The headline is completely inaccurate. The B-52H communications systems have received multiple upgrades since they were built in 1960-1961.
They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system and the software.
CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like this.
Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.
I'd wager (and please correct me if I'm wrong, your experience no doubt means you'd know better than I) that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too. The B-52's primary mission was nuclear bombing for a long time.
Yep. Everything is nuke (EMP) hardened. Another bit of trivia: the nuclear flight crew used to have a lead eye patch, so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
> so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
Serious question, this is quite interesting to me... why? I mean, if the Cold War had gone "Hot" there likely wouldn't have been anywhere for them to land (presumably the Soviets would have bombed the bases), they'd have been basically dead upon takeoff. Seems like they didn't even really need to carry enough fuel for a round trip, just carry enough to get to the target and fly faster. Do you know what the plan was for after the bombs went off?
One, a B-52 can carry more than one nuclear bomb. You want the crew to remain in flying condition after dropping the first one so they can drop more.
Two, you can end up with pretty severe motivational problems if you don't at least make an effort to allow your pilots to return home. Even if you think it's unlikely that they'll make it home, you still want to give them the tools they need to try.
Three, it's not entirely unrealistic that some of them would make it home. Even if every landing strip was destroyed, they could parachute out. The idea that a nuclear war would be a 15-minute orgy of MAD didn't really happen until the 70s. Before that, ICBMs were limited in number and accuracy, and bombers would be carrying out a lot of the strikes, especially on military targets. The war could take a day or two, with B-52s and other bombers making multiple roundtrips. Even afterwards, there was no guarantee that a war between the superpowers would go from zero to full-scale MAD in an instant. It wasn't out of the question that B-52s might be called on for nuclear bombing of a small number of targets in some form of limited nuclear war.
Each plane has more than one planned target, so they need to be able to fly on after hitting the first one. Early versions (before introducing stand-off missiles and cruise missiles) carried up to 8 free-fall bombs.
In the outbound direction they would get aerial-refueled over the arctic, so I don't think they can make a roundtrip. I've read (but don't have any authoritative sources) that the war-plan called for flying to western europe at the end of the mission, but that during simulator training they just shut down the simulator and stepped out after hitting the last target.
Ahh, you and another commenter pointed out multiple targets, I supposed that alone would be reason to need a functioning crew after the detonation. It's interesting stuff.
It definitely is interesting, in a horrifying sort of way.
Those of us who grew up towards the end of the Cold War (I'm assuming most of the participants in this conversation fit that) got exposed to nuclear war as The End of the World As We Know It, a brief, rapid orgy of destruction that leaves everyone dead. And by the 80s, that was probably about right unless the superpowers could figure out some way to keep the war limited in scale.
But there were two or three decades before that stage where the situation was pretty complicated. Nuclear bombs started out envisioned as being an improved version of the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. (And indeed, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the deadliest ones.) As bombs grew in number and power and bombers got better, there was a whole series of moves and countermoves involving better bombers, better interceptors, better radars, short-range ballistic missiles, tactical weapons up to and including nuclear bazookas, ICBMs, ICBM countermeasures, ICBM counter-countermeasures, ICBM counter-counter-countermeasures, submarines armed with ballistic missiles, submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes....
There are three fictional treatments of nuclear war which, to my limited and imperfect knowledge, appear to give a pretty realistic picture of what a real war would have looked like.
Two, surprise surprise, focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knows that it came close to a nuclear war, but until I read these, I didn't realize that it literally came down to a single officer objecting to the launch of a nuclear torpedo while on a submarine, while two other officers were in favor and tried to convince him.
Spoiler alert: both end up with the US largely intact and Russian reduced to an extremely niche language, as the disparity in nuclear arms between the two nations in 1962 was enormous.
No doubt all three have inaccuracies, but I think they paint a much more realistic picture of the situation than the more typical "mutants everywhere" or "literally every single human being dies" treatment.
In all seriousness, I think the plan was to make sure our bombs got dropped also. It's not MAD if you can't follow up on either the 'mutual' or the 'assured' part.
Software doesn't deal with EMP hardening. Hardware does. Bits soft setting themselves is almost impossible to debug natively, since your debugger can be effected by the same error.
Your bet met is running the algorithm ~20-100 times and comparing the outputs, then averaging.
I'm confused. Who said anything about trying to harden against EMP in software?
My understanding is that the real threat from EMP is physical destruction of the circuits by inducing voltages beyond what the wiring can handle. Any bit flips would be transient, since the EMP doesn't last very long (thus the P part).
Trying to use software to protect your chips from being fried by hundreds or thousands of volts being shoved through parts that weren't designed to handle it is clearly not viable.
>>I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.
>I'd wager [..] that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too
The poster was talking about software reliability, which the next poster asked if software reliability was related to EMP hardening.
It was quite clear to me that he was talking about hardware reliability, what with the explicit mentions of CRTs, fragility, and resistance to vibration and shock.
The only mention of software in the whole comment is a brief comment about "upgrades to both the system and the software".
