Tiny vanes glued to planes promise big savings for US Air Force

A mix.

For the mechanical and hydraulic systems, it's certainly not dead though maybe underutilized or, as the mission has evolved, unnecessary. These aircraft get torn apart and rebuilt during depot maintenance every X flight hours or years. If those systems aren't working, they're fixed.

They also tear out old patches and replace them with new ones, and these days (this century, really) they don't bolt on patches which creates its own problems they use adhesives and they use modeling to try and reduce the patch size to its minimum. So you don't fly around with unnecessary patches on your airframe (here I'm assuming you're at one of the competent depots, not like NG who left a plug in a fuel line and totaled the plane, fortunately it was able to land safely).

But for electronic equipment and some stations and fixtures it may be deadweight or excessive weight.

Electronic equipment may not get a modernization effort for decades. And depending on who wins that contract (who am I kidding, if it's one of the main five primes you're fucked) it's likely the effort will fail 2-3 times before it succeeds. Imagine flying with a radio built in 1980. Everything in it except maybe the power supply and of course the antenna can fit inside a cellphone today. That's a lot of weight that could be removed, but it's not deadweight. It's still in use.

But you also find things like stations and even racks (in some of the heavies) to hold LRUs or control panels and screens that were designed back when you needed 20 LRUs to do what one can now, or a huge wiring harness that is now a keyboard, mouse, and workstation. These stations and racks don't always get cleaned out like they should and would be dead weight.

Yes and no. It is often just dead equipment. But sometimes it could still be turned on but there is no purpose for it anymore. The P-3 has been used for a -lot- of things over the years. Beyond that it is just heavy old versions of things that could easily have been lighter and required far less power. Using a 60 year old design for a replaceable part is an expensive luxury only the military can afford. If we had modernized the avionics and the main load center on that plane it probably would have save 10-15k lbs without even changing the engines or airframe.

"We" is Boeing. No one else was buying them and they had no reason to keep the line operational. That's a massive expensive for a private corporation to take on.

> It's so crazy that we shut down working production lines without having a replacement ready to go.

No one was buying anymore. Just like no one is buying B-52s, they're just refurbishing the existing ones.

As a Canadian, we bough a few initially, and I wish we had ordered several more when they announced the closure: even if we didn't need to use them daily, having them around and perhaps help allies (NATO, Japan, etc) could have been nice.

Pads were the friction material is solely using glue to adhere to the backing plate are generally either very cheap aftermarket replacements or the OEM cheapening out.

Yes but pure laminar flow wings have undesirable stall characteristics.

> when it stops being laminar the flow separates

Not true, laminar/turbulent and attached/separated are independent descriptors. Flow can be laminar+attached, laminar+separated (e.g., laminar separation bubbles), turbulent+attached (e.g., the majority of boundary layers on large aircraft), or turbulent+separated.

Ya, this is about triggering vortexes in order to keep the flow stable and near the skin. It isn't about laminar flow which, at the back end of an airplane, isn't such an advantage.