Suspected counterfeit components found in ejection seat after fatal F-16 crash
airforcetimes.com
airforcetimes.com
>The lab also found signs that Teledyne had destroyed evidence related to the case, the lawsuit said. Teledyne appeared to have replaced five microchips on the sequencer before sending it to the lab
3rd world tier corruption and fraud. Based on the number of failed and severely cost overrun military projects I'd say it applies to way more than just this situation
The use of "3rd world" term makes me cringe a little even in this context. Isn't it more comparable to Boeing Conspiracy and Corruption [1] or even the Fat Leornard US Navy corruption [2] - which are indeed first-world corruptions?
Definition of 3rd world has changed overtime - but overall we can agree that; it now means developing countries with (1) high rates of poverty, (2) economic and/or political instability, and (3) high mortality rates.
Yes, above factors are indeed very conducive for corruption and fraud, but does it imply there's no corruption in "First-world"? I think the difference is it’s hidden (not as consequential) and some accountability come about sometimes... e.g MDHS Welfare fraud [3] [4], not to mention Covid related frauds.
To me the term has aged and similar to saying to someone "that is so ghetto"... which its use has declined considerably as a regular American vernacular. Another intersting term often used wily-nily with negative connotation of otherness is "Banana Republic" - which is very interesting when you consider the origin and who brought such conditions that led to the term being coined.
I didn't mean to inject "wokeness" to the discussion; for one I was born is so called 3rd world country (so perhaps a little sensitive?), and more importantly I'm obsessed with origin and use of words and phrases overtime as contemporary vernacular.
[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
[2] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
[3] - https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803399172/mississippis-ex-wel...
[4] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/14/us/brett-favre-mississippi-go...
It might be pessimistic but it -feels- like whatever happens here, be it coups, economics experiments, great innovations and the like - does not impact or even reach the rest of the world. One (mildly) rich Californian has more potential impact on the world than all of Latin America could ever have in the best of days.
This is a very natural kind of transition for words with negative connotations.
If you don't have a "developed" economy you're not as useful of a trade/etc partner than a country with a developed economy. Or your country is basically semi-colonizable then it'll just be semi-colonized instead (i.e. parts of your country become a gated community for the oil field employees).
After the Academy, Singleton elected to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1940, receiving both bachelor's (Sc.B.) and master's (Sc.M.) degrees in this field. During his first year there, he was a member of a three-man team that won the Putnam Prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered annually by the Mathematical Association of America. Another member of the team was Richard P. Feynman, a future Nobel Prize Laureate.For me, the sour taste comes from one of their engineers discreetly taking photos at an interoperability test event I was helping host many years ago. The NDA was clear. They knew what they were doing.
There is a 1954 prototype[2] at the fabulous but small Museum of Berkshire Aviation near Reading, about 30 miles west of London.
[1] http://www.hmfriends.org.uk/faireyrotodyne.htm
[2] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/gyrody...
Real question: Does anyone know the meaning of suffix "-dyne"?
Probably why a lot of aerospace companies used it in their name.
> The "dyne" is the standard unit of force in the centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units, derived from the Greek word dynamis, meaning "power" or "force".
It is also a non-SI unit, but that might be too obscure — or might motivate nerds like the teledyne founders!
The resulting name is better than Leyland-Toyota anyway.
> The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension used the name Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow". Yoyodyne is a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all with the first name John, that landed in New Jersey in 1938, using the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio play as cover.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne#Other_fictional_uses
> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.
That’s an interesting slogan, as I’d have thought that “the future begins today” seems more innovative. The future beginning tomorrow seems a bit of a tautology and procrastination.
I'm sure Russia would love to be worrying about specific transistor models in their ejection seats, at this point! (note, I'm aware of the pedantic point that Russia is definitionally not third world, they are just another point of comparison in this case).
This is true, and if you wish to be pedantic, or at least true to the original definitions, Russia is a 'second world' nation state.
Whether that aligns to what you thought you were qualifying, I do not know.
The government pays, but, you have a much higher profit margin if you just fake everything.
The people ultimately responsible for these things not only don't go to jail, they tend to make substantial profit from it after all is said and done. In a a matter of weeks everybody had forgotten (except I'm sure those related to the victims), a slap on the wrist was given, and we're straight back to giving Boeing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to do the only thing they're good at: killing people.