According to a March 2014 budget request, the Air
Force plans to spend $14 million on the project this
year, and a total of $40.6 million between 2014 and 2019.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but that seems incredibly cheap. I didn't think the military could change a roll of toilet paper for less than $50 million. (Much respect to those in the military - I think we're all just used to hearing about programs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars)
Well, cost effective programs rarely make the news.
Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane.
Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....
As I recall, and agreeing with the first link Google supplied (http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-...), the hammer might have been somewhat special, but the outsized price was simply an accounting artifact, the contract supplied N spare parts and tools, and overhead was evenly allocated to each part, whether it was a hammer or a complete jet engine (I think it was a contract for maintaining them).
The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a huge transport, our biggest ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ... more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to:
The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember, we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive restart of only 50 in 1985-89.
Ben Rich's book [1] about the development of the SR-71 explains the reason behind the hammer story. Cadmium plated tools were traced to embrittlement of titanium panels; they spent quite a bit of time tracking down the source of that problem and eliminating Cd plated tools from the factory.
As far as coffee makers go, it's not always true in aircraft---especially combat aircraft---that gravity always points down. You see the same awareness in NASA Tech Briefs: coffee makers, toilet seats, even simple things like cabinet latches can't depend on gravity always having the same magnitude, or direction, or steadiness.
[1] Ben R. Rich. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. ISBN 0-316-74300-3.
The trend is towards building fewer of each type of aircraft, too. For example, while 744 B-52s were built, only 78 remain in service. Which makes a $40 million avionics upgrade program pretty impressive. Imagine trying to get a design and production run of under 100 units of military-grade hardware done for half a million dollars apiece....
And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about $150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece. Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the $150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....
Heh. While drafting the above I decided to omit WWII production numbers, such as 18,482 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers (the all time record for a single type), or perhaps more comparable, as long as we're talking heavy bombers:
3,970 B-25s Superfortresses, which we kept using for a long time, along with a B-50 upgrade, 370 units.
384 B-36 Peacemakers.
744 B-52 Stratofortresses (but we actually used them in hot wars).
100 B-1B Lancers, although they were built as stopgaps, and the remaining active fleet of 67 have had their nuclear weapon capability removed.
21 B-2 Spirits, for like the F-22 we stopped production way too early.
Anyway, the problem here is that, someday, we're going to fight a serious hot war again, and these paltry numbers, which will decline due to wear and tear and operational losses won't suffice absent it going nuclear. ALL F-15s built have a nasty problem with a structural defect, what was built was not what was specified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15#Structural_defects) ... the F-35 looks like our generation's TFX....
Anyone want to bet the F/A-18F Super Hornet will play the same historical role the F-4 Phantom II?
I don't see a likelihood for any vaguely symmetrical hot war anytime soon. Who would we fight? Russia probably doesn't need fighting, just cut off their trade and wait. China and the US are far too dependent on each other. Europe wants to be buddies with everyone. Nobody else has the capability. If those situations change, by the time they do, I think sending manned aircraft into war zones to get shot at will be an obsolete technique, akin to sending in battleships to fight an enemy navy after the rise of the aircraft carrier. Another couple decades of technological advances will change things a lot.
the 300 dollar ashtray was built for naval use, that if it slammed against something it broke in to several dull pieces instead of tiny shards that went everywhere.
now that you mention it, yeah I think that is where i heard that. Although at one point I looked it up, and I seem to remember that it was an actual thing.
The reason why aerospace stuff sometimes looks dated is that it goes through an unholy amount of testing -- same for essential nautical equipment. Until a few years ago, you'd get on the bridge of a cargo ship and see these big LORAN navigation units built into the console, usually buried under GPS stuff on a swivel mount... because they liked GPS but wanted to be able to quickly get back to the system they KNEW worked in case the new stuff didn't.
My friend from college was a navigator on a 4 man crew aircraft called the A-6 I believe. Literally his only function in life was to be able to navigate the plane back in case the GPS failed (using maps and a compass and what ever else). So to combat boredom he would take his laptop up on every flight and watch movies and bullshit with the rest of the crew.
The P-3 Orion has a periscopic sextant for celestial navigation, in case the GPS and inertial nav both fail. Granted, the former wasn't around when the plane was designed, but the Navy keeps them on the aircraft and keeps the navigators trained in their usage.
Your friend's bird, particularly if he was in recently, was an EA-6B Prowler, the electronic warfare variant of the A-6.
That and hardware needs to be able to withstand impressive amounts of vibration, environmental conditions, and electromagnetic energy. The latest and greatest ICs typically aren't designed with these in mind, so you're "stuck" with older designs which have been adapted and work well.
I hope that the reality is that there are Windows PCs on the plane that the crew can use for mundane things like mission reports (as the article mentioned). I really hope nothing mission-critical is running on a consumer OS.
Edit: Are there high-availability versions of Windows? If so, does that version run Word?
They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system and the software.
CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like this.
Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.