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the Hornets issue:
Admiral: Corrosion Damage on F/A-18 Hornets ‘Caught Us by Surprise’
The extent of corrosion damage on the U.S. military’s F/A-18 Hornet fleet is requiring more maintenance than expected, an admiral said.

The Navy and Marine Corps are flying the legacy fighter jets longer than planned — 10,000 flight hours, up from 6,000 flight hours — because of delays in the
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program, according to Rear Adm. Michael Manazir, the service’s director of air warfare. As a result, the 1980s-era, twin-engine aircraft is experiencing a high degree of wear and tear, including corrosion.

“The corrosion impacts, I would say, caught us by surprise,” he said this week during a Navy and Marine Corps aviation conference on Capitol Hill. “When we opened them up and realized the extent of the corrosion damage, we realized we couldn’t just replace the parts we were going to replace. We had to put those airplanes aside.”

There are approximately 620
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currently in service, according to a 2015 report on naval programs. The Marine Corps still flies the aircraft as a frontline fighter, while the Navy operates the plane behind the newer
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. Marines in recent months have flown F/A-18s to strike militants affiliated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

COMPOSITE VS METAL

The services had been replacing worn out parts and other components on the F/A-18 as part of a maintenance program to ensure the aircraft could reach a service life of 6,000 flight hours, Manazir said. Extending that engineering effort to yield 10,000 flight hours “would normally be a straightforward task — if it weren’t for the corrosion created by the environments we operate in,” he said.

Complicating the effort was an assumption made by the Navy decades ago that the Hornet, as a composite aircraft, wouldn’t require the same level of corrosion-prevention work as older, mostly metal planes, such as the F-14 Tomcat, A-6 Intruder and the A-7 Corsair II, Manazir said.

“We had not planned on operating the Hornet past 6,000 hours,” he said. “So we did not do the normal corrosion control processes that we used to use on metal airplanes, like the Tomcats, A-6s, A-7s. We understood what corrosion was on metal. The science is different on corrosion on composites.”

In addition, the damage to the aircraft isn’t uniform and appears to be affecting different parts and structures, Manazir said. “They made each airplane coming into the depot kind of a one-off,” he said. “We realized we couldn’t just replace the parts — we also had to look at the corrosion on the surrounding framework.”

SITTING IDLE

Manazir didn’t say how many Hornets are down for repairs at depots. But they’re among an ongoing aircraft shortfall that’s estimated to be more than 100 planes through 2020, he said. The problem is exacerbated by mandatory spending caps that limit available maintenance funding, he said.

“That equates to two to three squadrons,” he said.

What’s more, the maintenance woes aren’t limited to F/A-18s. The Marine Corps wasn’t able to deploy CH-53E Super Stallion heavy-lift helicopters to assist with earthquake relief efforts in Nepal this spring because of a wiring issue that required replacing hydraulic lines, according to Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, deputy commandant of aviation.

The Corps instead dispatched to the country
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helicopters and
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tilt-rotor aircraft. The deadly May 12
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that killed six Marines and two Nepalese soldiers is believed to have been caused by bad weather in the Himalayas.

Meanwhile, the Corps’ F-35B jump-set variant, is scheduled to enter so-called initial operational capability, or IOC, later this year, followed by the Air Force’s F-35A conventional version in the latter half of 2016, followed by the Navy’s F-35C aircraft carrier variant in late 2018 or early 2019.
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Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
The US Navy recently accepted a new, large addition to the CSEDS (Combat System Engineering Development Site), also known as the USS Rancocas, or the "Cruiser in a Cornfield".

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USN-CSEDS-05.jpg

USN-CSEDS-08.jpg
USN-CSEDS-09.jpg

Lockheed Martin V.P. & Naval Combat and Missile Defense Systems General Manager, Jeff Bantle, Program Executive Officer Integrated Warfare Systems Rear Admiral Jon A. Hill, Lockheed Martin V.P. and Integrated Warfare Systems & Sensors General Manager, Carl P. Bannar, Senior V.P., NJ Economic Development Authority Maureen Hassett, and U.S. Navy Commanding Officer, Captain Scott M. Carlson cut the ribbon for the expansion of the AEGIS Combat System Engineering Development Site in Moorestown, NJ, on Tuesday, March 24, 2015.
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Five will get you ten China copied the test rig, down to the orange color.
I do not think China has any of these yet.

