Old tech in aerospace

Consider three levels of classroom technology:

- Blackboard

- Whiteboard

- Smartboard

The second doesn't do much that the first can't do, but dry erase markers are more convenient than chalk, so whiteboards are replacing 18th Century technology blackboards (but some teachers still prefer chalk due to the nicer smell, or whatever). 

Electronic smartboards can do more than either, but to get their full theoretical benefits they need a lot of systems integration that almost never gets done. So, some teachers make excellent use of their expensive Smartboards and others don't use them much at all and would prefer to just have 1960s technology whiteboards.

One thing I wanted to add to my article on the Education-Industrial Complex was that out of the three famous Skunk Works planes I mention in the article -- the 1950s U-2, the 1960s SR-71, and the 1970s F-117 -- the one that is still in service is the oldest and least technologically sophisticated: the U-2 that CIA put into service in 1957. It's basically a glider with jet engines. They keep upgrading the electronics in it and the more recent ones are somewhat redesigned while keeping the same basic shape but that's about it. It's cheap and very serviceable in situations where the folks being spied on don't have top notch SAMs or don't want to irritate the U.S. all that much by shooting it down. It was called the TR-1 for awhile, but they've gone back to the famous name -- why let Bono have it all to himself? It is currently intended to stay in service through 2023.

Here are some other famous old planes still in service with the U.S. military:

B-52 heavy bomber -- Introduced into service in 1955. Currently intended to stay in service into 2040s.

C-130 Hercules turboprop cargo plane -- in service since 1957. My father worked on this some when I was young, although my impression is that it didn't need much fixing. Mostly, they've just developed a remarkable number of specialized versions for different tasks.

KC 135 -- Refueling tanker (Boeing 707) since 1957

T-38 trainer -- Since 1961

P-3 Orion turboprop patrol plane. This subchaser has been in service since 1962. My dad worked on this a lot when I was a kid. It's modeled on the Electra passenger liner that became obsolete when jets came along, but it has been ridiculously useful has a high miles per gallon watchdog plane.

C-5 giant cargo plane -- in service since 1970. My dad flew down to Georgia to help out on this troubled project. Its development was enormously expensive and controversial in its day, but the ability to fly main battle tanks around turned out to be strategically crucial, so it's still here.

F-15 fighter -- since 1977

A-10 Warthog ground attack jet -- since 1977, although the Air Force has been trying to get rid of it since roughly 1978; but the lowly groundpounders like it. Supposed to be replaced by the F-35 Flying Panacea. Good luck with that.

F-16 fighter -- since 1978

This list divides fairly well into planes that were state of the art when introduced (e.g., B-52, KC-135, C-5, and F-15) and ones that were trailing tech even when new (e.g., C-130, T-38, P-3, A-10). The F-16 seems the only middling plane on the list of the enduring.

My father also spent years toiling on trying to make the F-104 Starfighter, which had been ultra-state of the art in the 1950s (twice the speed of sound), less lethal to its poor pilots. After Air Force pilots had grown terrified of it, the Lockheed brass "persuaded" the West German defense minister to buy it in the 1960s, so my dad had to work a lot of long nights trying to figure out how to keep what had been originally intended as essentially a high-altitude kamikaze interceptor to shoot down Soviet nuclear bombers in case of WWIII from killing so many West German pilots who had been sold it as an all-purpose low level all-weather fighter-bomber, a sort of A-10 Warthog with 7-foot wings.

The exceptionally brave Italian Air Force kept flying the F-104 until 2004. My father once asked an Italian air force general what their secret was since the West Germans were always complaining about how often their pilots crashed the F-104: "Why don't you crash?"

"Oh, we crash," the Italian general replied. "We just don't complain about it."

The state of the art progressed incredibly rapidly in aircraft design in the middle half of the 20th Century, but not all that much since then. (Stealth was a radical innovation at first, but with the computing power available now it's becoming easier to incorporate it into a conventional plane: recent stealth planes such as the F-22 don't look as weird as the Stealth Fighter.)

Some of that slowdown in innovation is that wars are winding down, so why bother working hard? 

Another reason is fundamental technological change such as missiles replacing aircraft. Back in the 1970s, Kelly Johnson originally objected that the stealth fighter was a waste of time since the future belonged to missiles. Ben Rich (whose brother was a sit-com writer) replied that "They call them missiles not hittles because you'll still need a pilot for a long time." But that was 38 years ago. Piloting airplanes, especially fighters (notice the F-117 was called the Stealth Fighter even though it didn't have any weapons for fighting other aircraft -- the "F" was chosen to attract the best pilots to fly such an awkward and dangerous plane), is still a glamor job and we'll likely keep it up for a long, long time, but there isn't as much urgency to get better at manned flight today.

A third is the decline in competition. Lockheed today is a giant oligopoly that bought up most of its competitors.

A fourth is that physical limits involving speed versus fuel consumption were banged up against pretty quickly in the early decades of the jet age. Everybody makes a big deal about Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but supersonic flight has mostly been a dead end due to excessive fuel use and sonic booms. Yeager's feat remains a big deal not because we want to fly faster than sound very often but because flying almost as fast as sound is a very good thing, so breaking the sound barrier proved definitively that you could get close to the sound barrier.

Fifth, systems integration becomes more, not less trouble as you get more systems. The nightmarish F-35 roll-out is now largely hung up on software:

Pentagon officials ... cannot say when Lockheed will deliver the 8.6 million lines of code required to fly a fully functional F-35, not to mention the additional 10 million lines for the computers required to maintain the plane. The chasm between contractor and client was on full display on June 19, 2013, when the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, testified before Congress. He said that “less than 2 percent” of the placeholder software (called “Block 2B”) that the Marines plan to use has completed testing, though much more is in the process of being tested. (Lockheed insists that its “software-development plan is on track,” that the company has “coded more than 95 percent of the 8.6 million lines of code on the F-35,” and that “more than 86 percent of that software code is currently in flight test.”) Still, the pace of testing may be the least of it. According to Gilmore, the Block 2B software that the Marines say will make their planes combat capable will, in fact, “provide limited capability to conduct combat.” What is more, said Gilmore, if F-35s loaded with Block 2B software are actually used in combat, “they would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative.” Translation: the F-35s that the Marines say they can take into combat in 2015 are not only ill equipped for combat but will likely require airborne protection by the very planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.

It will be interesting to see whether Google's plan to develop driverless cars turns out to be a quick fix or turns into a long ordeal like fighter development these days. Google doesn't hold itself to very high reliability even in old tech like Search: I frequently look up my old articles, and Google frequently loses them. The next time I look, however, it has found them. That's okay, it's a free service and it's not a big deal that it works 80% of the time and fails 20% of the time. (Alternatively, Google succeeds more than 80% of the time for most writers, but it's out to get me, which I would hardly be surprised by.)

But do I want to risk my life on the freeway to Google's hit or miss attitude? We'll see.