Air Force Designed, Built, and Flew a Brand-New Fighter Jet In One Year

When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.

There are many lessons to be found within Skunk Works by Rich.

Among them is the statement that the SR-71 was not at the edge of the design envelope. If I recall correctly, there were substantial safety margins in most areas, "like a Chevy truck" in order to ensure the speed of development and improve the likelihood that the entire project would succeed.

The HN productivity/self-help crowd will find a lot more in there.

This passage has had the highest personal impact per word as any text I've read: You don't need Harvard to teach you that it's more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don't half-heartedly wound problems - kill them dead. That's all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place.

Also: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...

SpaceX also did the COTS thing to great effect.

The original article says that they aren't trying to reduce spending. They want to take money that used to go into long-term maintenance and put it into into R&D and manufacturing. Instead of keeping the planes flying for 30+ years, they want a steady stream of new, up-to-date specialized designs that they keep in the air for 13 years or less. They want to force China and Russia to play a never ending game of catch-up.

It would be a shake-up in the current system, but is fully compatible with running a nationwide jobs program.

In theory if the cycles are faster, and not 30+ years, there's not so much pressure to make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. If you're churning out brand new planes every decade, you can stagger the spread.

Yeah, that's a really good article, and discloses that what they're doing isn't about a single new airplane. They want to completely change the way the Air Force manages the entire airplane lifecycle:

> The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about 50-80 aircraft every year.

> The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half, Roper wrote in the paper.

> “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”

> and perhaps give SpaceX founder Elon Musk a shot at designing an F-35 competitor.

This suggests an utter lack of familiarity with the motivations and capabilities of Musk and SpaceX. Or perhaps they merely needed some text for the link, even if it was silly text?

[1] maybe. How do you counter a fast follower with a knack for getting onto your development network?

Misdirection and rapid development would be my guess.

[1] https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-a...

They can if they need to... Both the U2 and the SR71 had a crazy short development time - months, not years. The history of both those aircraft from a build/design perspective is an amazing read. They knew the U2 would be obsolete for the original mission and got the blackbird in the air. Got to wonder if it is just significantly harder to hide things now than it was in the late 50's. Between satellites, cell phones, and globs of potential collaboration - it would be hard to keep something in the air a secret.

http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf

I've only heard good things about that program; if they somehow contributed to this effort, it would be another huge feather in their hat.