Plane crazy

A Japanese view. Japan Self-Defense Forces are going to buy the F35 too, if it ever exists, so Lockheed is manufacturing parts in Japan, enabling the Japanese government to up its own costs for the thing by 50%. Membership has its privileges, and you have to pay for them.

Pilots on the Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, F35, don't look out the window. Or at their instrument panels. As Adam Ciralsky writes in the current Vanity Fair, their helmets are equipped with something like Google Glass on steroids, giving them a continuous [jump]
video feed from six cameras mounted under the wings and around the body of the plane, plus a display of all the flight data and such. It's been described as like having X-ray vision, being able to see through the walls and floor, but it sounds to me more like the illusion of being coterminous with the plane, of hurtling naked through the sky, and guess what?

some test pilots have experienced spatial disorientation in flight serious enough that they have disabled the data and video streams to the helmet and landed using the plane’s conventional flight displays. Spatial disorientation is a potentially lethal condition in which a pilot loses his bearings and confuses perception with reality. A 2002 joint U.S.-U.K. review of Class A mishaps in the U.S. Air Force between 1991 and 2000 found that spatial disorientation was implicated in 20 percent of cases, at a cost of $1.4 billion and 60 lives. (Class A mishaps are defined as incidents that result in a “fatality or permanent total disability,” destruction of an aircraft, or $1 million or more in damage.) The report’s authors worried that, with the advent of helmet-mounted displays, mishaps involving spatial disorientation “will continue to pose a significant threat to aircrew.”

Who could have expected that?

They had to design in that way though, because the cockpit design gave pilots a lousy view. Whether they thought of redesigning the windows instead I don't know, but I imagine if they did they decided it would be too expensive. That's the kind of thinking that has made the project seven years late, so far, and run its total costs up to a trillion and a half dollars. I seem to be using a lot of italics here.

Also, and I've heard this before, you have to schedule your battles pretty carefully, with rain dates, because the F35 can't fly in bad weather.

And do you know why this monster has not been put out of its misery or controlled in some way? Lockheed's design engineers may be doing a monumentally crappy job, but their political engineering is beyond outstanding:

The program was designed to spread money so far and so wide—at last count, among some 1,400 separate subcontractors, strategically dispersed among key congressional districts—that no matter how many cost overruns, blown deadlines, or serious design flaws, it would be immune to termination. 

Unlike feeding and educating the people and taking care of their health. Or even having a government, which some of our members of Congress have concluded we could save some money by doing without (after all, they're working for Lockheed too, so they think the same way). When they couldn't agree on a budget at the beginning of this year and the famous sequester of funds took place, the Defense Department made its savings by putting its employees on furloughs—ripping off its employees and their families the way Walmart might do—and Lockheed never lost a penny. If they succeed in shutting the government down this week, look for Lockheed to come out of it just fine.