No communications? What about the PRC-90's in their survival vests?
Lockheed's F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line
Brandon Hill (Blog) - February 26, 2007 10:28 AM
Six Lockheed F-22 Raptors have Y2K-esque glitch of their own over the
Pacific
Lockheed's F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighter in the world with its
stealth capabilities, advanced radar, state of the art weapons systems and
ultra-efficient turbofans which allow the F-22 to "supercruise" at supersonic
speeds without an afterburner.
The Raptor has gone up against the best that the US Air Force and
Navy has to offer taking out F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18 Super Hornets
during simulated war games in Alaska. The Raptor-led "Blue Air" team
was able to rack up an impressive 241-to-2 kill ratio during the exercise
against the "Red Air" threat -- the two kills on the blue team were from
the 30-year old F-15 teammates and not the new Raptors.
But while the simulated war games were a somewhat easy feat for the Raptor,
something more mundane was able to cripple six aircraft on a 12 to 15 hours
flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Air
Force's mighty Raptor was felled by the International Date Line (IDL).
When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems
crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and
partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were
made to "reboot" the systems to no avail.
Luckily for the Raptors, there were no weather issues that day so visibility
was not a problem. Also, the Raptors had their refueling tankers as guide
dogs to "carry" them back to safety. "They needed help. Had they gotten
separated from their tankers or had the weather been bad, they had no
attitude reference.
They had no communications or navigation," said Retired Air Force Major
General Don Shepperd. "They would have turned around and probably
could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been
bad on approach, there could have been real trouble."
"The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious.
It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad,"
Shepperd continued. "It turned out OK. It was fixed in 48 hours. It was a
computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in
a couple lines of the code and everything goes."
Luckily for the pilots behind the controls of the Raptors, they were not
involved in a combat situation. Had they been, it could have been a
disastrous folly by the U.S. Air Force to have to admit that their aircraft
which cost $125+ million USD apiece were knocked out of the sky due to a few
lines of computer code.
"And luckily this time we found out about it before combat. We got it fixed
with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again,
completed their deployment. But this could have been real serious in
combat," said Shepperd.