
Air Force Designed, Built, and Flew a Brand-New Fighter Jet In One Year - mercurialshark
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586/air-force-secret-new-fighter-jet/
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carabiner
Spoiler: they don't know anything about it, no pictures and no specs. The
company that worked on it is not revealed. Really the most notable thing is
that it took only a year. The P-51 Mustang was conceived and put into service
(wartime) also in a year.

It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a
modern aircraft.

~~~
dylan604
When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker
fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start
requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.

~~~
fred_is_fred
Also true for all software projects.

~~~
dylan604
That's exactly why I worded it without referencing airplanes. It's kind of a
universal statement about committees.

~~~
sosborn
My theory: In any organization there is a magic number of committee members,
that once achieved, assures that the project will fail.

~~~
Yoofie
I was just thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on
small nuclear reactors and how many organizations, governments and countries
can't accomplish anything of significance in a timely, costly or efficient
manner.

I was thinking it should be written like a law:

The success of a project or goal is inversely proportional to the number
stakeholders, investors and/or general labour involved in the
project/business/goal.

This idea is closely related to the 80/20 rule, the cost/performance/quality
decision triangle, etc.

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cheaprentalyeti
I have no special knowledge, but I find myself wondering if it's just a
variant of an existing fighter (F-22, F-35, maybe even F-23) or a manned
variant of a recent drone prototype like the X-47B.

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kiba
Reminds me of what I read from the memoir on Skunkwork. They specifically used
off the shell components and other strategies to reduce engineering time and
speed up prototyping.

Not knowing anything about aircraft development, they are probably much less
ambitious about design specs while at the same time iterated much faster.

~~~
ISL
There are many lessons to be found within Skunk Works by Rich.

Among them is the statement that the SR-71 was _not_ at the edge of the design
envelope. If I recall correctly, there were substantial safety margins in most
areas, "like a Chevy truck" in order to ensure the speed of development and
improve the likelihood that the entire project would succeed.

The HN productivity/self-help crowd will find a lot more in there.

This passage has had the highest personal impact per word as any text I've
read: _You don 't need Harvard to teach you that it's more important to listen
than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll
never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is
better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don't half-
heartedly wound problems - kill them dead. That's all there is to it. Now you
can run this goddamn place._

Also: [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-
are...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-
areas/aeronautics/skunkworks/kelly-14-rules.html)

~~~
ylee
>You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make
the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than
no decision

What I wrote in my journal after joining an investment bank's equity research
team:

"Good dinner with two traders, x and y; they have both been in the business
for more than a decade and shared many interesting experiences and insights
into the business. I did not realize that our traders very much need
information flow, preferably proprietary, in order to entice their buyside
counterparts to trade through them. It almost doesn't matter whether the
information is accurate or not; what counts is being distinctive".

I well remember one of the traders slamming his fist on the table complaining
about how a former analyst was very bad at returning phone calls, and saying
that being 52% right (meaning 48% wrong) is better than a higher correct
percentage but not being available.

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seattletech
Yeah, but the defense budget is optimized to benefit multiple Congressional
districts as a jobs program, this doesn't work...

~~~
OldHand2018
The original article says that they aren't trying to reduce spending. They
want to take money that used to go into long-term maintenance and put it into
into R&D and manufacturing. Instead of keeping the planes flying for 30+
years, they want a steady stream of new, up-to-date specialized designs that
they keep in the air for 13 years or less. They want to force China and Russia
to play a never ending game of catch-up.

It would be a shake-up in the current system, but is fully compatible with
running a nationwide jobs program.

~~~
twic
It also means opponents have thirteen different aircraft they have to train
against!

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jacques_chester
Lots more detail in the original article this one links to:
[https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-
us-...](https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-
has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-
jet/)

~~~
OldHand2018
Yeah, that's a really good article, and discloses that what they're doing
isn't about a single new airplane. They want to completely change the way the
Air Force manages the entire airplane lifecycle:

> The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the
> majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the
> aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would
> keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new
> planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business
> case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about
> 50-80 aircraft every year.

> The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent
> increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft
> would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half,
> Roper wrote in the paper.

> “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a
> profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get
> to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it
> research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the
> spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”

~~~
twic
If a figher plane has a lifespan of 30 years, does this mean that at steady
state, the air force would have 1500 - 2400 fighters of 30 different types?

Did Hayao Miyazaki take over Air Force procurement, or what?

EDIT: Ah, they also reduce the lifecycle to 10 - 15 years. Still wild!

~~~
jacques_chester
I don't think you should be downvoted, it's a reasonable misunderstanding.

The goal is to create a constant pipeline of new planes with short lead times,
so that they don't need to have extended lifetimes with expensive maintenance.
Personally I feel that's a better approach overall for many mobile capital-
intensive systems: military hardware, public transportation and so on.

As the interview points out, smaller, more-frequent procurements reduce the
risk to suppliers as well. Currently every weapons system project is a
existential risk to contractors, so they quite naturally try to push as much
back as possible. And so we wind up with parts being built in every
Congressional district at vast expense and added complexity.

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jjk166
Given that a warplane has not been developed so quickly since WW2, part of me
wonders if there has recently been some development which has given the air
force a wartime sense of urgency. While it seems unlikely that we wouldn't
hear anything about such a development, it also seemed unlikely that we
wouldn't hear about a project like this.

~~~
heelix
They can if they need to... Both the U2 and the SR71 had a crazy short
development time - months, not years. The history of both those aircraft from
a build/design perspective is an amazing read. They knew the U2 would be
obsolete for the original mission and got the blackbird in the air. Got to
wonder if it is just significantly harder to hide things now than it was in
the late 50's. Between satellites, cell phones, and globs of potential
collaboration - it would be hard to keep something in the air a secret.

[http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf](http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf)

~~~
lokedhs
The irony is that the U-2 is still in service while the SR-71 is
decommissioned.

This doesn't take away from your point of course, I just thought it was
interesting.

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toomuchtodo
Would love to hear if the Air Force Kessel Run program contributed to this [1]
[2] (cc @AndrewKemendo).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326)

[2] [https://kesselrun.af.mil/](https://kesselrun.af.mil/)

~~~
qchris
I've only heard good things about that program; if they somehow contributed to
this effort, it would be another huge feather in their hat.

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ufmace
Would be interesting to hear more details on how they pulled that off. I would
tend to assume the fast development speed involves using a bunch of existing
tech instead of developing new. Maybe it's also unmanned, letting them drop a
ton of life-support stuff and relax reliability requirements.

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IanDrake
I would think at this point we don't really need fighter jets.

Wouldn't a vast number of cheap remote controlled/ai driven flying explosives
be more useful?

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mrbonner
So basically they could do this because of limited budget, right schedule and
no red tapes? Sound like a start up to me :)

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duxup
Not knowing much of anything about it, it's kinda hard to figure out how much
of an achievement this is...

