March 20, 2023
March 6, 2023
February 20, 2023
February 6, 2023
The U.S. Aerospace Jet Aircraft Industry has been getting punched in the nose of late, with the grounding of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the threat of cutbacks as a result of the sequestration. As if it could not get any worse, it has, but what does it all mean?
A report that somehow has leaked from the Pentagon revealed that the flaws and technical malfunctions that comes with the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II fighter jet is no small matter. According to the report, conducted by 5 avionic experts from the pentagon, the F-35 Lighting II fighter jet had 13 serious glitches.
Source: Derived from PENTAGON EVALUATION REPORT, Flight global Defense News – The Star
The plane which is costs an approximately two hundred and thirty million dollars each has fallen way beyond expectations as avionics experts in engineering scrambled to reconcile the glitches. According to an un-named source, the F-35 Lightning Jet Fighter has been procured by eleven nations around the world. The Joint Strike Fighter program has cost almost 400 billion dollars from the military budget. The whole scenario defies the old adage that “lightning never strikes the same spot twice”, in this case, it has been more than a dozen times!
On another note on glitches, the Federal Aviation Administration has approved the test flights conducted for the grounded Boeing 787 Dream liners with prototype versions of the battery fix. The Boeing 787 was grounded worldwide due to a short circuit that started a fire on a packed 787 at Boston’s Logan Airport and another incident when smoke originating from a battery on a 787, forced it to make an emergency landing. Grounding of the dream liners caused chaos worldwide when thousands of flights were cancelled, especially for All Nippon Airways (ANA), the world’s biggest operator of the plane.
US regulators gave Boeing the green light on Tuesday for its plan for the 787 batteries and agreed for them to carry out the test flight with the prototype battery fix. The federal aviation administration approved the Boeing Commercial Airplane’s Company’s certification plan for the redesigned 787 battery system and its plan to demonstrate the system, with assurances that it would meet all FAA requirements.
Japanese airline operators were applauding the decision by the regulators with the hope of resuming their flight operations as soon as possible. The recent spate of technical glitches due to batteries has been triggering questions from consumer groups who are beginning to think that there is a ‘reason behind the battery issues’, not realizing that the incidences are purely coincidental and isolated. Nevertheless, battery engineers have taken the issues into serious consideration.
What it all means is simple: I believe that if someone is not making mistakes, they aren’t making anything. In other words, mistakes are the result of attempts at progress. Every great innovation in any industry, the aircraft industry included, has resulted in some problems to be solved. These latest problems with the Boeing 787 and the F-35 Lighting II fighter jet only demonstrate that our aerospace engineers are moving in the right direction.
