Stealthier Bomber

     The USAF is now heavily touting its next generation stealth bomber, the B-21.  It will supposedly have such and such capabilities, will be available by the mid-2020s, and will cost X amount of money.  All of these assertions are blatant lies, or at least they are lies if the track record of similar projects is any indication.  There is a one hundred percent certainty that the aircraft will not enter service until, at best, the early 2030s, that it will cost two or three times as much as currently projected, will be plagued by bugs and performance problems that will take years and oceans of cash to correct, and will be far more expensive to operate and maintain than promised.

     The fault ridden F-35 is a perfect example of this baleful trend, only worse, much worse.  It should be straight out cancelled forthwith before we end up with unreliable, poorly performing, and already obsolete fighters costing half a billion dollars each, but of course it won't be.  One shudders to think what the B-21 program will ultimately cost, but two billion dollars per aircraft is not out of the question.  It's insane.  We can build naval destroyers for half that much.  Arleigh Burkes that is.  The ill-conceived Littoral Combat Ship program mirrors the problems of the F-35.

     Every major new weapons system fielded in the last forty plus years has followed that dreary template.  Every.  Single.  One.  There are many reasons, some good, most bad, why this is the case, but nevertheless the pattern has proven robust.  And Congress buys it because of the sugarplums dancing in their heads engendered by a manufacturer's intentional spreading of the build around as many polities as possible.

     There may well be a need for an ultra-stealth penetrating bomber, but all parties concerned will have to lie through their teeth to get it built.  Even more bizarre is that everyone knows everyone is lying.  Not even the dimmest congresscritter accepts at face value the promises of developers, but they climb on board anyway since the multi-billion dollar largesse will be spread far and wide.

     Not even dictatorships can escape this phenomenon.  Russian and Chinese development regimes take the same baleful path, although in the Chinese case development is aided by wholesale theft of western technology which, luckily for us, tends to be countered by wholesale corruption and technological inexperience.

     If the B-21 project is approved it will progress as outlined above and there does not seem to be any power on Earth capable of preventing it, or anyone much interested in preventing it.  Unfortunately, if this particular Big Lie was not in effect, if developers stated realistic timelines and costs, then it's highly doubtful these projects would ever be approved in the first place, even if the weapons are desperately needed.

      Virtually all new weapons systems, airborne or otherwise, suffer from the same problem, especially new seaborne systems.  The problem is so pervasive and without exceptions that it scarcely qualifies as unusual anymore.  It's just the current way of doing business.  The western way of low casualty warfare is brutally expensive and steadily getting more so, as the Chinese are rapidly discovering.  Even stolen technology has to be built and fielded, a process which quickly reveals the ruinous expense of doing so.  The Indian military has honed this art to such a fine degree that major new in-house weapons systems can expect to be deployed, never.  Turgid waves of corruption and incompetence surge back and forth through development programs for decades until the government throws up its hands in surrender and buys foreign hardware.  A decade or two after that troops and pilots might actually receive the weapons, by which point they will be thoroughly obsolete.

      Just remembered an article I read back in Sept. 2016.  It reported that the design and initial testing phase of a new hand grenade for the military has taken, so far, five years.  It was also reported that with continued testing and evaluation the grenade will not be supplied to troops for another five years.  Well there you have all of the woeful circumstances listed above in a concussive nutshell.  It will take a full decade to design, test, manufacture, and field the new device.  This is a hand grenade mind you.  Not a fighter, not a tank, not an artillery piece or even a rifle, but a flipping hand grenade.  I have no doubt that it will be the first hand grenade consisting of parts made in all fifty states and will cost several thousand dollars each to obtain.

Addendum:  The F-35 appears to have solved enough of its teething problems to enter service in increasing numbers.  All to the good, but it doesn't alter the frightening costs of its development and maintenance expenses.  The only hopeful note in evidence is that the Chinese and the Russians are finding that catching up to the U.S. level of technology is proving much harder than they thought.

