wwww4alll 6y ago

Unfortunately, this will result in failure. This country simply does not have enough skilled engineers to design and produce original parts to requirements. Let alone reverse engineer a worn out part. B2 is product of its time and the amount of engineering resources that went into design and development simply can not be replicated with current society. Tik Tok stars make multi millions of dollars, so why would any smart person spend years in school and solve complex problems to build state of art Stealth Plane. Boeing can’t even produce a simple jet without having it fall out of the sky few times, 737 Max.

lambda2001 6y ago
I would disagree on this point. I work in aerospace with a a lot of smart folks. Boeing's 737 issues are a product of many years of poor management choices, but I don't think represent the talent of the industry as a whole.
- wwww4alll 6y ago
  737 Max is just the poster child for issues in aerospace. There are many other examples, F35, 787, F22, are just recent examples. The flow of smart folks in the pipeline are dwindling. You may be working with smart folks, but how many are going to retire in few years? Who are going to replace them? Does the current education system produce the number and quality of candidates needed?
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Project failures cannot be simply attributed to a workforce problem without a detailed analysis especially when the top example is a widely reported management failure.
    - wwww4alll 6y ago
      It’s an industry failure, society failure, not just a single project failure. This country can not build a new reliable airplane, like it did decades ago. It’s failed project after project. Ask yourself why this is the case? What has changed in this country? What has changed in the industry. What has changed in society? It’s not just aircraft. Where are US high speed rail systems, that other countries built 30, 40 years ago? Where are modern infrastructure? Who works in water treatment plants, providing clean drinking water for millions of people? What happens when all these guys retire in few years? Tik Tok is all fun and games, and no one wants to do the hard messy work of treating water for consumption.

lurquer 6y ago

For many reasons - limited production run, secrecy, and age — the need in this case for reverse engineering isn’t all that surprising. Nevertheless, these things may become more common if we are at the apex of our civilization. I could imagine a RFP in Rome from 300 AD or so soliciting bids to figuring out how the hell to make an aquaduct, amphitheater, or even cement!

YesThatTom2 6y ago

Why is the government allowed to reverse engineer AND create laws making it difficult for citizens to do so? Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. That said... I think there's an opportunity here: EFF and other pro-reverse engineering organizations should sue and demand that the DOD follow the same laws that citizens follow. If they lose the lawsuit, it be great ammunition (so to speak) for stopping anti-reverse engineering laws. If they win... bonus!

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Jtsummers 6y ago
> EFF and other pro-reverse engineering organizations should sue and demand that the DOD follow the same laws that citizens follow. They'd have to have standing for such a suit and they have none. NG and others involved in the design and manufacturing might have standing, but they're also unlikely to sue. This is not a novel activity for DOD.
macspoofing 6y ago
>Obviously the answer is that it is legal to reverse engineer something if you own it. Or the contract allows it.
- Wohlf 6y ago
  And the patents would have expired after 20 years anyways.

elevaet 6y ago

The only possible explanation is that the Stealth Bomber was indeed crafted using alien technology. /s

feralimal 6y ago

Yes, as the US cedes the economy to China, they will also surely become stronger militarily. And with the US (and other Western countries) in a perpetual lockdown in the coming years, which will accelerate the transition - we had better make sure we are able to copy the tech!

azernik 6y ago

A related story: One of the proposals for future upgrades to SLS (ugh) was liquid-fueled boosters using new-build F-1 engines (i.e. Saturn V main engines). Unfortunately, the specs were not complete; not only was lots of stuff different in the factory than in the drawings, but parts of the engine were literally hand-built. Think API documentation built on a tight deadline, and published while software is still under development. Luckily, some NASA engineers were already taking one apart and modeling the parts for previous SLS work. The new Dynetics version ended up much simpler and cheaper because of new manufacturing methods, but the reverse engineering process required to get there was a serious project in its own right. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

kgbier 6y ago

Here is a relevant lecture on the decay of specialised knowledge across civilisations. https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko Included is an anecdote about Texas Instruments and loss of knowledge between generations of silicon hardware.

mschaef 6y ago

The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state. Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the manufacturing process, decommissioned the plant that made it, and the people that knew how to do it weren't around any more. They figured it out, but it doesn't necessarily look easy to do (nor does the material seem easy at all to make in the first place). https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/ https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/ p20 here says more: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_... Edit: I somehow missed this other thread in this story, despite a search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367

workergnome 6y ago

My grandfather spent the last part of his career doing this sort of work—often on classified projects, I'm told. Usually there was an assumption made on the project about the useful working life of any part, and the expected duration of the program, and they made the "right" number of spares. Things change, and the factory/tooling/people are long gone. Also, often the underlying tech isn't available. But the part needs to weigh the same amount, meet the same guidelines, and fit in the same hole. It's cheaper to pay someone to spend the time to figure out how to make the replacement then to mothball the entire airplane—almost regardless of how expensive it might be.