On the off chance somebody doesn't understand the reference - Boeing is the 2nd largest defense contractor in the US, scoring upwards of $22 billion in contracts las year, after that settlement.
[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
Can speak from the perspective of a finance professional constantly rolling his eyes at insider traders. Many people assume enforcement is far weaker than it is. That leads them to make stupid choices. For a period of time, during the Iraq War, enforcement was weak around military procurement. But the wheels of justice grind slowly, and I guess every generation needs its examples.
All the covid relief and stimulus fraud that's slowly being investigated is another example of this. All you have to do to disabuse yourself of the idea that law enforcement is weak is go to justice.gov and click news.
https://www.justice.gov/usao/find-your-united-states-attorne...
Click on any of the states, click news. Tons of covid fraud being prosecuted already in all of these places where small fry's thought they could get away with this. Medical fraud is another example.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/pr?keys=covid&items_per_pa...
Optimism bias is also a thing, they don't necessarily need to "want fighter pilots to die", but it won't stop some people trying to pocket some money ("it may never be used anyway").
If revenue is fixed, the only way to make more money is to reduce costs. Using cheaper parts with less/nonexistent quality control is one way to do that. Or even just straight up laziness. The "trust but verify" approach is more work than just trusting your suppliers to never make mistakes.
There has been problems with counterfeit chips and parts infiltrating the market for decades. The margins are also very good.
There’s a lot of potential problems in the world, but leadership doesn’t always take them seriously.
How long would the world have gone on thinking Putin had a world class military if he never failed to invade Ukraine?
I prefer the "Turn of the Millennium" myself.
So, obviously, it's a long standing problem.
At the lottery I had a $5,000 3D multilayered monitor fail. All it needed were 3 SMD caps at maybe 1 cent total parts cost plus labour to fix. the lottery just trashed the monitor instead.
USA corporations trying their hand at vertical integration. Normally they stick to 1st world tier corruption (directly buying off politicians) which is a scale far greater than anything the third world can imagine.
And it would be moderately hard to cheaply fake a chips that met the requirements of form factor, power and so on - and still was able to respond to some basic interrogation but also was flawed in some way (ie the way that cuts out the expensive bit)
Inwoukd love to know the specifics here of how fake chips walk that line. Cos otherwise it feels like "OMG any electronics could fail at any moment and there is nothing we can do"
A complex microchip can be easily caught. Simple one... Not necessarily.
Yeah, 1st world tier corruption doesn't take just one life, it fakes Weapons of Mass Destruction photos in the 3rd world to falsely justify the killing of hundreds of thousands and the disruption of the lives of millions.
But somehow, american still speak about "fighting for freedom" and act as if they're the "good guys", while they go and destroy another middle eastern country.
> 1) Saddam was a threat to U.S. interests before 9/11....He had developed WMD and used chemical weapons fatally against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq's official press issued statements praising the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.
> 2) The threat of renewed aggression by Saddam was more troubling and urgent after 9/11.
> 3) To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years.
> 4) While there were large risks involved in a war, the risks of leaving Saddam in power were even larger. The U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no-fly zones were routinely under enemy fire, and a larger confrontation – over Kuwait again or some other issue – appeared virtually certain to arise
And probably the biggest factor:
> 5) America after 9/11 had a lower tolerance for such dangers.
But let's just ignore history and claim that there was no other impetus for war other than making accusations that turned out to be false.
I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline, but the article doesn't really substantiate it. The way you'd see "fraud" in a never-used item like an ejection seat is that it just wouldn't have its components. The expensive stuff would be missing, which to my eyes would be the explosives/rockets, absolutely not the electronics.
What they found was that the electronics looked "shoddy", which isn't (again, to my eyes) the same as "fraud"[1]. More like "we can't get the original parts anymore for this order, just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead", or "crap, we stuffed the wrong parts, pull them out and rework them by hand".
[1] In the way you mean it. Obviously if it's not the specified part then it's not delivering the item ordered. But not really "3rd world tier corruption".
My only intentions when writing the headline were to avoid the click-bait format of the original and to communicate that it is suspected that counterfeit electronic components somehow ended up in an F-16. That is supported by this sentence from the article:
> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip, according to the Air Force slides.
I have no idea how it would have happened and I hope I didn't phrase the title in a way that suggested any particular possibility.
