Boeing Starliner OFT-2

GW Johnson · 2024-06-19 16:05:22

Brian:

My old 170 had old-time round analog gauges for everything. It had a decent radio and a decent transponder, adequate before the switch to the ADS-B thing. It was a perfect example of a well-equipped stick-and-rudder airplane from the paper chart and E6B era. It had a VOR that was all my dad and I ever needed. No glass cockpit there! I inherited it from my dad when he passed away. He rebuilt it from a wreck. I bucked rivets for him as a young teenager, when he was doing that.

I had a very mild stroke that did no damage anyone could see, just before I could solo. I had no idea who I was or what was going on, during the hours after that stroke. I did not get grounded by the FAA, I grounded myself. There was no way in hell I would want such a thing to ever happen again, with me alone at the controls. After a while, I sold the airplane to a fellow EAA member who would use it for basic flight instruction. It was a more-than-perfect airplane for that purpose. Even better than a cub!

And my dad's original airplane was a J-5 Piper Cub Cruiser, rebuilt from a wreck. That's a 3-seat cub with a real door. I sanded the airframe tubes with crocus cloth when I was 8-10 years old. My dad was both an aeronautical engineer and a certified A&P. He retired from LTV aerospace back in the 1980's as their chief of airframe design. The F-8 Crusader and A-7 Corsair-2 are his proudest designs, among many things.

My proudest achievement was becoming an advisor to him at home, that he trusted.

GW

kbd512 · 2024-06-21 09:22:33

GW,

That's a shame, but we're all getting old and eventually all good things come to an end.

You'll be pleased to know that we're still using E6Bs, our "paper" flight computers. They still work. All the gauges in the planes I've flown have been dial gauges. They're easy to understand, but the first time I was in their "RedBird" simulator with "Garmin" electronic instruments, I knew that was better than the old dial gauges in most of their planes. High quality glass is golden. All the info is in one place, you don't have to scan the entire panel, because it's all on one screen. It's just faster. With the exception of some nav and comm functions, it's pretty intuitive, too. The planes they had set up with glass have multiple redundant displays and they have their own batteries behind the panel if the alternator fails, so power is fairly well covered. If they have electronic circuit breakers, then you're very well covered. It'd be almost impossible to fry the instruments. That only leaves software and chip failures, but both the MFDs and iPads are pretty reliable, and you can have multiple complete instrument backups if your iPad can connect to the sensor input. You definitely can't do that with dial gauges.

We flew one cross-country with paper maps just to say we did it, and then my CFI told me to stuff the maps in my bag and started teaching me to use visual reference landmarks and the maps loaded into the iPads strapped to our kneeboards. He'd point out important landmarks to remember for navigating back home, and then we'd plot a course to and from the practice area using those landmarks. We used the highways, the church steeple and HEB near the airport to "know" if we were on course and where to turn on base or final, etc. We had one instrument training flight into real clouds, which was fun and surprisingly easy to do. We repeated cross-wind landings at least a dozen times in one hop, but the repetition really helped cement what to do to grease it on when the wind doesn't cooperate.

The F-8 and A-7 airframes were exceptional at their jobs, so thanks to your father and his engineering staff for designing them. Simple, rugged, and easy to maintain airframes are sorely lacking today. Navy maintainers were quite pleased with the A-7, and still spoke fondly of them after they were gone. The F-14s and F/A-18s were not well-liked. Tomcats were hangar queens while I was still in, all were subsequently retired, and the Hornets had incessant landing gear and avionics issues. We badly need a single-engine general purpose heavy all-weather attack aircraft that won't break the bank to maintain.