jb1991 6y ago

This is exactly the sort of problem that Jon Blow talked about in his talk about preventing the collapse of civilization [0] -- the human race forgets how it does amazing things. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

frakkingcylons 6y ago

One of my aerospace professors in college used to be the secretary of the Air Force and B2 development started during his time in office there (back when Carter was president). I remember him saying that one of the missed opportunities in his opinion for the U.S. was not buying more B2 bombers. They can reach anywhere on earth and we only have 20 of them. But Congress didn’t want to keep making them after the Cold War.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Why don't you ask China? They've already got that and everything else

aurizon 6y ago

Advances in additive fabrication, plus other advances in substractive machining and the use of sintered metal molded preforms, composites etc., explain most of this. The time saved with the newer methods yield a net efficiency.

dwheeler 6y ago

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the cores, all technical data related to the stack up, vacuum brazing, and installation of the cores on existing units. The deliverables will also include all technical data related to the tooling needed..." It's clear they don't have the technical data. Here's how this can happen: the government asks for proposals, and the prospective contractors say "we'll create it for you for cheaper if you don't require the technical data & its related rights". The government program manager (PM) is under a lot of pressure to "get it cheaper", and this is cheaper in the short term, so the government PM agrees. The PM will be around for a few years, then leave. Later on, the contractor is the only one who can make the parts (because they're the only ones with the technical data & the technical data rights to do it). The government procurement system is all about competition, but now there is no possibility for real competition. Thus, the parts will cost 10x or more, and the government PM who approved this is long gone (probably with a promotion), and the contractor is happy with incredibly large profit margins. I don't know if that's what happened in this case. But it's very very possible.

Jtsummers 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised. It has happened with a lot of different acquisition programs. That was actually one of my first thoughts on reading the article, as I know people who've had to do this kind of reverse engineering for other aircraft due to a lack of tech data in the initial contract and refusal of USAF to purchase it later.
b-mmxx 6y ago
This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.” Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.

trasz 6y ago

Not the first time this happens. Reminds me of a case where they had to reverse-engineer parts for one of the stockpiled atomic warhead types.

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marshmallow_12 6y ago

depressing to read. We point to military technology as a sign of how ingenious we are. Then all that effort gets lost due to laziness and being overambitious. it's beyond belief, our much vaunted stealth technology will be completely worthless in a generation due to simple ineptitude. i'm not sure how the military can be trusted with a toy radio, let alone h bombs.

freedomben 6y ago

I was active duty Air Force in the mid 00s, and we had a tropospheric scatter terminal called the TRC-170 where the entire manual was reverse engineered. Air Force Technical Manuals aren't the most riveting of documents to read, but man that one was painful. The technology is badass though, and still useful even half a century later! The story (which I have no idea if is actually true, but it was widely repeated), was that the engineer who built it in the 60s didn't get paid the full amount that he thought he was owed, so he destroyed the technical manual as a middle-finger to the Air Force.

aftbit 6y ago

"This engineering effort is to reverse engineer the core of the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers, develop disassembly process to remove defective cores, develop a stacking, vacuum brazing, and welding process to manufacture new heat exchanger cores and to develop a welding process to install the new cores on existing B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The requirement includes reverse-engineering the re‐core process for the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The B‐2 Load Heat Exchanger (NSN 1660‐01‐350‐8209FW) uses air and Ethylene Glycol Water (EGW) liquid to produce cold air for the cooling system." They need to change some plugged up radiators. Good to see that old bombers and old trucks have the same problems.

Rebelgecko 6y ago

Everyone once in a while you'll see a story in the news like "Congress budgets $x million to keep open a factory that builds 20 tanks a year even though we don't need more tanks" Even though there's definitely a pork aspect, there is also actual value in being able to keep that sort of business continuity and institutional knowledge alive.

bdowling 6y ago

> Twenty-one years after the last Spirit was delivered... Isn't this just the Air Force not wanting to pay full-price for replacement parts from Northrop Grumman now that the patents have expired?

