https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...
They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating.
While its definitely good that NGAD has produced a flying prototype so quickly, it isn't proof that they have achieved the goal of faster development.
The primary hinderance has been and still is the software. The defense industry has been slow to adopt modern coding practices. Sometimes that's a good thing. But on the balance its bad. F-35's software development has all of the hallmarks of a project saddled with a great deal of technical debt combined with outdated practices and overburdened with compliance.
Is there such a thing as a “working airframe” for modern combat aircraft? Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability, I have the understanding that, for modern combat aircraft, you can’t consider the airframe to be separate from the software.
As a side note: Early relaxed stability planes had no software. It was implemented with analog computers
If you have normal wings and the right size horizontal and vertical stabiliser the basic design of an aircraft is self stabilising. Especially with the wings sloping upwards (as all airliners have) because that wing shape also contributes to stability.
Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think. There are compression and twisting forces on the fuselage and flight surfaces which have no analog in conventional airliners.
And you can't just take the flight characteristics of one shape/size of aircraft and tweak them a little for your new design.
Just because they are a huge company with big spending power does not make it impossible for their codebases to be a pile of hot steaming garbage that even the best engineers struggle with.
And every supersonic aircraft also has to fly subsonic. So you really need two sets of software in a supersonic aircraft. Or more accurately three, because the transonic regime is weird enough to be its own thing.
Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
For comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of $30bn in modern money.
Tons of people are getting rich off that, and tons of people are being elected for the office. Military spending is one of the biggest government welfare programs in USA.
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy–maneuverability_theory
"the first Air Force aircraft to be built using the 'holy trinity' of digital engineering, agile software development and open architecture"
Obviously heavily pro-military just by the title, as if the military is only used in a defensive manner.
No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying.
We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
Hm. Significant delays and missed timelines aren't normal you say? Let's see (aerospace only):
• all SpaceX projects so far (USA)
• Virgin Galactic's space tourism plans (USA)
• Boeing's 787 and 777X (USA)
• HAL's Sukhoi-30-, Jaguar Darin III-, and Tejas LCA projects and production (India)
• BAE Systems Plc/TAI TF-X project (UK/Turkey)
• EADS's MRH-90, Tiger, and A400M (EU)
• Airbus A380 (EU)
• Comac’s C919 project (China)
• ...
TBH, it'd be easier to list projects that actually finished on schedule and didn't face significant delays, such as the Airbus A350XWB.
And most of the companies listed aren't even money-starved start-ups that required investor attention and media hype. It's almost as if developing, testing, and certifying cutting edge aerospace projects is kind of hard and just as easy to predict and schedule as large software projects...
Boom Supersonic is obviously overly optimistic in their deadlines, but they at least aren't pretending that they're meeting them when they aren't.
They are a lot more similar that you like to admit though. Both of their hype descriptions are to support the hype culture that powers the environment they live in, namely silicon valley(even if they're not physically there).
It's just that at some point Theranos decide to resort to lying to keep the whole thing going. The scope that Theranos promised was actually physically infeasible, some subsection of it might have been possible. Boom will hopefully not do that.
But in terms of engineering, Boom also has yet to produce even a prototype of their plane. A test version is scheduled to testflight in 2021. We'll see about that, I don't think it will happen. Although 7 years for a supersonic jet from scratch would have been quite impressive.
Theranos could have chosen to build a bigger machine with a more limited amount of tests once they realized it's not possible, but they decided to tackle too many problems at once and double down on them. But what we conveniently like to ignore is that investors, politicians and media perpetuated the whole lie. It wasn't just Holmes, it was an entire culture of VC's and politicians that had a vested interest in perpetuating the lie and to some extent helped silence critics.
Besides the obvious scammy and blatant lies that Theranos leadership did(down the line). There was also the aspect of feature creep (i.e. 200 tests per tiny blood vial) and ignoring both leadership and biochemical specialists(i.e. sample size and machine size).
In the case of Boom I like to think that at least Josh Wilding seeing that he has been an Aerospace engineer for 20 years has mentioned the issues with the timeline, and was overruled probably by either his peers or VCs, but we won't really know for sure. But if the engineering cofounder is already not involved at this point, let's hope that other issues won't follow.
It's amazing that there are so many people willing to lie in order to make honestly good ideas viable, instead of everybody just being like Theranos.
It was authorized by the board in 2005, first flight was planned for 2008, entry into service was planned in 2010. First flight was 2013, it entered in service in 2018 (January, but still).
Don't forget the KC-46 tanker. Even though they had a working KC-767 to start from.
When you want to sell, you should be overly optimistic in your presentation.
When you have sold, you can now explain the real picture and explain that actually... everything will take 3 times longer than when you were trying to sell.
I hate super positve PR propaganda too, and a skeptical eye should always be applied. Fraud is still used when talking about Tesla, yet they clearly have developed products. Yes deadlines were missed. I'm willing to give Boom a bit of leeway.
Say I'm looking for a bike. Person A is selling one I like and promises to deliver after two weeks. Person B is selling one I like a bit less, but promises to deliver after one week. I might now choose to buy from person B, even if I like the bike a bit less.
If I buy from person B and they deliver after three weeks, there's a problem. Why did it take three times as long? Did they ever intend to deliver after one week? Should they have known they wouldn't be able deliver after one week? They got the order based on a feature they didn't deliver. If that was intentional, that's fraud.
You don't have to. It it not a government project. The only pass that matters is their ivestor's. And most of the time as long as the progress is made and the outcome overweights the delay, everyone will be happy to wait.
Same with cures and vaccines. Who cares if they are delayed? It is not on purpose. Would you rather have it delayed or never?
Which relies on the company's public statements being honest. Normalising unrealistic timeline announcements hurts everyone.
It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it.
Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up.
If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others).
Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold"
And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit.
And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on.
That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility.
And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed)
In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines".
just my 2 cents, whatever that means.
That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway
No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted.
The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1].
I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years.
[1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...