They do not have a catapult to install on their new carriers...and I believe the next one will probably be a STOBAT like the Liaoning.

It will be a while before they need any of these.

When they do...why not make one that looks like this? No rocket science in that.

It's heavy, its on wheels, and it is made to be retrieved from the river. Orange is a standard color for test rigs that could pose a hazard as they fly through the air into the water,

Let's be careful how we throw around terms. We have members from China who may well take offense.
 
TE, I think you'll like it:
Air Force’s Batman Drops in the Pentagon
The U.S. Air Force is testing dozens of wearable technologies as part of an experimental program nicknamed “Batman.” Officials with the Air Force Research Laboratory showed off some of the innovative products during recent exhibition at the Pentagon.

The gear included a wrist mount designed to hold a cell phone or tablet computer, gloves with red and fiber-optic lights, and a new-and-improved signal gun for air traffic controllers. They’re all part of a family of wearable or portable technologies for the so-called Battlefield Air Targeting Man-Aided kNowledge, or Batman, demonstration program.

“Batman is a program that helps find innovative technologies for our operators,” ranging from those in the kill chain such as joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) to those in the life chain such as pararescue jumpers (PJs), Lt. Anthony Eastin, a behavioral scientist with the program team, said during an interview at the event.

The advanced technology program, established in 2003 after a fratricide in Afghanistan, has already transitioned more than 20 technologies to airmen on the battlefield. “Everything that you see me wearing, a lot of it has actually been given to operators,” Eastin said. The following is a sampling of what was on display:

Wrist Mount
The wrist mount was added to the Batman kit after JTACs and PJs preferred using smart phones rather than small, chest-mounted laptops, such as the MR-1 GoBook made by General Dynamics Corp. and its now-defunct Itronix subsidiary, Eastin said.

“We noticed that operators were moving away from that,” he said. “They want to have cellphones and tablets. So what did we do? We created a wrist mount so that they can put their mobile phone devices right there.”

The mount is compatible with any number of mobile devices, including the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and S6. The Android-based devices are capable of running military apps also developed by the program, such as Batdok, which helps leaders monitor the health of their troops by streaming heart rates, blood-oxygen levels and other vital signs collected from body sensors.

The Army liked the wrist mount so much that it purchased some 500 of them, Eastin said.

Gloves with Lights
The team is also experimenting with embedding lights into gloves. They showed off a pair with red lights mounted on the index fingers to help JTACs be able to write without interfering with their night-vision goggles and another with white fiber-optic lights near the wrist for general illumination.

The fiber-optic design might have multiple applications in the field because of the ease with which different colors can be employed, according to Lt. Caroline Kurtz, a human factors engineer with the program team.

“JTACs — they’re only going to use it for writing, so red lights are going to be best for them because they don’t want it to interfere with their night vision,” she said. “But let’s say the PJs, on the other hand — maybe they want one that has ultraviolet light so that blood is now visible, or maybe they want one with infrared so that they could signal to each other. So there are all these different options on the light spectrum that we can play with on depending on the mission.”

What’s more, fiber-optics prove useful for the airmen who prefer to cut and otherwise manipulate their gloves to improve dexterity, Kurtz said.

“Guys like to manipulate their equipment, especially gloves,” she said. “They love to cut off the fingertips because they need that dexterity, especially the thumb and trigger finger. If these guys do that to this glove, there goes the LEDs and the entire functionality of the light. But if you incorporate fiber-optics into the glove, no matter where you cut the fingers off, you’re going to have that light displayed.”

Smaller Signal Gun
The officers also showed off a prototype of smaller signal gun for air traffic controllers.

“We’re this team that finds a solution, essentially, so the combat controllers, they came up to us with this problem and said, ‘This is what we have to carry with us in order to signal to aircraft,’” Eastin said. “The problem with this is that it’s big and it’s bulky.”

Like they did with the other products, the officials contacted a company working on similar technology to discuss developing a prototype. “We went ahead and created this light gun system,” he said. “It’s a lot smaller and it’s a lot lighter.”

What’s more, the device uses the same type of batteries that the controllers already carry — and it’s small enough to fit into their pocket.
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