I don't know if it meets the legal definition of fraud, but it will certainly get you in trouble.
I imagine Aviation is similar to Medical Devices and in that (my) environment, to build a device using a component with a different part than specified in the design, you need at a minimum an evaluation from an EE to see if the suggested replacement is suitable. That's considered a Design Change and the evaluation, criteria to be met, and outcome (possibly including Test Data), along with the peer review will all be documented to create an Engineering Change Order (ECO). Only when that ECO is approved and released, can you then start building the assembly with the new part. Anything else would be Non-Conforming and could cause you to have to recall all the devices that were built incorrectly.
Basically, changing a part is not a trivial undertaking. For non-critical parts, the process will be quicker but nothing can be changed without documented justification.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59186655 [2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/fake-military-gear-china
It blows my mind why she thought the testing requirements were "stupid". For those unfamiliar, subsea testing requirements set a high-bar (pun intended) because failure in operation is simply not an option. From my non-expert understanding, testing at such low temperatures is not just an order of magnitude factor thing for simulating the operating temperature of the environment, it actually helps put the material in a state to check for other things when under test (maybe increased pressure?). Steel intended for subsea use is not your everyday stuff, apart from it's role in distributing forces, corrosion resistance is designed into the alloy through other elements and the resulting structure (often normalised), to perform even after impact.
I've been curious about fraud, counterfeits, grey market, and such for a while.
Authenticity, in all domains, seems like a huge problem.
And an opportunity. While I was working for a fashion retailer, I suggested we should emphasis our end-to-end chain of custody, so customers knew our Gucci handbags were legit. To contrast us with Amazon & eBay, for example.
Sounds like arrogance.
Given that there hasn't been any known issues with the steel provided, perhaps she's correct that the requirements of the test were stupid. But still not right.
I'm not a metallurgist, but I did take a class at MIT on the subject and worked in a metallurgy lab for a couple of summers. The temperature of steel has an effect on the nature of fractures that can occur. Ductile fractures start at a crack and the steel deforms as the crack widens. This is the way most everyday metals under everyday circumstances act. The deformation absorbs energy and dissipates the forces acting on the metal. If this occurred in a beam, it might be observed to be deformed before a catastrophic failure happens.
Brittle fracture is different. A crack forms and it travels rapidly like breaking glass. Such fractures travel through the metal at the speed of sound through the metal (over 2000 ft/sec for steel). Pipelines in Alaska can experience such fractures. Such a fracture could travel thousands of feet because at the point of fracture there is no pressure drop at all (since that drop in pressure would travel at the slower speed of sound though natural gas).
This is a concern in Alaska because a piece of steel can exhibit ductile fracture behavior at ordinary temperature but transition to brittle fracture at lower temperatures. This transition point depends on the steel composition and its history. The history of the steel includes heat and mechanical treatments during it's production, but also the stresses put on it during its use such as welding, shaping and forming, vibration, and even exposure to radiation (which will occur in some parts of a submarine since they contain nuclear reactors). I have no idea how the steel was intended to be used, but conceivably there could be good reasons for the -100F requirement even if the steel was never going to come close to this temperature. (For example, I know nothing of the relationship of radiation embrittlement and the ductile-brittle fracture temperature transition.) So while the testing requirement sounds "stupid" it is perhaps even stupider to ignore it.
1) Just because the testing requirements say -100 °F but the temperatures will "never" get there is false.
2) There is a direct correlation between fracture toughness at various temperatures and impact testing, but testing may need to be at a different temperature than operation conditions to successfully validate the material.
Regarding 1, rapid release of a compressed gas can reach cryogenic temperatures shockingly fast, even if the surrounding environment will never reach those temperatures. This principle is widely used[0] and the correct conditions can occur in everyday situations. For example, vessels meant for operation on the Texas coast are routinely designed to withstand -20°F temperatures despite the fact that the lowest temperature ever recorded in the area is 10°F.
Regarding 2, there has been nearly a century of intense research into fracture toughness and how it correlates with low temperatures. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and American Petroleum Institute (API) have published gobs of (paywalled) articles about correlating minimum design metal temperatures and fracture toughness, although here's[1] an older U.S. DOD document from 1981 outlining their findings in guns, specifically.
[0]: https://www.nexflow.com/blog/vortex-tubes-use-compressed-air...
