The F-35's $400k helmet
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But... you don't have to wait to see how powerful this weapons system is. The F-35 completely took out the Dutch government before one even rolled off the assembly line!
Note to governments: when ordering your weapons systems it may be a good idea to get a cost-per-unit quote before signing.
What makes you think they're unhappy about the outcome?
However, like construction projects, the original politician/official get the credit for signing the contract and their successor actually has to deal with the terms.
I used to do development for a DOD project. At the outset of the project, it's often not clear what you're trying to do will even work. It might not even be clear what you should be trying to do. It's an iterative process of the government telling the engineers what it wants, and the engineers going back to the government with what can be done. That's not the say that projects like the F-35 weren't badly managed. But even well-managed defense projects are unpredictable.
The world just looks very different when you can't count on massive consumer volumes to amortize R&D. Imagine going to Apple and saying "we need you to develop the iPhone, and oh by the way we will order at most a few thousand of these. What'll be the unit cost?"
That's interesting, and also scary. I work in IT consulting where it's extremely rare for customers to pay for a professional services project before seeing a proof of concept demonstration of what will be delivered. In fact, we insist on showing them one before anything is signed, because it aligns expectations and allows for more accurate SOWs.
I've bid weapons systems and built weapons systems. I can honestly say that you make your very best effort to come up with a realistic proposal (we aren't trying to rip off the government. I'm just as much a taxpayer as you are). But there are limits. Detailed requirements are only going to be known well after you start. The government doesn't know how to specify the requirements - in large part that is your job. When you bid you want to be sure that you can be profitable, but then you also have competition, and a blind process (you don't know what your competitor is proposing, and at what price). This limits collusion, but the lack of information makes it hard to write a good proposal. Company A might think feature X is important, and put that in the contract. You didn't. Who is right? You'll find out when the contract is awarded. Opps if you got it wrong.
Once you win the real "fun" begins. If you are lucky the program office running your contract understands the nature of research and the unknowability of the future, and works with you to set a reasonable scope for the project, and works with you as more information is found. OTOH you can have a bean counter trying to protect their career by counting "shalls" in the document (a legally binding term) and ensuring that each one can be checked off with what you deliver. Doesn't matter if it is rational or not. And then there are copious documentation requirements. The intent is that these requirements be tailored to the contract and needs, but again bean counters can intervene and have you doing massive amounts of busy work. A great program officer will stream line it and have you doing effective work.
But, you know, there is not infinite money to prototype, build, test, scrap, and build again. You have 1 billion moving parts (figuratively) that you are trying to track and optimize for, and you kind of work your way to a solution. that is, unless you can afford the project to cost 10x as much (you are already complaining about cost, so that is a nonstarter), or take 5x as long (why don't I have my jet yet?!?!). The result is, unsurprisingly, unoptimal.
tl;dr: weapons systems are an extremely expensive mix of state of the art research/development/deployment all in one. It is not going to go smoothly. It is the worst possible way to do a project, except for all the other ways, which are worse.
There have been a few instance of advanced weapon systems designed by firms at risk with the hopes of winning sales, but the history of many of those is not conducive to firms repeating the efforts (e.g., the Northrup F-5G/F-20.)
Doesn't this just sound like the contractor promising things it can't deliver? This seems like one of the major endemic problems, especially with ridiculously advanced projects like this.
R&D is R&D. Contracts are contracts. Research, by nature, fails often. Contracts, by nature, are expected to succeed. You can't (or rather shouldn't) sign a contract for something that you don't know you can do, let alone whether you can do it within the time / money limits. To me, that seems borderline fraudulent, and is a form of lock-in. The clients don't know they're getting screwed, but when they finally do know, it's too expensive for them to switch contractors and they're stuck with you.
Obviously it's partially an incentives issue - it's economically rational for companies to do that. It's also probably a rational career move for officers to pitch a super-mega-awesome device that doesn't exist yet but sounds awesome. So that needs to change.
What happened to trying before buying? I have a sense that this used to be the case pre-WW2 but I don't really have any proof to back that up.
It's actually a lot like when Apple gets Foxconn to build iPhones. For stuff like its aluminum manufacturing process, Apple takes the R&D risk, because there aren't a bunch of other customers wanting to buy these products to Apple's spec.