A new A-7 facsimile could mount the F-35's GAU-22 25mm cannon for strafing, use the version of the F-35's engine without the afterburner to reduce per-unit production costs by increasing production rates for the engine cores, drop JDAMs or fire AGM-65s and AGM-84s, with Sidewinders for self-defense. It really doesn't need to carry much else. Raytheon's 1/3rd scale full-featured APG-79 equivalent, which was miniaturized for drones using modern electronics, would easily fit in the nose. Add the F-35 EOTS (not the full DAS suite) and you have a superb attack platform. This doesn't describe our current F-16 or F-35 designs, unfortunately. F-4, F-14, F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 programs ultimately transformed into absurdities which required too many maintenance hours and too much money to justify the number of hours flown. The type would emphasize climb rate, turning rate, swift acceleration to high subsonic speeds to gain energy back quickly, and a powerful armament- all the hallmarks of a good fighter. In practice, it would easily out-turn the faster MiGs and Sukhois, even if it can't chase them down. That's what missiles are for. It would be a simple and unpretentious design, and while not "the best" at anything in particular, it will get the job done at a reasonable cost.

GW Johnson · 2024-06-21 09:42:01

About 3+ decades ago, there were war games being flown at Nellis to evaluate the F-15 being introduced back then. Because of the longer range radar, it was outflying the aggressor squadron using F-5's to simulate Migs. No radar warning receivers in the F-5.

American ingenuity always surfaces, even in pilots trained to think and behave like Russians. They got tired of losing in the war games. They went to Radio Shack and bought police radar warning receivers, plus the gear to jerry-rig them to aircraft power. This stuff was not large, and fit in the flight suit pockets along with rolls of duct tape.

Preflight inspections revealed no contraband, so once they were ready to taxi, the warning receivers were duct-taped to the glare panel and plugged into aircraft power. The games suddenly went lopsidedly in favor of the aggressor squadron, which really pissed of the generals, who for the longest time, could not figure out why. (Eventually the truth was revealed.)

The point is, you put a really good pilot into a just-barely-good airplane, and you still have a winner!

I agree with you, simpler is better and more reliable. Which is also more combat-capable.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2024-06-21 09:43:56)

GW Johnson · 2024-06-22 09:31:14

In todays news: NASA has pushed back Starliner's return to an undetermined date in July. This is to give them more time to figure out what has been going wrong with the helium leaks and the thrusters. This particular story gave enough detail to pin down the faulty thrusters to those on the service module, not the capsule itself, as I first thought. Supposedly, helium supplies are sufficient to re-enter at any time. The problem seems to be not fully understanding the sources of the problems.

GW

Oldfart1939 · 2024-06-24 23:18:17

This delay gives them more time to come up with a rationale to sell if the return of Starliner manages to kill Butch and Sunni. I just watched an interesting and highly detailed plan for having a standby rescue vehicle available to rescue the entire crew of the ISS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPs19M2 … WL&index=5

Oldfart1939 · 2024-06-24 23:30:41

GW- Thanks for the wonderful history lesson that you shared about your Dad at LTV. The F-8 was a wonderful design and became a fearsome MiG killer.
I can empathize with you about selling your bird, and I finally sold mine in 2019 after having a mild heart attack in June of 2018. Mine was a PA28-235 Dakota, complete with a Garmin 530W navigation and flight control system. It was fully IFR certified at the time I sold it.

GW Johnson · 2024-06-25 09:12:29

My Dad took his 170 to Oshkosh one year. He and a friend camped under its wing. That's a long way from Texas at only 110 mph and with only a VOR, but he said he had a great time flying it there and back.

Before the 170, Dad took me from D-FW area to San Angelo in the old J-5. It cruised at only about 75 mph, and we fought an enormous headwind getting there. That was back in the early 1960's, and the J-5 had no lights and no radio. It did not have a starter or a battery. It was restricted to day VFR, and it was a hand-prop start.

Took all day plus a refueling stop to get there. But the return flight sure seemed fast! Massive tailwind.