I'm not even a metallurgist, and yet I know metals and other materials[1] can lose their strength at low temperatures.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
I'm not defending her actions, but isn't the coldest ocean water possible still going to be warmer that 24°F? How would a submarine ever get to the top of a mountain at the South Pole (where the -100°F temps are)?
Evaporative cooling by definition cannot cool below the wet-bulb temperature.
Right. The absolute value is related to the evaporation process, which is affected by wind.
> Evaporative cooling by definition cannot cool below the wet-bulb temperature.
Wet bulb temperature is not “the true temperature of the environment”. Besides, that is true for humans as well, so again not any different between living and non-living things.
The main point is that a thing left in a given environment can end up at temperatures lower than that of their local environment. This process depends on the atmosphere in contact with the thing, which depends on winds.
Wind chill is explicitly and only the experienced subjective temperature caused by cold air being continuously replaced by the wind.
For example, take the US National Weather Service's wind chill formula, which only uses wind speed and tempurature as inputs and provides the wind chill in W/m².
Source: https://www.weather.gov/media/epz/wxcalc/windChill.pdf
> Wet bulb temperature is not “the true temperature of the environment”. Besides, that is true for humans as well, so again not any different between living and non-living things.
Wind chill and evaporative cooling are independent mechanisms, and the wind chill value and wet bulb temperature are separate values.
My reply was to your original comment, which said:
> For second the coldest wind chill recorded in the US was -100°F at McGrath, Alaska in 1989.
That value is not the temperature that an object could have reach at that time and place. It is the wind chill, an approximation of how cold it would have to have been on a windless day to make a person subjectively feel equally cold.
That’s just good engineering, and someone doing tests who does not understand that is clearly in the wrong industry.
But it is not possible for sea water, anywhere in the oceans, to be much colder than freezing, nor does the air temperature at sea level begin to approach the coldest temperatures recorded on Earth, which are always recorded at elevation. I can't seem to find the record lowest temperature recorded at sea level, but I can't imagine it could be much lower than a few dozen degrees below 0°F.
The question that comes to me is, why is that -100°F metal test even a standard? On the one hand, it is vanishingly unlikely a watercraft could ever experience temperatures that low or even 50°F above that, and on the other hand, temperature measure goes down all the way to -459.67°F. So why aren't they stress testing at -559.67°F? And if tests at those literally impossible temperatures were required, could we at least agree that that would be objectively stupid? And if so, there must be a way to determine what test temperatures are stupid to test at in a sliding scale diminishing towards test temperatures that are less stupid to test.
Though other comments are intolerant of the metallurgists' actions, fundamentally, she was correct, although it is clearly unethical she faked tests results, her reasons for doing so are not entirely irrational. The more intelligent and the more expert an individual is, the less tolerant they will be when asked to do things they know could never matter. Though the military is famous for requiring irrational actions, such as constantly digging a ditch to only fill it in again (which I believe has something to do with proving compliance and following orders, maybe testing the command structure), the woman was not in the military. While I do not condone faking tests, I have some empathy for her, as it is difficult for intelligent individuals to intentionally do stupid things, especially when they are required to do so by less intelligent individuals. I could only guess that most of HN members are a lot like her, and less tolerant of objectively stupid requirements.
She falsified tests and produced parts that were not up to the specs required by the customer. That is very much wrong, regardless of how justified the specs are.
If the navy is overly pessimistic, the discussion needs to happen with them. Second guessing and assuming that they won’t really need that anyway is what I’d expect from a cut-throat Chinese factory selling in AliExpress, not a supplier for a major western power’s navy.
It also can be useful if these extreme test are better at revealing manufacturing defects. Maybe you literally only want the most perfect 1% of steel coming out of the foundry to actually be used, because you believe that will make a better submarine. In that case, sure maybe -100f is overkill for the specific application but you have to remember these objects are literally designed to have explosives near them. Being EXTREMELY GOOD at resisting brittleness literally will save sailors lives when it comes to close calls from depth charges.
That’s why we test over the operating range for the different parameters, not just at the limits.
> It's one thing for the purposes of science, to know, but my understanding is that engineering and material specifications for an actual thing needs to be more practical, especially for something that already costs $3.5B.
