6 ms·

B-52 Bomber Gets Its First New Communications System Since the 1960s

29 points by MikeCapone 12y ago

JohnBooty 12y ago
According to a March 2014 budget request, the Air Force plans to spend $14 million on the project this year, and a total of $40.6 million between 2014 and 2019. I'm ashamed to admit it, but that seems incredibly cheap. I didn't think the military could change a roll of toilet paper for less than $50 million. (Much respect to those in the military - I think we're all just used to hearing about programs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars)
- mikeash 12y ago
  Well, cost effective programs rarely make the news. Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane. Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....
  - ericcumbee 12y ago
    the 300 dollar ashtray was built for naval use, that if it slammed against something it broke in to several dull pieces instead of tiny shards that went everywhere.
    - ljosa 12y ago
      Did you learn that from The West Wing?
      - ericcumbee 12y ago
        now that you mention it, yeah I think that is where i heard that. Although at one point I looked it up, and I seem to remember that it was an actual thing.
  - hga 12y ago
    As I recall, and agreeing with the first link Google supplied (http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-...), the hammer might have been somewhat special, but the outsized price was simply an accounting artifact, the contract supplied N spare parts and tools, and overhead was evenly allocated to each part, whether it was a hammer or a complete jet engine (I think it was a contract for maintaining them). The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a huge transport, our biggest ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ... more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to: The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember, we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive restart of only 50 in 1985-89.
    - jloughry 12y ago
      Ben Rich's book [1] about the development of the SR-71 explains the reason behind the hammer story. Cadmium plated tools were traced to embrittlement of titanium panels; they spent quite a bit of time tracking down the source of that problem and eliminating Cd plated tools from the factory. As far as coffee makers go, it's not always true in aircraft---especially combat aircraft---that gravity always points down. You see the same awareness in NASA Tech Briefs: coffee makers, toilet seats, even simple things like cabinet latches can't depend on gravity always having the same magnitude, or direction, or steadiness. [1] Ben R. Rich. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. ISBN 0-316-74300-3.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      The trend is towards building fewer of each type of aircraft, too. For example, while 744 B-52s were built, only 78 remain in service. Which makes a $40 million avionics upgrade program pretty impressive. Imagine trying to get a design and production run of under 100 units of military-grade hardware done for half a million dollars apiece.... And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about $150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece. Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the $150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....
lawlessone 12y ago
Independence day? http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-CONECT1.jpg http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-C...
arethuza 12y ago
So not a CRM 114 then?
- jevinskie 12y ago
  It clearly wasn't reliable enough. The Air Force was sick of starting World War IIIs. =)
runjake 12y ago
The headline is completely inaccurate. The B-52H communications systems have received multiple upgrades since they were built in 1960-1961. They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system and the software. CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like this. Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I'd wager (and please correct me if I'm wrong, your experience no doubt means you'd know better than I) that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too. The B-52's primary mission was nuclear bombing for a long time.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Software doesn't deal with EMP hardening. Hardware does. Bits soft setting themselves is almost impossible to debug natively, since your debugger can be effected by the same error. Your bet met is running the algorithm ~20-100 times and comparing the outputs, then averaging. It's pretty horrible honestly.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      The US took EMP testing pretty seriously - the ATLAS-1/Trestle test rig was rather impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I I found it while searching for large wooden buildings a while back: "Trestle is the world's largest structure composed entirely of wood and glue laminate"
      - valarauca1 12y ago
bobowzki 12y ago
The system runs Windows...
- noir_lord 12y ago
  Vista?! Roy where gonna die.
- jevinskie 12y ago
  I hope that the reality is that there are Windows PCs on the plane that the crew can use for mundane things like mission reports (as the article mentioned). I really hope nothing mission-critical is running on a consumer OS. Edit: Are there high-availability versions of Windows? If so, does that version run Word?
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > Are there high-availability versions of Windows? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server > If so, does that version run Word? Yes.
spiritplumber 12y ago
The reason why aerospace stuff sometimes looks dated is that it goes through an unholy amount of testing -- same for essential nautical equipment. Until a few years ago, you'd get on the bridge of a cargo ship and see these big LORAN navigation units built into the console, usually buried under GPS stuff on a swivel mount... because they liked GPS but wanted to be able to quickly get back to the system they KNEW worked in case the new stuff didn't.
- runjake 12y ago
  That and hardware needs to be able to withstand impressive amounts of vibration, environmental conditions, and electromagnetic energy. The latest and greatest ICs typically aren't designed with these in mind, so you're "stuck" with older designs which have been adapted and work well.
- omilu 12y ago
  My friend from college was a navigator on a 4 man crew aircraft called the A-6 I believe. Literally his only function in life was to be able to navigate the plane back in case the GPS failed (using maps and a compass and what ever else). So to combat boredom he would take his laptop up on every flight and watch movies and bullshit with the rest of the crew.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    The P-3 Orion has a periscopic sextant for celestial navigation, in case the GPS and inertial nav both fail. Granted, the former wasn't around when the plane was designed, but the Navy keeps them on the aircraft and keeps the navigators trained in their usage. Your friend's bird, particularly if he was in recently, was an EA-6B Prowler, the electronic warfare variant of the A-6.
spacefight 12y ago
Eternal war and war like capabilities for eternal freedom...
crististm 12y ago
So the thing "runs Windows" so they can do "WORD"!? The amount of BS in government contracts in unbelievable.