Ok, so that's a fair point, but we don't really owe these companies a viable business model.
What happened to funding DARPA and NRL and Lincoln Labs and other places instead of private companies for the research portion? What happened to funding real research instead of funding an amorphous combination of research and delivery?
Those two things could still be separate. We could have a ton of competing research designs, and when some of them yield working prototypes, /then/ we can decide whether to pour hundreds of billions into building them.
> It's a joint-venture where the government foots the R&D risk to get a product that doesn't exist yet.
You're suggesting this is more kickstarter than amazon, basically. Which is fine. But if the government was 100% aware that there was risk, why aren't they hedging their bets like any sane investor should? It sure looks like they went all-in on the F-35, for example.
The U.S.G. doesn't owe them anything, but if it wants these weapons, it needs to offer its contractors a viable business model.
> What happened to funding DARPA and NRL and Lincoln Labs and other places instead of private companies for the research portion?
DARPA doesn't really do research. It manages R&D grants to private companies. Lincoln Labs is also a private entity. And in any case, they do more blue-sky stuff, not applied development.
> We could have a ton of competing research designs, and when some of them yield working prototypes
One of the early steps of the F-35 project was to issue contracts for two competing designs, one from Boeing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32) and one from Lockheed-Martin (which ultimately became the JSF). Each one cost $750 million.
I think going all in on the F-35 has to do with the some kind of power struggle between the air force and the army. The F-35 is the air force's baby, but it's a ground support role, which means the army is the organization that benefits from it. It's ground support as the air force prefers: fast, stealthy, light, in-and-out and not as the army prefers: slow, heavily armed, lingering for hours. As far as I can tell, the air force doesn't really care to do ground support the way the army would prefer. I assume they resent the idea that they're a support organization and not the principal actors. I don't know, maybe it's tied up in the old idea that pilots are the knights of the skies?
Of course, I'm no expert - everything I know I learned here:
http://www.jqpublicblog.com/lying-win-air-force-misrepresent...
here:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/a-10-f-35-air-force-...
and here:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/fa... http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-trag...
The whole F-35 vs A-10 satisfies a lot of tropes; government bureaucracy gone wild, old vs new, Air Force doesn't care about CAS, etc..
The fact is, guided munitions have changed the nature of close air support to the point that most CAS missions have been performed by other aircraft for a number of years now. The A-10 operates well in such asymmetrical environments as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Air Force concern is towards less permissive environments and having an inventory of planes that can multitask vs single-task. The A-10 has always been known to operate only in permissive environments and MANPADS are an emerging threat (Su-25 in Ukraine, for example). Yes, the A-10 is highly survivable, but there is case to be made in not being hit in the first place.
I would prefer if they kept the A-10 (and to be honest, prefer if they start fielding A-29 or some other LAS/LAAR craft in such permissive environments), but their argument against the A-10 (essentially, "we prefer to keep it, but other aircraft can do a pretty good role and it's cheaper to abandon it") isn't without merit.
The biggest thing Agile tries to do is minimize up-front planning. The reason for that is that you have the absolute least knowledge available to inform your decisions at the beginning of a project, so decisions made early on are massively more likely to be poor ones. Worse, you tend to get locked into them because other components in the system were designed around these decisions and that creates major impediments to change.
F-35 had reams and reams of design decisions made long before anyone started assembling the thing. To an Agile team that's the worst possible thing you can do. You decide you're going to do X long before you have any idea how long X will take or what it will cost or how well it might work. OK sure, yes, you've written down some numbers on paper, but to be blunt that's just blowing smoke up your own ass. It's inevitable that the end result of so carefully specifying the requirements up-front would lead to a virtually unbounded schedule and budget.
By contrast, an agile project's schedule and budget are theoretically unbounded, but you're supposed to strive to always be at a point where it's possible to ship on short notice so the practical reality (not always accomplished) should be that it's always possible to fix one or the other at a defined point by saying, "OK that's enough, let's ship." Or you can even pull the plug on the whole project if you decide it's just not working, and that's actually a realistic option because by delaying decisions you haven't encumbered yourself with a mountain of contracts and financial obligations.
Which isn't to say you could get away with using Scrum or Kanban on a project like this. Just that the problems you're talking about aren't really emblematic of Agile so much as the problems Agile is designed to fix.