You need to be pessimistic about operating conditions if you don’t want it to fail unexpectedly. That is absolutely critical in engineering. Now, you set the boundary differently depending on the field and the importance of the widget you engineer (tolerances are quite different for a phone than for an aircraft), but the concept itself is part of engineering.
There are cases where practicality is less important than reliability. Things like space probes and a lot of things related to national security. That is one of the reason why they cost billions in the first place.
All metals have a ductile-to-brittle transition temperature. Ductile failures are generally preferred to brittle (think bend/dent vs shatter). Some steels have a D2B temp around 0°C, which makes them basically untrustworthy in colder environments.
The D2B Temp can be lowered by altering the elemental makeup of the metal, controlling the crystal structure, and other various metallurgical techniques. These same techniques are utilized to produce metals with other desirable properties, like increased ductility, higher tensile strength, corrosion resistance, etc.
Casting, especially large complex castings of custom tailored alloys, are temperamental. Controlling the elemental makeup is relatively easy, but controlling the crystal structure is difficult.
My guess is that they were paying for a specific alloy & temper of metal because it had their desired properties, and successfully cast samples would have a D2B below -70°C.
It is a standard & easy test to perform, but I could see how the tech running it would not connect the dots above. That being said, they don't need to know why the test was ordered & paid for, they just need to run it.
She didn't get 10 years, she "faces up to ten years in prison... She will be sentenced in February"
Her sentence ended up actually being considerably less, 2.5 years.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallur...
It’s a national security risk.
The federal government needs more internal audits.
I would prefer the latter as standard but audit is always a trade off between peace of mind and cost. You can demonstrate that a process is superior and mitigates known risks (however unlikely they are) but there will be those that despite operating under in "no failure" environment will ignore the low likelihood, high impact risks because their risk process puts it in the "green" and there are far more pressing things to spend attention and money on.
If an org is corrupt (example: Trump admin), the competent, honest, people would stay away, and you just attract idiots, whose motivations might be different to doing the best job possible.
They are an effective tool, but they don’t address all issues.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-ne...
The claims in that article from Senate aides are a bit misleading, as it's not that unexpected or unreasonable for a department as large and complex as the Pentagon to take years to reach 100% clean audits. After all, it took DHS a decade. It's because interventions don't take effect immediately, with process changes taking time to be planned, rolled out, and have an impact on reporting. As long as the trend keeps moving upward the country is better off than not having audits.
The US DoD as a whole has always done a huge amount of compliance auditing both internally and of suppliers, as well as financial auditing at most project and unit levels, outside of the new Congress-mandated top-level auditing requirement.
At that point, DHS had existed for just over a decade. Pentagon opened in 1943. Is there a chance that they'll file a complete audit while USA still exists?
The Pentagon said it expects to get fully clean audits by FY28. That seems plausible at the current rate of change in their audits.
The military is an insanely complex organization with probably thousands of different financial systems. Whatever a “complete audit” is, you can be sure it will take a long time and get extended many times as congress paints the airplane in flight and changes the standards.
The issue is a political football.
https://www.knkx.org/law/2022-02-14/metallurgist-from-auburn...
The seat already had issues, was scheduled for maintenance but that maintenance was constantly deferred, and was finally scheduled for maintenance for shortly after the mishap.
The maintenance discussion starts around 35:58 into the video.
This story, while sad, is not the least bit surprising.
> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip
Suppose I make a proprietary electronic component. There is no other source of that component. If I can't keep up with supply, where are these "outsourced" parts going to come from?
[edit] re-reading the article, I think the author or someone else who made the presentation misinterpreted the facts.
FTA: "Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit"
What's most likely the case is that the potentially counterfeit parts were labelled with Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix markings/logos and they were misidentified as the source of those parts. That's the only thing that makes sense.
Although I don’t think that is likely. If you were going to defraud your customers with components you know are fake, the US government would be the last customer you’d choose to send them to.
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k72SFBOZ_lw
The first problem is a lot of refurbs are poorly done. I've had parts that were literally something else with a different print on them. Entire controllers that were marked as X but were Y in reality.
The second problem is the buy side. Government especially has regulations for quality control and counts on suppliers to do their part. Check out MVP Micro for a company a decade or so ago where the owners were profiteering off refurbs and wound up in prison.
