Into the wild blue yonder:
The Air Force is planning to lift the four-month grounding of its F-22 Raptor fleet, although it has yet to figure out what went wrong in the aircraft’s oxygen system, sources said.
Service officials will meet Friday to determine what restrictions will remain on the planes, the culmination of a lively debate between various factions in the Raptor community, sources said.
The service grounded the twin-engine fifth-generation fighter on May 3 after pilots reported 14 incidents of “hypoxia-like” symptoms. According to one former F-22 pilot, toxic chemicals were found in the bloodstreams of the affected aviators.
Investigators have yet to ascertain the cause of the problem with the Raptors’ On-Board Oxygen Generating System (OBOGS).
“They haven’t pinpointed it,” one source said. “But they feel that the risk is mitigated enough to stop the grounding while they continue to see what can be done to solve the problem.”
Have fun, kids.
Be safe.
When you have only and handful of the craft and have to play a shell game with them, I guess that means you don’t take chances that there might be a problem with a system. We have, something like 20 B-2s now that one of them crashed. Wonder what 20 B-2s are going to do in a real war.
All the product of bad policy and worrying about the wrong things. As Ted Kennnedy once sneerinly said: Who are we going to bomb?
The F-22 is the logical output product of ‘leaders’ who consider technicians and engineers to be ‘a dime a dozen’.
Go back to the O2 bottle and get them flying and safe. Junk the O2 generator design and start over with a clean sheet of paper, and new company to design and make the new system. Kelly Johnson is once a generation, the bozos that ruined the Brewster Buffalo design are all too common.
And what exactly have they done to actually ‘mitigate’ the problem????? “Oh, go ahead and fly the aircraft the way it is……an Oh, by the way…..you may die. Be careful out there, ya hear?”
I was acquainted with a guy that had a Surfing business in Samoa. Things were a bit rough until he started sending prospects a waiver of liability that had the verbiage, “the surfer may incur injury,…., or death.” Or something to that effect. He said business took off after that. He figured guys were calling each other saying (insert your rendering of the surfer accent), “Hey dude, we may die.”
Actually, telling a pilot to stay out of an AC is like telling a 6 year old to stay out of the cookie jar.
Here’s to you, America’s Heroes! What a marvelous thrill it must be to pilot a magnificent aircraft. I remember eating my sandwich at lunchtime while an Airman at Davis-Monthan in the 70′s, watching the aircraft taxi into the “Graveyard”, one last time; F4′s, F-101′s, F-106′s, Buff’s, all the magnificent flying machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXCs41DkWs
That’s gotta be tough knowing you’re climbing into an aircraft that can kill you in the most insidious way possible.
I think what has kind of boggled my mind this entire time is the lack of data. The pilot is breathing compressed bleed air, coming out of a pretty complex system, yet there is nothing in the cockpit, no sensor, no nothing, that gives the pilot the slightest indication that the quality of his O2 has been compromised or that levels are poor. It’s not until there is a smoking hole and someone gets to the blackbox that it’s clear, and even then, it’s more of a ‘go, no-go’ logic. “No O2, Yes O2″. Not that simple, but that’s it boiled down. So all O2 information is not known until something very very bad has happened. I just think that’s poor planning. Then again, there was the international dateline incident…
The systems pukes missed that one.
Q. Crew Chief: Uh, sir, what is that large green-painted bottle you are taking into my airplane?
A. Pilot: Never mind, CC, I just want to breathe some oxygen which is not mixed with other stuff. Will you help me jury-rig it so that it does not fly about and smash things when subjected to maneuvering accellerations?
A. Crew Chief: Yessir, yessir, Three Bags Full!
+1
Might want to tuck away a small emergency oxy bottle somewhere, just in case.