Lead times on hardware is years. That helmet - how long would it take you to make one? You can't just tell that team don't sweat it, we are going to change requirement on you every two weeks. And you can't tell the jet team wait 3 years for this helmet, then start designing the system.
Military development is so far outside the realm of agile that it make so sense to compare (source: I've done both). The things agile people struggle with I just scoff at. Building large, physical, state of the art systems require planning, requires schedules, requires rework, requires huge teams, requires reams of documentation, and so on. You can't agile your way through that stuff.
Planning doesn't lead to unbounded schedules. It leads to compromise. We have 3 years, 85 million dollars. We need an architecture (assume, say, a flight system for a helicopter, something I have done and delivered). I'm sorry, but very early in you have to choose your processors, distributed network (you need to be fail safe, so multiple redundancies are needed), and more. Then you can buy that, or simulate that; either has costs, but your engineers something to work with. Many have very strict environmental concerns - limited weight, has to fit in this bay, needs radiation hardening, and so on. I can't wait until the last 3 months to make this decision, sorry. Somebody has to build these, deliver them. They need to design and build out the logistics chain - how do I retrofit the existing fleet? HOw do I do repairs? How quickly can I spin up my factory line if you need spares? Do we buy 3x the units you need now, or plan on JIT. This is just one tiny nit of a tiny detail that needs to be decided and tracked. Don't forget instruction manuals, plans to train the maintaince workers, training the workers, training the pilots, building a school for the next people coming through in two years.
I have a meething. I could type for several hours. There is nothing agile about this problem.
In my experience unfortunately, exactly 0% of customers (internal or external) are ablet to accept/wrap their head around a variable feature deliverable and demand a fix set of features decided at start and required to be delivered by some date. Aka utter fantasy.
That said, it's perfectly reasonable for customers to expect to have some promise about what they're paying for. That's where you trot out the idea of a minimum viable product: Make some tough decisions about what features are actually required, and then agree to a timeline that makes it a virtual certainty that you'll be able to deliver all of the required ones. When you hit that mark ahead of schedule and start burning through the list of nice-to-haves they'll be elated.
Just visualizing this makes me feel sick. Imagine executing high-G maneuvers but seeing an image that doesn't correspond to what you feel...
Planes have attitude indicators for when you can't see anything,e.g when you fly inside a cloud.
But you don't need attitude indicators when you can see the horizon.
They were quite involved in the Virtual World project which is open sourced: https://github.com/virtual-world-framework/vwf
*from my perspective as someone who thinks building weapons technology is pretty bad and something I'd never do personally
If anything I pine for the days when it was much simpler to make a direct and meaningful engineering contribution on a large project.
Pilots do complain about technology (which always amuses me), but in the end we want the technology that helps us win.
Nobody really knows just how much of an advantage stealth technology provides in the real world. It's going to take a few skirmishes with other top-of-the-line aircraft flown by well-trained pilots before anyone can say it's a failure from a performance perspective.
The one place you point to any sort of certain failure is cost. The F-22 was supposed to be the high performance, high end, high cost plane and the F-35 was going to be the high volume, low cost plane to fill in the numbers. Just like the F-15/F-16 pair. Clearly the F-35 is too expensive to qualify as low cost anything, and the more expensive it gets the fewer they're going to sell, which sets off a sort of price spiral.
> Costing about 250,000 pounds ($400,100) apiece, the helmets will be deployed in all Typhoons, of which Eurofighter has delivered 278 to six air forces and has orders for 429 more.
>>"Things got so bad that in 2011 the Pentagon hired BAE Systems to build a back-up helmet in case the one in development couldn’t be rescued"
Particularly why BAE for Typhoon already had it around the same time.
That is the opening sentence. And I will be surprised if it does not send chills down the spine of any person whose life will somehow depend on that airplane.
Who, exactly, are we supposed to be dog fighting with in next 20 years?
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-ships-old-arctic-nato-set-alar...
A number of people think Stealth increases the chance for WVR engagements (WVR = Within Visual Range, or dog fighting). I'm one of them. The U.S. has a bad history of predicting the end of WVR engagements (see Vietnam and the F-4 produced without internal guns). Air superiority is definitely not a thing that can be taken for granted. But many people do because the West has dominated the skies for many decades now.
extremely low-latency head & eye-tracking, managing depth-of-field, integrating multiple input streams, providing non-distracting information overlays etc.