In one instance, we were building a bunch of very bright lcd displays for big video ads in times Square. This was when it was a cutting edge thing to do. To deliver on our project, we needed to buy every single Golden dragon 2 white led in the world at the time (200k or so). We bought the entire stock of digikey, RS, mouser, etc. all at once. For each led also needed a zener diode, which we had similar issues sourcing. Once all the boards were built zeners started blowing up and literally popping off the boards. It turns out about a third of thr zener we bought, from reputable suppliers, were counterfeit. No way to know until they blow up.
Seems the way to find out if they are bad, is wait a year.
I have had a whole bunch of $100+ headsets crap out, after eight months, and have had cheap $20 exercise headphones last for five years.
How exactly is this not a big red flag that something's fishy?
Court time
"Prove my client knew it was fake, remember innocent until proven guilty + beyond reasonable doubt" - defense lawyer
Acquitted
Court costs for US government - 5 million
"Let's add new regulations to make sure they have to test parts" - some person
"We need to stop big government" - Republicans
"There's too many regulations how can I stay in business, guess I'll raise prices for the government" - supplier
"Why does this part cost so much, corruption, conspiracy, blah" - hackernews comment
It’s a civil case against the contractors not the government, it carries a much lower burden of proof, just needs to prove preponderance of the evidence (more than 50% chance of the claim being true).
Plus you have discovery and depositions to help build your case.
Oh and if they don’t comply with discovery, well then the judge will just find them liable and then the case will just be about how much money they owe (see the Alex Jones cases going on right now).
>>Acquitted
It does not work like that.
The client has already signed off, under penalty of perjury, that the parts ARE NOT FAKE, and that the company and the parts (respectively) comply with any number of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requirements applicable to the contract.
If the part is bad, it is going to be up to the "client" to prove that his statements were not false.
I cant help but feel a hypocracy is a great word for small government
And blacklisted from doing business with the government.
> Under the preponderance standard, the burden of proof is met when the party with the burden convinces the fact finder that there is a greater than 50% chance that the claim is true. This is the burden of proof in a civil trial.
If the supplier were criminally liable (as they also can be, for trafficking in counterfeit goods or services[2]) then because the bar is higher the prosecution would (should) only move forward if they believe they have the requisite evidence to meet that standard.
As it is, the widow is taking the suppliers to court in civil court[3]:
> Now, two years later, the 32-year-old has filed a federal civil lawsuit against defense giant Lockheed Martin, Collins Aerospace and several sections of Teledyne Technologies, alleging that components of her husband's ejection seat may have been counterfeit, leading to his death on June 30, 2020.
The aforementioned law was passed in Dec 2011 by the House of Representatives, which the Republicans held a majority in, and the Senate, which the Democrats held by a slim majority[4][5].
I'm not sure what your comment is about other than trying to appear knowledgeable through cynicism. Ironic that you would complain about others' HN comments.
[0] https://aronsonllc.com/government-looks-to-contractors-to-st...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preponderance_of_the_evidenc...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2320
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/14/widow-of-f-16...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_United_States_Congress
To be brief, and what I assume happened, is that military electronics specs lots of old outdated/obsolete electronic components. It can be exceedingly difficult to get that part changed (if it works don't fix it) and often can be exceedingly difficult to find parts from authorized distributors. On the back end too, those distributors also need to ensure they are getting legit parts.
SO what can end up happening is you desperately need a part to move production along, and you yank on all your distributors to get you some. One of those distributors then goes out and gets "contaminated" parts from a "usually good" source.
You end up with those parts, test them all, they test good, put them in, and by doing so assume all responsibility for them. "All responsibility" means you are legally liable for using that part. Cue FBI raid.
Really the core issue is that the military uses a lot of stuff that works amazing, but is contracted from parts that are long out of production. Updating is a difficult and risky task, because it's not really an "update" as much as a "find similar parts to build the same thing". Which means moving from a tested and known good product, to a brand new untested one. Naturally, there is a lot of resistance to this, and a changing something like a single chip could take a year or more of testing and auth.
> Two years after that testing, the lawsuit claims, the companies hadn’t said whether the third unit passed muster. Still, the Air Force relied on the test data when it decided to continue using the sequencer that ended up in Schmitz’s F-16, the lawsuit said.
I don't want to be too facetious, but if you very eagerly said that 2 out of 3 worked and say nothing about the last, I'm going to assume that last one completely failed.