29 points by MikeCapone 12y ago

According to a March 2014 budget request, the Air Force plans to spend $14 million on the project this year, and a total of $40.6 million between 2014 and 2019. I'm ashamed to admit it, but that seems incredibly cheap. I didn't think the military could change a roll of toilet paper for less than $50 million. (Much respect to those in the military - I think we're all just used to hearing about programs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars)

mikeash 12y ago
Well, cost effective programs rarely make the news. Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane. Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....
- ericcumbee 12y ago
  the 300 dollar ashtray was built for naval use, that if it slammed against something it broke in to several dull pieces instead of tiny shards that went everywhere.
  - ljosa 12y ago
    Did you learn that from The West Wing?
    - ericcumbee 12y ago
      now that you mention it, yeah I think that is where i heard that. Although at one point I looked it up, and I seem to remember that it was an actual thing.
- hga 12y ago
  As I recall, and agreeing with the first link Google supplied (http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-...), the hammer might have been somewhat special, but the outsized price was simply an accounting artifact, the contract supplied N spare parts and tools, and overhead was evenly allocated to each part, whether it was a hammer or a complete jet engine (I think it was a contract for maintaining them). The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a huge transport, our biggest ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ... more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to: The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember, we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive restart of only 50 in 1985-89.
  - jloughry 12y ago
    Ben Rich's book [1] about the development of the SR-71 explains the reason behind the hammer story. Cadmium plated tools were traced to embrittlement of titanium panels; they spent quite a bit of time tracking down the source of that problem and eliminating Cd plated tools from the factory. As far as coffee makers go, it's not always true in aircraft---especially combat aircraft---that gravity always points down. You see the same awareness in NASA Tech Briefs: coffee makers, toilet seats, even simple things like cabinet latches can't depend on gravity always having the same magnitude, or direction, or steadiness. [1] Ben R. Rich. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. ISBN 0-316-74300-3.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The trend is towards building fewer of each type of aircraft, too. For example, while 744 B-52s were built, only 78 remain in service. Which makes a $40 million avionics upgrade program pretty impressive. Imagine trying to get a design and production run of under 100 units of military-grade hardware done for half a million dollars apiece.... And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about $150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece. Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the $150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....

lawlessone 12y ago

Independence day? http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-CONECT1.jpg http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-C...

arethuza 12y ago

So not a CRM 114 then?

jevinskie 12y ago
It clearly wasn't reliable enough. The Air Force was sick of starting World War IIIs. =)

runjake 12y ago

The headline is completely inaccurate. The B-52H communications systems have received multiple upgrades since they were built in 1960-1961. They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system and the software. CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like this. Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.

mikeash 12y ago
I'd wager (and please correct me if I'm wrong, your experience no doubt means you'd know better than I) that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too. The B-52's primary mission was nuclear bombing for a long time.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Software doesn't deal with EMP hardening. Hardware does. Bits soft setting themselves is almost impossible to debug natively, since your debugger can be effected by the same error. Your bet met is running the algorithm ~20-100 times and comparing the outputs, then averaging. It's pretty horrible honestly.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    The US took EMP testing pretty seriously - the ATLAS-1/Trestle test rig was rather impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I I found it while searching for large wooden buildings a while back: "Trestle is the world's largest structure composed entirely of wood and glue laminate"
    - valarauca1 12y ago

bobowzki 12y ago

The system runs Windows...

noir_lord 12y ago
Vista?! Roy where gonna die.
jevinskie 12y ago
I hope that the reality is that there are Windows PCs on the plane that the crew can use for mundane things like mission reports (as the article mentioned). I really hope nothing mission-critical is running on a consumer OS. Edit: Are there high-availability versions of Windows? If so, does that version run Word?
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Are there high-availability versions of Windows? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server > If so, does that version run Word? Yes.

spiritplumber 12y ago

The reason why aerospace stuff sometimes looks dated is that it goes through an unholy amount of testing -- same for essential nautical equipment. Until a few years ago, you'd get on the bridge of a cargo ship and see these big LORAN navigation units built into the console, usually buried under GPS stuff on a swivel mount... because they liked GPS but wanted to be able to quickly get back to the system they KNEW worked in case the new stuff didn't.

runjake 12y ago
That and hardware needs to be able to withstand impressive amounts of vibration, environmental conditions, and electromagnetic energy. The latest and greatest ICs typically aren't designed with these in mind, so you're "stuck" with older designs which have been adapted and work well.
omilu 12y ago
My friend from college was a navigator on a 4 man crew aircraft called the A-6 I believe. Literally his only function in life was to be able to navigate the plane back in case the GPS failed (using maps and a compass and what ever else). So to combat boredom he would take his laptop up on every flight and watch movies and bullshit with the rest of the crew.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  The P-3 Orion has a periscopic sextant for celestial navigation, in case the GPS and inertial nav both fail. Granted, the former wasn't around when the plane was designed, but the Navy keeps them on the aircraft and keeps the navigators trained in their usage. Your friend's bird, particularly if he was in recently, was an EA-6B Prowler, the electronic warfare variant of the A-6.

spacefight 12y ago

Eternal war and war like capabilities for eternal freedom...

crististm 12y ago

So the thing "runs Windows" so they can do "WORD"!? The amount of BS in government contracts in unbelievable.