What Went Wrong At Boeing

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

I highly doubt your information is correct anyhow. Can you provide a link.

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MIflyer said:

I worked on the USAF F-4 and the funny thing about it was where the air conditioning packs were. And it had packs, not a single pack, one on each side of the nose.just aft of the radome.

The correct place for an air conditioning pack on a fighter of that design is just aft of the cockpit, close enough to get bleed air from the engines and ram air from the intake ducts and easily able to blow cool air to the cockpit and avionics. But when they revised the F3H design into the F4H they decided to remove the 20MM guns that were on the F3H and replace them with Sparrow missiles. So they needed a radar operator, Sparrows not being Fire and Forget. That extra crewman took up the space where the air conditioning pack would have gone and they gave the air conditioning guys at AiResearch the place where the cannons would have been placed. So, without enough space for one pack they built two strange looking smaller ones, one for the cockpit and a less powerful one for the avionics. Ram air came in through two scoops where the muzzle for the guns would have been and was exhausted to the rear and downward, where the empty shell casings would have fallen.

Trying to come up with ducts to do tests of repaired heat exchangers was a challenge that I had to accomplish.

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MIflyer said:

Well, engineers may start with a "clean sheet of paper" but that does not mean they empty their minds. Look at the attached, from the book F3H In Action.
View attachment 554380

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MIflyer said:

Of course, any version of the F3H or F-4 did not even recognize the concept of checking your six!

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MIflyer said:

A friend of mine got on the tail of a couple of ROK F-5's at 35,000 ft and stayed there. It took them a bit to figure out he was there and, unable to outturn him, dove for the deck. Boy were THEY in trouble when they got home! You see, my friend was flying a B-52.

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MIflyer said:

Well, the F-8 did not have the best rear view around, either. In fact, he could not even see his own wing.

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• While there are always hiccups, cheating, and short cutting, I fully believe, for the most part, that American military equipment is the best in the world.
• I also felt that, again by a significant most part, all the people I worked with, Northrop, subcontractors, and government, wanted to provide a quality well tested product for the AF. Yes, subcontractors, and Northrop, wanted to make money, this is capitalism after all, but quality was rarely an issue.
• I never cared much for Boeing, in that they were quite expensive. The government paid much more for an installation in the Boeing portion that for a similar installation in the Northrop portion.
• I think the Boeing's stunning failure with the 737 Max was a problem endemic to the commercial airplane industry. Boeing was not the only aircraft with the problems of uncontrolled perturbations of flight controls. The A3xx also had several problems with uncontrolled pitch commands, which luckily occurred at altitude that allowed the crew to mitigate, but not solve, the problem. Another Airbus was lost because the crew could not correct for an inadvertent initiation of Go Around on final, causing the aircraft to stall and crash. The procedures for cancelling Go Around was complex and not trained for. We had a single button for cancelling autopilot. What happened to that button? Maybe explained by the following paragraph.
• I think there is a danger in the process of aircraft designers and operators as they move towards totally automated aircraft and prematurely depending on the aircraft systems to ensure safety of the aircraft over the admittedly more prevalent pilot error. Already aircrews are encouraged to let the aircraft do the flying. Autopilot functions are probably now embedded in the flight control computers thus making them difficult to override. One of the main factors the Korean Air crash in Korea was, quoted from Wikipedia, "inadequate training on the planning and executing of visual approaches"????! As mention previously, a China Airline A300 was lost when a pilot accidently engaged go-around, they manually overrode the throttles but where incapable of overriding the autopilot pitch up with flight control input. Recognizing the danger, and not knowing how to disengage go-around auto function, they initiated a go around by releasing forward pressure on the controls and pulling back thus additionally adding nose up command to what the autopilot command was already doing and the aircraft stalled and crashed.
• The pathway to the outstanding safety of modern commercial aircraft is littered with many grave sites. I would have hoped with all the simulation and computer technology available today, that the pathway to future safe aircraft would not have those grave sites. Apparently that is not happening.
• Even though the C-141 had full autoland capability, I never operationall flew any type of coupled approach. I always flew manual penetrations, approaches and landings.

davparlr said:

Even though the C-141 had full autoland capability, I never operationall flew any type of coupled approach. I always flew manual penetrations, approaches and landings.

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MIflyer said:

Talking about mistakes companies have made, both Lockheed and the USAF made a big mistake with the C-141. When C-141 production ended (Lockheed proposed a bomber version as the production wound down), Lockheed asked the Air Force what they wanted to do with the production tooling; after all, it was Air Force property. The Air Force responded that they had no further requirement to build any more C-141's and thus did not need the tooling. Lockheed replied that it needed to be paid to store the tooling and if the Air Force was not going to fund the storage they would destroy the equipment, which they did.

Not many years later the Air Force and Lockheed both rued the day they every let the 141 tooling be destroyed. Needless to say the C-5A turned out to be less of a wonder than had been envisioned and the costs were so high that the Air Force could buy many fewer than they had planned. They would have liked to have bought more C-141's, but that option was gone. Lockheed also realized that a commercial C-141 would have sold well, while their attempts to build commercial C-5A's were a complete failure.

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BobB said:

Running C-5 & C-130 production concurrently didn't leave much room for storing C-141 tooling in place so it would have had to have been disassembled enough to move outside for storage. That's a lot more expensive than storing in place on the shop floor and means more work refurbishing if the tooling is ever put back into use. C-141 received FAA certification as L-300 and was pitched to airlines but nobody bit.

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jetcal1 said:

I remember going by the Lockheed Marietta plant in the late 80's and being aghast at the condition of the tooling that was being "stored" outdoors.

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BobB said:

Running C-5 & C-130 production concurrently didn't leave much room for storing C-141 tooling in place so it would have had to have been disassembled enough to move outside for storage. That's a lot more expensive than storing in place on the shop floor and means more work refurbishing if the tooling is ever put back into use. C-141 received FAA certification as L-300 and was pitched to airlines but nobody bit.

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FLYBOYJ said:

That's common - I worked for Lockheed in Burbank and that was done all the time for superseded and obsolete tooling. Also consider some tooling belongs to the government and the contractor may be directed to store it in such a manner.

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