Skunk Works is all about getting to the prototype stage (2018)
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I've worked in teams that were described as "skunk works," though I'm not sure the ones using that term had actually read the book. But a feature of the teams that were successful, was that the people doing the innovative stuff also had a solid understanding of manufacturing and service. The engineers may have been more conservative than their employers were aware.
There was one huge order over many years that cause the continuous production. This doesn’t include variants sold to several other nations.
For the I series: “A senior IAF official said that the F-35's stealth may be partly overcome within 10 years despite a 30 to 40-year service life, thus Israel's insistence on using their own electronic warfare systems”.
The Accidents and notable incidents is an interesting read on https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II
I do understand it would lose every time to an F-16 in a dogfight, but it would have vaporised that F-16 long before visual range.
Afaics it has more operational capability than the previous generation of warplanes, in ways that matter to military planners.
Rushing to a PT isn't the key, the key is having a group of people who know how to rush to a prototype and then empowering them to do so.
Firefox and Edge showed warnings:
"This server couldn't prove that it's skunkworks.com; its security certificate is from www.lockheedmartin.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection."
It does indeed go to lockheedmartin.com but they should fix that?
It's incredibly difficult to build an airplane, especially a completely new design.
It's absolutely impossible to do that at the same time as making one that will last 30-50 years and have a low failure rate.
What is difficult, incredibly expensive, and very time-consuming, but possible - barely - is starting with the first airplane and eventually getting to the second.
The first is the job of a Skunk Works. The second is the job of more traditional aerospace organizations.
> It's incredibly difficult to build an airplane, especially a completely new design.
why ?
Structural design.
Design for manufacturing and assembly.
Power and drivetrain.
Control systems and actuators.
Avionics.
And then get all of these to a reliability level where you feel comfortable with a single failure causing high likelihood of multiple human deaths.
However, if you were designing and building a new aircraft to meet the latest Part 25 regulations for passenger transport, it's almost insurmountable. There's a reason why there are so few aircraft OEMs.
Aircraft design requires truly careful engineering. There is very little leeway. EVERYTHING is a trade-off. You have huge forces and need very light weight. You add a pound of structure to tolerate the loads, now you have more loads and need more power all of which adds weight, requiring more fuel to make range. All of that requires more structure, which adds weight. To find a workable design that "closes" is hard because there is a very small corner of the design envelope that will even work.
It's also hard because when working at these extremes of what is even possible, there is no room for failure and you can't just add reliability by brute force (adding more power, more metal, etc.). There are fine margins because you can't afford thick ones. And to live with these fine margins, you must have extremely tight manufacturing tolerances and predictable performance.
Aircraft are also a very complicated system. The physics are complicated, the behavior of all the required subsystems is complicated.
So now, you have to do the most precise careful engineering you can think of, across a set of super complicated interdependent systems.
So all of this costs a lot of money, and at some point - for a new design - it has to take off for the first time. At that point, basically nothing can go wrong. You can't exactly fire up gdb, find the bug and recompile. There is no edit-compile-test cycle (well, or it's a very short cycle).
The only thing that seems harder is rocket design. Actually turbo-pump design for the engines for the rockets.
Processor are really hard to do, as well as software for physics simulation, as well as a ton of other things. But for both of them, I can confidently say that nobody starts from scratch: it's improvements upon improvements and from time to time, a bit of breakthrough...
I do understand that the safety aspect is pretty specific and really tough to get right.
Well, derivative designs bring their own problems. Also a double edged sword. Making significant mods to a complex system is often even more difficult. There's a lot of analogy with software and computing. Take 737-Max for example. Obviously boeing royally screwed that up - but mainly because their business people underestimated the difficulty and tried to patch over it and take short cuts. That itself is a hard problem: a commercial company does eventually have to make a profit.
And yes, absolutely there are new greenfield designs. If you need a Cessna 170, you don't usually start from scratch. But one reason to start from scratch is that you are pushing the envelope even further because of new materials, new requirements, etc. So more problems.
Slap a motor and a few servos on a piece of cardboard and you've got yourself a model airplane. Sometimes I'm surprised how easy it is to get something flying.
Man, I don't know why anyone says that software development is hard.
https://store.flitetest.com/park-flyers-swappables/
I work in the UAS industry and we absolutely do use things like these cardboard airframes for prototyping. They're awesome out of the box and really easy to repair with some tape and hot-melt glue if necessary.
Like the U-2, the SR-71, or the F-117?
Military aircraft lifespans rarely fit their projected timeframes.
Still impressive that those bird are still airworzhy so.
Are training systems considered operational? It depends. In a systems readiness point of view, yes, they're operational even if they've been re-roled, as opposed to being withdrawn-from-use or having another status.
But if you consider only front-line combat systems operational and exclude all other aircraft including training aircraft like the USAF's Texan IIs, then these wouldn't be included in that category.
What led you to believe the U-2 “was expected to be obsolete quickly?” It would be interesting to know who amongst Lockheed and Air Force personnel were right, and wrong, about something like that.
Every time one of these threads comes up I think I should reread Ben Rich's book, which I read over twenty years ago and gave to a friend about five years ago. It would be interesting to recall his perspective on this. I think he had something in there about how proud they were about keeping the costs of the reactivation and final flights of the SR-71, which were sort of mandated by congress, as low as possible. They were still a lot more expensive than, for example, recent programs to equip the U-2 fleet with more modern avionics.
Probably either Skunkworks or Kelly: More than my share of it all. I recall that very soon after shipping the U2, they saw the writing on the wall for its operational limits and started working on the SR71 very soon after. Looking at the timelines, U2 first flight was 1955 and the first discussions for the SR71 were done in 1957 with work beginning in 1958. Powers was shot down in 1960 in his U2.
To this commenters point, my uncle has built several Cessna 170's from nothing in his garage... but he also worked in aviation.