[1] A shearable component was replaced with thicker part, with larger strain capacity, resulting in pilot not separating properly from the ejection seat
This looks pretty bad! but I know literally nothing about ejection seats
At sea, we were told the legal system does not make a distinction for the maritime zones. If you make a mistake and someone dies, than it is considered a murder rather than manslaughter or criminal negligence.
If someone knowingly used counterfeit parts, than it could fall under espionage laws as well. i.e. the public will not know why someone was thrown into a hole for 40 years.
You execute the CEO and board of directors of the companies that had the contract for treason and sabotage.
You do that once, and I bet the next CEO takes supply chain issues seriously.
EDIT:
And before you tell me that you wouldn’t be able to find CEOs if you executed the bad ones, there are lots of Americans who work in coal mines, oil rigs, and high rise construction where they face a risk of death for far less money.
The issue of initial quality and provenance of the chips aside, I don't understand how this wasn't picked during Functional Performance Testing (FAT) of the system before final acceptance.
For such a critical safety system you would expect that all tests were performed and that it was operating correctly within it's design parameters. You would expect whoever was responsible for procuring (either principal or contractor) would have witness points were a suitably qualified person from their side (or third party independent verifier) would witness and sign-off on the test being performed to spec, and the results were within expectations. This is why these processes exist.
NB: The test in this case might not even need the actual parachute, just testing that the circuit pulses at the right time in the right place, or that a solenoid activates.
Then again, maybe it did pass all these checks but the poor quality of the parts meant they degraded at an accelerated rate because they weren't designed to operate in those conditions. Who knows. As things get smaller and more abstract (digital v. analogue) it's much more difficult for us to rely or even expect traditional methods of "trust but verify" to satisfy our requirements. It's becoming more and more incumbent on the end-owner to know their asset as it becomes harder and harder to understand it.
The design should be self-testing continuously. If any wire, microchip, or other component were to go bad inside the ejector seat, it should flash a big warning light on the dashboard saying "unsafe to fly".
In the case of an ejector seat sequencer, the electronics could run through the full ejection process, but with the power supply to the explosive detonators super low. Then another system detects that the right detonators are being activated at the right time. If they aren't... red light and buzzer.
If your design is good, cheap parts won't make it fail dangerously. Cheap parts will just lead to more time being repaired.
Nor is self-testing 100% reliable, as counterfeit chips might work well enough during a self-test sequence on the ground but fail when exposed to the extreme temperatures and vibrations of an ejection. It's not just about whether the part meets the spec, it's about meeting the spec in all conditions.
That's why for things like this and similarly crucial things like munitions-related circuitry the preference is for circuits and components that are as simple as possible and to use process control to ensure that all components are reliable.
Ejection seats are not designed to be used again and again, they're designed to be used exactly once and work flawlessly when that one moment comes. Rigid process control and verification in the manufacturing, storage, and installation steps is the only way to be certain it'll work.
I get that you're just playing armchair engineer here, but you're ignoring nearly all the actual complexity and engineering challenges.
The test would be of the electronics _only_; not the explosives or any other single use component. Single use items are usually validated by randomly sampling from within the batch / production run.
Even so, those checks aren't sufficient to handle counterfeit parts that might only fail under stress, rather than the safe conditions of a ground test.
The best approach is what it has always been: Strict process control of the entire supply chain, rigorous component and subsystem testing under extreme conditions before delivery, deep analysis of failed components coming off the flight line, and regular inspections for anomalies.
We have a family who lost a bright young man who volunteered to serve his country and lay his life down to protect the ones he loved. And what did the Air Force brass do? Everything they could to deny him an honorable send off.
They pinned the blame squarely on the soldier who died . This would be low for even the communists. I hope they rot in prison and the Feres doctrine is amended to allow suits for malice like we see here.
For instance, you don't want to deploy the drogue while the rockets are still firing. You also don't want to deploy it if the seat is oriented in the wrong direction and the drogue might get stuck in the seat.
Then, you don't want to release the main chute until the seat has stabilised and the speed is right. You also want to control the speed of release and inflation depending on the altitude at which the ejection happened, with a more rapid release at the lowest altitudes.
Early seats used simple delay fuses and didn't have the ability to sequence events based on sensor inputs, resulting in a lot more post-ejection deaths and injuries.