GW

Oldfart1939 · 2024-06-25 16:35:30

GW-
My first flight in my Dakota was memorable after I took delivery in Murieta, CA in 2011. I was a certificated Private Pilot, but didn't have my high performance endorsement yet, so the seller arranged for an Airline pilot to pick up some cash and a free ride back from Casper (KCPR) at my expense. We had an very early departure planned and the visibility was strictly IFR departure, so I got some real instrument time as a result. I already was partway through an instrument rating and had about 20 hours of hood time, so the ALP called and got a departure clearance for our departure. I took off and managed a really nice takeoff under zero visibility conditions and simply followed his directions regards altitude rate of climb, and heading. What a cool experience to break through to VFR "on top," and fly towards the Sierras at 11,500 feet. The cloud cover cleared and we flew directly over Big Bear Lake, and using a combination of VOR Nav and my partner's Garmin tablet GPS system, skirted Las Vegas. We did my first landing at Bryce Canyon, after flying over Zion NP at 9500 feet.
The the real fun began as we flew over Dinosaur National Monument and picked up a powerful tailwind we had a ground speed of 209 kts with an airspeed of 142 kts, according to the ASI! What a thrilling ride for my first time in my very own bird!

SpaceNut · 2024-06-25 18:26:06

Boeing has just 45 days before the capsule is considered expired and no longer capable to return on a safe trajectory from the launch date.

GW Johnson · 2024-06-25 18:30:41

Given the crappy valves they used in the NTO tankage and supply systems, I'm surprised it is rated for 45 days yet!

GW

GW Johnson · Today 12:16:53

Still no change for the Starliner crew that is supposedly "not stranded" aboard the ISS. The lack of change in the situation for over 3 weeks suggests nobody on the ground has yet figured out why all these troubles cropped up. Reporting on this is sparse, and from a technical standpoint, unreliable, but it appears the thrusters have some unspecified problem that causes the control software to lock the misbehaving thrusters out.

Pressure-fed bipropellant hypergolic-ignition thrusters are a technology that has been flying for over 6 decades now. There is no excuse for these troubles to be cropping up like this. But there might be a reason: crappy quality. The thruster technology is dangerous enough that you have to do it "right", in order to get reliable, safe results. "Right" means very careful attention to details, and very high quality.

Apparently 5 of the 28 on the service module "tanked" and got locked out, which is what delayed docking, because that was too many to lose, as programmed into the flight control software. They somehow manually restored 4 of the bad 5 thrusters, good enough to be able to override the control lockouts, and thus be able to dock. I may well be wrong, but I get the definite impression that thrusters are still showing up "unusable" in the software, and nobody can figure out why.

And, there's also the helium leaks, which threaten getting propellant into the thrusters. They flew with 1 small leak, but 4 more showed up on the way up, one which was actually very large. They may or may not yet understand what has been going wrong there, either, I dunno for sure. Only some of the reporting talks about flanges and seals. If so, there's no excuse for this, either. Even with easy-to-leak helium, the plumbing technology has been flying for over 6 decades now. Although a reason could be crappy quality.

Despite the press releases, NASA (and Boeing) have been very close-mouthed about all this trouble. I understand the delay, since there is no "smoking gun" hardware to look at, once the service module is discarded for entry after making the de-orbit burn.

What I'd hazard a guess about, is crappy quality building these things, forced by the same evilly-greedy corporate culture that screwed up the 737 MAX big time (killing 2 planeloads so far), and which has also screwed up the 777X and 787 programs, although those have yet to kill passengers.

Nobody has run into troubles with the entry capsule yet, so far. But that's coming! It was made by the same Boeing.

The batteries that power stuff aboard Starliner "time-out" after about 45 days, or so I heard. About half that time is now gone. If Boeing and NASA can't figure this out by then, they are faced with a choice fraught with consequences either way: either bring the crew home with untrustworthy batteries powering their capsule, or bring the crew home in a SpaceX Dragon.

Boeing management will likely push for risking the crew on bad batteries to avoid more bad publicity (to keep stock price from dropping further). And, after Columbia and Challenger, I do not trust NASA upper management to value crew lives above bad publicity. They didn't before, in either case, and actually attempted a cover-up during the Challenger investigation.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (Today 12:36:45)

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