In an interview one Russian tank gun operator was boasting "we had a good tank - it had night vision"! In 2015! He said 3 tanks out of their team's 12 were such "good" tanks (and it was regular Russian army unit, not a rebel one). Of course no laser guided, drones, or any "total battlefield awareness", etc... Just shoot whatever you see through that night vision (it was their actual order the night Ukraine forces were making their way out of Debaltsevo encirclement through the narrow bottleneck while Russian forces were shooting at them from good positions from both sides)
Officially the soldiers were "on vacation" (just happen to vacation with their guns and tanks in Ukraine). Unfortunately for wounded and killed in the January/February 2015 many of them were really put "on vacation" paperwork-wise and now they or their relatives have troubles trying to get the compensation money.
>>Modernized versions of T-72 is still in wide service with Russian army.
Oh, that's funny. SKS is in wide service. Along with Mosin-Nagant.
>Oh, that's funny. SKS is in wide service. Along with Mosin-Nagant.
In active service Russia has 2000 T-72, 2000 T-90, 3000 T-80. And 3 or 4 of T-14. So, according to you, which tank is in wide service in Russia?
Not that it really matters.
I appreciate your point on one hand - conventional weapons can be inaccurate and that can result in tragic, horrifying mistakes.
But, I'm not aware of any high tech war technology that explicitly tries to prevent risk of injury to non-combatants. The only thing that stops civilians from being fired on is the person on the other end with their finger on the trigger.
For example, in spite of the technology at hand, drone operators have made decisions based on misinformation or misinterpretation - resulting in the horrific murder of civilians.
A weapon is a weapon, and it can be easily used negligently - or malevolently. The Uragan example you mentioned is at least one of these.
> A weapon is a weapon, and it can be easily used
> negligently - or malevolently.
Something like a guided cruise missile is designed to destroy a single building. There can be operator error, and obviously you could intentionally (malevolently) target a civilian building with one.
But compare that to the technology we had sixty years ago: squadrons of huge bomber planes carrying hundreds of unguided bombs.
One of those things is clearly an order of magnitude less likely to cause unintended collateral damage than the other.
There are certainly downsides to the modern technology. One much-discussed one is that cruise missiles and drones give some countries a god-like ability to reign targeted death on others, without putting their own people at risk. Say what you will about the horrors of WWII bombers dropping bombs on populated cities; at least the countries dropping bombs had some skin in the game.
Overall, though, I'll take it.
I visited Ukraine last month and one of the best things I saw was that war there was contained and "light" using mostly light weapons.
Russia probably has not the tech the US has, but Europe does, and Europe does not need a heavy nuclear war or loosing their main energy supplier(Russia).
I can see how NATO came to be then...
I'm not sure how discouraging Russian and Islamic expansionism is somehow 'seeding war.' I don't recall Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait being 'seeded' by the U.S. During the Korean War, it was the Chinese supported North that attacked the South. How about Tibet? Or pretty much every conflict in Africa? This "America as invader" meme has no basis in reality or fact. The U.S. just doesn't sit around throwing darts on maps to pick countries to invade. We could suggest that countries like France in Africa and Indochina, the British with Northern Ireland and the Faulklands, the Germans (twice) in Europe, the Italians in Ethiopia and Libya, the Egyptians in the Six Day war and the Yom Kippir War.. The U.S. has been the belligerents in very few conflicts. We could talk about the Cubans in Grenada, the Soviets in Afghanistan..
The U.S. isn't perfect, but they definitely don't spend their time invading their neighbors because of some ethnic claim or another. The U.S. is involved in many places but there's a big difference between getting involved defensively as opposed to offensive, territorial-grabbing objectives such as seen in the Ukraine and the Caucasus.
By the way, I am not passing judgement on any country; it's just important to maintain perspective based on facts and not some knee-jerk assumption.
Ask Poland and the Baltics if they want the U.S. around. Huge majorities would say yes. Woukd you rather have the US sit in the sidelines while Russia marches unchecked to the German border?
And EU as a whole gets most of energy from outside Russia. It would hurt Russia a lot more than EU.