They can steal specifications the livelong day, but it doesn't excuse them of the need to duplicate and integrate stolen tech into their industrial bases and thence into home-grown systems.  The one thing they can not steal is the reliability of a system built elsewhere by experts with much greater knowledge bases.  The Chinese J20 is a case in point.  An alleged competitor to the F-22, its development began in the 1990s and has yet to enter service in any numbers because of reliability and performance issues.  Its development could easily span thirty years before the aircraft enters normal service in front line squadrons, and very well may not match the performance of the aircraft which was its target.  C'est la guerre dudes.

Second addendum.  The B-21 Raider bomber has had its public debut, and, supposedly, it has come in on time and on budget, but I've yet to see any figures on cost.  If the program continues on without major and expensive hiccups, it will be the first time a major weapons system has done so.   

For Once And Bloody All

       Pet peeve time.  I'd like to focus on something so trivial in the great scheme of things that it may cause your brain to sludge up like molasses at absolute zero.  It has nothing to do with politics, terrorism, economics, psychology, political correctness, or why an allegedly merciful God allows the Kardashians to exist.  My petty peeve is the enduring myth, famed of high school physics classes, that airplanes fly because a wing is curved on top.

      What prompts this pettish jeremiad is recently seeing this myth promulgated on PBS, of all places.  I do not recall if they dragged Bernoulli in as an avatar of scientific authority on the subject, but my H.S. science teacher did, and so did, shudder, the teacher of the general physics class I took in college.  The college prof was not pleased when I called him on his explanation.  I had just finished reading the veriest and ancient bible of flight by Wolfgang Langewiesche titled Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying.  It's still available today, and is beloved by primary flight instructors the world over.  At any rate, I airsplained to the prof why aircraft do not fly by Bernoulli alone, and mirabile dictu he bought it.  As well he should.

      By far the simplest explanation of why an aircraft flies is Newton's Third Law of Motion.  To wit: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The action with which we are concerned is the wind flowing past the wing of an aircraft as it is propelled through the sky by either its engine, or by gravity in the case of a "glider".  Imagine a sheet of thin plywood, an air plane, being hauled through the air exactly parallel to the wind.  It will produce no lift and a small amount of drag.  Tilt that woody plane up at the front and now we're talking lift.  This lift is a reaction to the wind impinging on its lower surface---Newton's third law in airborne action.

      The high school explanation is that the upper curvature of a wing causes the air to speed up and reduce the pressure thereby lifting the plane into the air as shown by Mr. Bernoulli's equations.  Now here's where it gets a little tricky.  The usual demonstration of pure Bernoulli lift is a high school teacher blowing over the top of a sheet of paper, with the class acknowledging that the paper really is lifting up just because of the higher speed air blowing over the "top".  So indeed pure Bernoulli lift can "fly" a sheet of paper.  By extension, it is averred, the curved upper surface of a wing can reduce the pressure enough to lift a plane into the air.

      Sadly, an actual aircraft can not fly solely because of the pressure reduction caused by the upper curvature of its wing.  Got that?  To actually fly, an aircraft must tilt its wing up in front by varying degrees (referred to as "angle of attack") so that the "relative wind" impinging on the bottom can push the plane up.  The consequent lowered air pressure over the top of a real wing is an effect of lift, not its cause.  The high school explanation turns this on its head by putting the effect before the cause.

      This is not just semantics.  As an illustration stick your hand out your car window at speed with your palm flat to the wind.  Naturally you will feel a great deal of pressure.  The air pressure is certainly reduced behind your palm, but it is obvious that this reduced pressure is not a proximate cause of the pressure you feel on your palm.