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

Sort of related: in UK an entire skyscraper went up in flames, and it was obvious there were multiple breaches of fire safety. Over 100 people died. The inquery was told that the plans for the building were lost, and it was the intern's fault that he deleted them off his pc. https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lost-forever-after-laptop-wiped-inquiry-hears https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lo...

doggodaddo78 6y ago
I remember that. Shitty builders, developers, and inspectors. Are these both then "their dogs ate their homework" defenses?

doggodaddo78 6y ago

If I were a reporter, I'd have 3 questions for DoD: Aren't they spending tens of MIC billions on new bombers soon anyhow? Why aren't they cannibalizing other airframes and just making do? Why didn't they have a spares support contract for the entire lifecycle of the airframe?

williesleg 6y ago

Damn h1b's just doing the needful

waynesonfire 6y ago

Sheesh, who reads that job description and feels like they're the perfect fit?

torgian 6y ago

Kind of interesting, as this is essentially the plot for the universe of Battletech.

ajarmst 6y ago

The B2 was designed to stealthily penetrate long distances into the USSR. It was a 1980s black program that eventually (at absurd cost) only shipped about 20 aircraft for a mission role that no longer existed. It's not surprising that the infrastructure and supply chain to maintain them into the latter parts of their operational life didn't materialize. I am curious about what the current role of the B-2 is, as the US doesn't really have much need to bomb anywhere that it doesn't already have complete air superiority (and retaliatory strikes that wouldn't be preceded by pounding the local air force flat are best served by missiles, drones and other things that don't take a crew somewhere they might crash and end up confessing to war crimes on live TV). It was used to deliver a few bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not in a role that couldn't have easily been filled by a B-52. Or a B-17. (I checked. There are currently more than 40 B-17s still flying in the world. That's twice as many as there are B-2s. Hmmmm...)

md_ 6y ago
It’s still a part of the so-called nuclear triad. Whether it’s actually critical for second-strike credibility (absent a 24/7 in-air alert, which I think no longer exists?) is up to debate, of course, but that would be the rationale.

travisgriggs 6y ago

The B-2 pictured says "Spirit of Pennsylvania" on its gear flap. Are all of fleet named in similar spirit (pun)? Would seem kind of reminiscent of WWII battleships named after states of each is named "Spirit of a State".

neurotech1 6y ago
Yes. Spirit of (Something) is how the B-2s are named.

giftcard 6y ago

Reverse engineer? Just ask the Chinese Communist Party. I'm sure they have a copy of the blueprints.

8bitsrule 6y ago

There has to be a way to transfer the massive yearly income of public money into the right private pockets.

aidenn0 6y ago
People who put effort into spending money effectively eventually get beat out by people who put effort into convincing the government to give them money. This isn't unique to public money; SEO, advertising, marketing &c. are all ways to get private people to part with their money.

isolli 6y ago

Tangentially reminds me of this video by Jonathan Blow [0], "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization". The eye-opening moment, for me, was the importance (and neglect) of the inter-generational transfer of knowledge in maintaining technological complexity. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

jimktrains2 6y ago
Not an exact reply to your comment/that video, but I think this dovetails well with it. Burke's "Connections" (1978) from the BBC is an interesting look at how technology has been developed and built on itself over time.
vivab0rg 6y ago
That was the first thing I thought. Jon Blow was spot-on.

crististm 6y ago

When you read the Skunk Works book you stumble upon passages where the government has to pay for tools maintenance and storage after the project is complete. Some bureaucrat entity always decides at some moment that paying for storage of an arbitrarily old project tooling is not worth it.

sandos 6y ago

I'm not surprised. I was recently tasked with a very simple change in a bootloader in an industrial product used in the nuclear industry. Part of the task was also to find the latest sourcecode that was actually compiled into the product. The last known changes was some 20+ years ago! I, as a contractor, and an employee (who was the one who actually coded the last change!) spent more than a week trying to hunt down any leads to anyone who could know where the source could be found. In the end we gave up, we had no leads at all it turned out. The code was not developed in the same company, and not even those working peripherally with these things were still working in the company. In the end, the 15 lines of assembly that was supposed to be reverted/removed was done, but the uncertainty of the C-code part of the bootloader and some evidence that the known code was in fact no the latest and greatest, the change was abandoned altogether and a workaround in another part used instead. I reverted to binary comparisons of machine code, and I also suggested editing the actual machine code to avoid recompiling other parts of the code, but it wasn't a very popular option and I advised against it if there were a possible workaround.

jedimastert 6y ago

This sounds like an awesome idea for the beginning of a sci-fi story: a test for a team the government wants to reverse engineer an alien spaceship or something. I also just remembered this is the beginning of the original Stargate movie...

jondiggsit 6y ago

Ask China, I'm sure they have a copy of the plans.

ajwmalcolm 6y ago

Wasn't there a joke about this in the x-files when the lone gunmen were at a poker game?