And nuclear war is right off.
On the other hand behaving like it's 1939 in modern Europe must be punished, or we will get more wars eventually, so Russia brought its own demise on itself, and it drags parts of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and others with it.
and that exactly what Russia did when Western Ukraine nationalist forces grabbed the power in Kiev through the military coup and threatened to do to ethnic Russians what the same nationalist forces did to ethnic Poles in Western Ukraine during WWII http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army#Ethnic... . Their WWII leader - Bandera - is openly revered as national hero by the current powers in Kiev.
BTW Bandera had nothing on Stalin when it comes to murdering civilians, and there are 1000s monuments of Stalin in Russia, and your president called the fall of USSR the greatest tragedy of XXth century...
Anyway - this doesn't matter. You lie regarding the nationalist forces (look up the percentage won by right wing parties in elections after Majdan - less than 5% IIRC).
And the threat to ethnic Russians in Ukraine is pure bullshit Russian propaganda. There is not even clear way to tell who is Ukrainian speaking Russian (significant amounts of these live even in Kiev), and who is "persecuted Russian". And telling by the fact that Russian minority in Estonia, Latvia etc complain about persecution too (and EU laws regarding minorities are very strict about such things). I'd take such complains with big grain of salt.
In conclusion - it was invasion and annexion of democratic state by authoritarian neighbor. The excuses are poor. That's why most of civilized world put sanctions on Russia.
Bandera was doing ethnic cleansing of a region and killed 60000-100000 Poles, Stalin doing military occupation of half of the country - 150000 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland#After...
Percentage-wise Poland probably got easier than USSR itself during the same period under Stalin. Not that it wasn't a tragedy, just that it wasn't specifically against Poles. It was pretty much the same "upper class cleansing" that happened in USSR - military officers, ministers, government, and other educated or "advanced" in any other way people. Bandera on the other hand was specifically killing Poles.
>You lie regarding the nationalist forces (look up the percentage won by right wing parties in elections after Majdan - less than 5% IIRC).
Yatsenuk's and Poroshenko's parties took around 50% and have full power in the country. It is these forces that direct the "pacifying" operation in the East which in particular results in significant ethnic cleansing of that region.
>And the threat to ethnic Russians in Ukraine is pure bullshit Russian propaganda. There is not even clear way to tell who is Ukrainian speaking Russian (significant amounts of these live even in Kiev), and who is "persecuted Russian".
you just don't know what you're talking about.
>And telling by the fact that Russian minority in Estonia, Latvia etc complain about persecution too (and EU laws regarding minorities are very strict about such things). I'd take such complains with big grain of salt.
Have relatives in Litva. Fully integrated, inter-married, children, etc... If you're relatively young and determined, you can be able to jump through all the hoops... And it wasn't immigration, it is for the people who lived on the territory at the time of the new state formation. You're probably again talking about things you don't know about.
>In conclusion - it was invasion and annexion of democratic state by authoritarian neighbor.
Presidents in democratic state are changed either through elections or impeachment. Taking power in a coup is completely different thing. These new Ukraine powers were stupid to immediately manifest direct and open hostility toward ethnic Russians (first order of business of the new powers - the language law - no practical effect, only huge symbolic gesture) before having built up the military forces. Putin doesn't care about fate of these ethnic Russians of course, it just provided the opening for him, and Crimea more than happily voted for separation (speaking about democracy - Crimea separation was more democratic than the power change in Kiev, so if you think that current regime in Kiev is democratically legitimate than it would be a double standard to not recognize Crimea separation). And as a side effect Ukraine got punished for stupidity of their new regime. Nationalism blinded by hate always gets punished in the end...
And by the way - everybody is ok with Saudis attacking Yemen where the president they liked was ousted... Try Putin actually attack the Ukraine when Yanukovich was ousted... Double standards.
And then he also ordered massacre of prisoners at Katyn. And I don't understand your point about only counting killed Poles against Stalin. He is responsible for millions of deaths, Bandera can't compete.
Not that it matters, you brought up history to political discussion.
Yatseniuk and Poroshenko aren't nazi nor nationalist, and they weren't leaders of Majdan, they were chosen in elections afterwards, after Janukovych lost power after ordering shooting to protesters.