      The specific curvature of a wing surface, the "airfoil", is there for two main reasons.  The first is to reduce drag and thus make the wing more efficient.  The second and more important function is to control the flow of air around the wing so that the desired operating parameters of a given aircraft are met.  A thickly airfoiled flat-bottomed wing suits the needs of an aircraft intended to take off slowly, fly slowly, land slowly (think Piper Cub), and to give the aircraft gentle handling and more easily controlled stall (loss of lift) characteristics.  The thin and relatively small wing of a jet fighter sports an airfoil configured for high speed combat and may appear to have very little curvature at all.  

      In fact many jet fighters have symmetrical (same curves top and bottom) airfoils so that their flight characteristics are similar whether upright or inverted.  Symmetrical airfoils are also preferred on aircraft dedicated to aerobatics, and for the same reason.  Countless millions of hours in wind tunnels, computer simulations, and contemplation by febrile noggins have been devoted to optimizing airfoils in the past century.  This has resulted in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of different airfoil designs that optimize a wing for duty stretching all the way from gossamer indoor free-flight models traveling at one or two miles per hour, all the way to the Space Shuttle which is the fastest winged beastie ever to fly.

  Airfoils trick the wind, hence the "foil", into proceeding smoothly around and across a wing in the desired fashion, but they are not the primary cause of the lift a wing generates.  Mr. Bernoulli's equations do indeed describe what happens when a wing generates lift, but they do not appear to properly order cause and effect when applied to an airfoil.  Pure Bernoulli pressure reduction is indeed seen in very many hydro-dynamic situations.  Carburetors spring to mind most readily, but pure Bernoulli "lift" can not, will not, ever cause a real full-sized aircraft to rise into the sky.

  Pass it on, and if you see a copy of Stick and Rudder, pick it up.  It's an entertaining read even for a non-pilot.

 

 

Tinfoil Tom

This post is from a half dozen years ago, but is as germane as ever.


From a recent Time article/interview with actor Tom Hanks:

     "Back in World War II we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

     Well there went any respect I might have been harboring for the man, for with a mere four sentences he's officially joined the growing ranks of clueless celebrity numbskulls. What's truly brain boggling is that this is from someone who recently participated in a multi-year 100 million dollar mini-series about the fighting in the Pacific during WWII.

     The statement "We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different." is born of a particularly fine and special sort of historical ignorance amounting to blind stupidity.  They were indeed "different" from us, in that the Japanese Empire was attempting to subjugate and pillage half the world, while brutally murdering millions of innocents in the process, and the United States was not. That's the only difference really worth considering you buffoonish yob. Sure they were reviled you nitwit. They were the ENEMY. And by enemy I do not mean the other side of a chess game or a cricket match.  I mean a powerful and merciless military juggernaut that for many years before Pearl Harbor had bombed, smashed, raped, tortured, murdered, enslaved, starved, and worked to death many millions on its brutal rampage across much of Asia, with India and Australia square in its gunsights.  Anyone who got in their way was dealt with entirely without mercy.

     Aside from the U.S. cutting off raw material supplies to this juggernaut of evil, the main brief the Japanese held against this country was that it might prove a major roadblock in their grandiose dreams of pan-Asian conquest.  I doubt there was any serious sort of embedded cultural hatred of the U.S. in Japan that was any worse than the normal sort of sneering disdain of all "barbarians", i.e. everyone not Japanese.  And not even the most bellicose in the Japanese general staff thought that invading the U.S. mainland was remotely practical.  A few pointless pinpricks were all the damage to the U.S. mainland they could manage.

     So they were not in any wise "out to kill us because our way of living was different." and we in turn did not generally view them as having that attitude.  They just wanted us out of the way, and the Pearl Harbor attack was supposed to shock the U.S. so much we would sue for peace and allow their pillaging of Asia and the western Pacific to proceed without interference.  The attack was efficiently prosecuted, although it did not complete the task the Japanese had set for themselves.  And of course it was one of the most profound military blunders of all time, but few Americans at the time thought that it was motivated by innate hatred of the people or the culture of this country.

     Before the war, U.S. opinion of Japan itself was not particularly ugly, in fact it was frequently laudatory, although those of Japanese ancestry certainly had major problems on the west coast.  After Pearl Harbor the U.S. propaganda machine swung into action and painted the Japanese as leering subhuman killers of innocents and savage despoilers of whole countries.  The concept of "politically correct" had not reared its putrid head in those days, and cartoonish characterizations of enemy peoples and combatants was de rigueur on all sides.

     The U.S. was lamentably not special in this regard, but slack must be cut on this score because the Japanese plainly and unquestionably were mass killers of innocents and despoilers of whole countries.  This image was reinforced by the wholesale murder of prisoners, including women and children.  In fact their savagery was scarcely eclipsed by the Germans, so however vicious our propaganda was, it was not only well deserved, but actually understated things.  

     However cruel and black-hearted we thought the Japanese military was shortly after Pearl Harbor, they continued to surprise us throughout the war with fanatical savagery no sane American thought possible.  A prime example is the horrifying Manilla Massacre where the Japanese army went into a blind orgy of murder of well over 100,000 civilians, which resulted in the city being reduced to rubble by American artillery attempting to dislodge the fanatical troops who refused to surrender.  It was the most bitter and destructive city battle in the Pacific theater.

     It was entirely the result of the all too real, and stupefyingly wicked, Japanese depredations during the war that they reaped the ultimate nuclear whirlwind, and that consequence had absolutely nothing to do with shop window propaganda posters of smirking bespectacled Japanese troops bayoneting Chinese babies.  They should thank us really because the nuclear bombings abruptly ended the war and likely saved several million lives which would have been snuffed out in a full scale invasion of the main home islands. There are many millions of Japanese alive today precisely because we dropped those nuclear weapons instead of invading the country.

     Moving on, Mr. Hanks is an unfathomable jackass if he thinks there are any parallels whatsoever between World War Two and the current mutual disregard between the western world and the middle-east.  Or at least there are no parallels on the western side.  On the middle-eastern side, hatred of decadent western culture and its democratic institutions is all too real, and clearly supported enthusiastically by millions.  Yeah yeah moderate Muslims blah blah blah.  Sure there are moderates.  Maybe they are in the vast majority, but if so they seem especially helpless in reigning in murderous jihadis, although admittedly said jihadis appear to be experts in literally explosive intimidation of said putative moderates.

     Most Americans do not hate Muslims, but they should and do properly revile the Islamist human garbage who brought down the twin towers, and who routinely attempt to mass murder their co-religionists into submission.  Not a lot to love there, but even so, propaganda posters of caricatured swarthy leering jihadi suicidists bombing polling places, mosques, and Christian churches are notably lacking in American shop windows.

     In summation Mr. Hanks, the Japanese just wanted us out of their way while radical Islamists do in fact hate our culture and want to conquer and subjugate us by whatever means possible.  Not that they are going to achieve this, but that does not make them want it any less or make their murderous depredations any more palatable.  Get a grip Hanks, yank that tinfoil hat off, and really respect those men whom your production is portraying by not painting their incredible sacrifices as a mere clash of cultures or a simple matter of mutual disrespect.  They hated the Japanese not because they were funny looking little yellow fellows who did not look or talk like us, and did not worship the same god, but because they were unspeakably savage, inhumanly bestial, and enthusiastically genocidal feudal fanatics.  They were enemies not merely of us, but also of the peace and freedom of half the globe.

     If Hanks actually believes his statements he should be dismissed as a clueless boob by anyone with even the slightest historical awareness of the insane brutality of the Japanese army of the era.  Some nine hundred of the murdering swine were subsequently hung or shot as war criminals.  That everyone in the Japanese military over the rank of lieutenant was not summarily executed is a testament to the inherent benevolence of the people of this country.  The two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan were a mere tithe of the retribution so richly earned by the brutal ruthless bushido poisoned Japanese war machine.