He also illegally changed constitution, and introduced law against protesting, and against independent media. I'd say the only way they could avoid Putin and Lukashenko style authoritarian state was through revolution, and they did OK.
Saudis are irrelevant to the subject, it's natural that people react to bully next door more than to bully on other continent.
Are you absolutely bonkers? I live just far enough outside of a major US city where I'd die a slow miserable death from the fallout.
But as long as we carry the bigger gun, we'll always have an incentive to fight.
This is without a doubt one of the most backwards ignorant things I have ever read online.
It might come as a shock to you, but humans have been killing other humans since the stone age. And, as time has gone on, it's become less and less likely for a person to die violently, at the same time that arms technology has advanced.
Is it sad that the internet has connected the entire world in ways no one foresaw? That through it ideas and information flow so much more effortlessly than they used to? Is it sad that anyone with a sufficiently powerful receiver can contact a satellite and find out where they are on the planet to an accuracy of a couple meters? Is it sad that digital cameras have become ubiquitous and we can capture whatever moment when want on demand? All of those technologies came from the military. Do you even stop to think that America's government is paying for the upkeep of and freely giving access to the GPS we've come to take for granted?
America's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are another great example. Mercury and Gemini both used modified ICBMs where they swapped the nuclear warhead with a pod that had men in it. America used those (and the Russians used their versions) to put the first men in space which started the space race which has ultimately given us GPS, and untold knowledge about our planet and what we're doing to it.
To say that the military only creates technology that kills people is disingenuous when all you have to do is stop and think about the modern tech we use every day.
The US/Iraq war and occupation lasted about a decade and there were less than 200,000 direct combat deaths. Contrast with WWII, in which there were quite a few individual battles with greater death tolls... between one and two million people died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
Advanced military technology might be one reason why death tolls have decreased. Advanced superpowers with advanced military technology don't wage full-scale wars against each other because the results would mutually assured destruction. And smaller, poorer countries don't dare to engage the larger ones with advanced technology because the outcome would be lopsided destruction of the smaller country's forces.
Don't get me wrong. Even a single death is too much. The world still sucks and there's too much violence. And the ultimate end price of this advanced killing technology might be that we ruin the planet with nuclear weapons someday.
Only the most facile could possibly believe this or any war machine is "just to kill people".
- Deter war
- Protect people from being killed
- Provide strength to negotiations / treaties
- Liberate conquered people> a stealthy fighter jet years that is often called a flying computer because of its more than 8 million lines of code
For all the critics, all the hate vs drones and leaner fighters and bombers, the F-35 _is_ an impressive engineering feat and a turning point, especially re:software.
At some point, a "Snow Leopard" version of the F-35 will turn out as a very fine piece of equipment, only possibly without the initial cost benefits expectations. Also: most learnings will probably be lost because the project will not have a decisive cost/performance advantage despite its complexity. The plane won't have a successor.
Hopefully we can hear at some point of contractors who worked on its systems.
That they keep quoting it really just makes me scared for the people working there, their worth measured by the lines they contributed to the behemoth as dictated by people that started in the 70s and never did learn anything new.
What does the context change in this case? That it is (or not) a propagandistic advertisement doesn't change the fact that it's an interesting technology.
Weapons aren't evil. Evil is what's evil. Burying one's head in the sand à la Chamberlain led to the extermination of millions. The Khymer Rouge had no advanced weaponry and slaughtered millions.
In Gulf War I, 35,000 total deaths, in no small part because of smarter weapons. An entire country liberated from the Iraqis in just over a month.
How would advanced weaponry have changed the game in wars across history?
Even the Iraq war, which has been one of Anerica's longest has resulted in about 500,000 deaths. In the much shorter WWI it was 16 million deaths.
High tech weapons save lives. Wars will always happen be it with machetes or spears or with billion dollar aircraft systems. A world without war would be nice, but there will always be evil in the hearts of men.
this world will not get better as long we don't unite and overcome ancient separation by nation or believe.
They've come down in price. When I did my honours at a defence science base in '96, it was using a helmet obtained "second-hand and shop-soiled" for $600k - the helmet had a monocle that projected a HUD onto your retina. Apparently it was an Apache gunship pilot's helmet.
custom made != only works with one aircraft
but wonder if this can translate into increased situational awareness or just more distractions