This Week In AFLCMC History – August 26 - September 1, 2024
27 Aug 1970 (Armament Directorate)
Today in 1970, the Air Force cancelled its AIM-82 Short Range air-to-air missile (AAM) program that was intended for the new F-15 fighter. Three companies were competing for the contract before it was cancelled—General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, and Philco-Ford—but it never got to the actual prototype stage. The preceding January, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard had directed the Air Force and the Navy to develop a joint AAM, resulting in the AIM-82’s cancellation and the two branches cooperating on upgrading the AIM-9 Sidewinder, which was originally a Navy program and had been used extensively by both services in Vietnam. The new AIM-9L entered production and was first delivered in 1976. (Photos: AEDC)
28 Aug 1929 (Engineering Directorate/Wright-Patterson AFB)
On today’s date, 95 years ago, Wright Field test pilot Lt Harry A. Sutton received a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for experimental airplane spin tests he performed in Dec 1926 at Santa Monica, CA. Born in Geneva, Nebraska, Lt Sutton was close friends with fellow test pilot Lt Eugene H. Barksdale (for whom Barksdale AFB is named) at McCook Field, Ohio. After Lt Barksdale lost his life there in Aug 1926 during his own spin test in an observation plane, Lt Sutton began working immediately on resolving the problem of airplane spins (where an aircraft stalls and begins to descend in a corkscrew-like fashion), first at Wright Field and then in California. He performed his tests primarily on the O2-H and P-3 aircraft, collecting valuable scientific data and offering crucial insights into future aircraft design. His spin test work also earned him the MacKay Trophy in Oct 1929, later that year, in addition to his DFC.
29 Aug 1924 (Agile Combat Support Directorate)
Today, 100 years ago, and for the first time in aviation history, both a pilot and his passenger parachuted to safety from an out-of-control aircraft. The pilot was Lt L. L. Koontz, and he was flying with his mechanic, Private Walter Goggin. The two were flying above Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., when their plane went into a tail spin. Efforts to right the aircraft resulted in it going into a nose dive, after which Koontz gave the order to jump. Both men parachuted down from about 1,000 feet, sustaining minor injuries. In the process, they became the 7th and 8th members of the “Caterpillar Club,” an organization of plane crash survivors whose lives had been saved by the parachute. AFLCMC’s predecessors at McCook Field had developed the Type A parachute that saved the men’s lives.
30 Aug 2004 (Wright-Patterson AFB)
Today, 20 years ago, the Proteus research aircraft—owned by aircraft designer Elbert L. “Burt” Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites—arrived at Wright-Patterson AFB for a two-day stay while en route to Naples, Italy, where it was scheduled to undergo flight tests. The Proteus was designed to conduct high-altitude, long durations research missions and as a telecommunications relay platform. Its tandem wing- and all-composite-design made it highly efficient, and it was powered by twin Williams FJ44-2 turbofan engines. It was imagined as an aircraft that could be used for atmospheric sampling and Earth science-type missions, but evolved into a multi-mission vehicle, and saw use with a variety of customers, including the Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Energy.
31 Aug 1974 (Digital Directorate/Tinker AFB)
On today’s date, fifty years ago, the Secretary of the Air Force announced that Tinker AFB’s Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC) was receiving management responsibilities for the then-new E-3A Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). Tinker AFB also became the main operating base for the E-3A. Previously, the E-3 had been managed out of the Sacramento Air Logistics Center. The E-3 at Tinker AFB (both as a program and as a plane) represented the first time that an Air Force Logistics Command base provided both management and operational support of a major weapon system. A modified Boeing 707-320B, the AWACS provides situational awareness of airborne battlespace using the large radar housed in its iconic rotating radome.
1 Sep 1953 (Mobility Directorate/Eglin AFB)
Today in 1953, the first jet-to-jet aerial refueling occurred between a pair of modified B-47B Stratojets, flying from Eglin AFB, as a test of British “probe-and-drogue” refueling equipment. Engineers at Wright-Patt conceived of this as a simpler alternative to the Boeing-designed “flying boom” method. They converted the two bombers into a KB-47G tanker (nicknamed “Maw”) and a YB-47F receiver (called “Paw”), and successfully transferred fuel from one to the other. While this was a one-off technology demonstration, the need was real: the standard propeller-driven KC-97 aerial tankers were so slow that they could only refuel B-47s while in a dive. When the new “Century Series” fighters had the same problem a few years later, the Air Force revisited the B-47 tanker idea, but the introduction of the jet-powered KC-135 solved the problem.
25 Years Ago This Week in AFLCMC History: 26 Aug 1999
Remembering the “Year 2000” (Y2K) Problem
Planes will fall from the sky. The global financial system will collapse. Nuclear missiles will launch by themselves. People will be trapped in stopped elevators. Heat and water systems will turn off.
These were just some of the fears that inspired anxiety across the world in the months leading up to the year 2000, when, it was widely believed, there was a real possibility that the computer systems we’d built our world upon might come crashing to an end thanks to the “Year 2000 (Y2K) Problem.” And today, 25 years ago, a Joint Chiefs of Staff “Y2K phase four sustainment assessment test” occurred across the Department of Defense (DoD) to try and assess the military’s preparedness for this potentially catastrophic event.
But what was the Y2K problem? And why were people so worried about it to begin with? It all boiled down to the fact that in the first several decades of computing, computer memory was so limited that programmers would abbreviate years in an effort to maximize available memory by removing what seemed like redundant information—why write ”1982” when “82” will suffice? They also presumed that these computers and software would be replaced long before 2000. Many programs relied on this system for their internal timekeeping, which could be used for calculating sometimes critical data. The uncertainty around the Y2K problem was that no one was really sure what would happen when the year 1999 became the year 2000, and thousands of computer programs read the date as “00” in the changeover. Would computers think it was 1900? Would it be read as a “null” value? The answers were unclear—and scary. Because there was a concern that many programs would outright fail, a lot of effort was spent—especially in 1998 and 1999—in preparing for the year 2000 date change. Across the world, nearly $300 billion were spent combatting the problem, with the U.S. alone spending between $100 and $150 billion of that.
In the DoD, nearly 28,000 IT systems were in active use at the time, with 2,300 of them being “mission critical.” At Wright-Patterson AFB, 144 base organizations had to busily work preparing their own systems—inventorying around 140,000 items and correcting nearly 17,000 potential problem areas to make everything “Y2K compliant.” By the end of the year, however, Wright-Patt was so confident in its own Y2K preparations that its Major Shared Resource Center remained online during the transition from 1999 to 2000—making it the only one of DoD’s four supercomputing centers to do so. AFLCMC’s predecessor organization there, the Aeronautical Systems Center, did encounter some minor database and systems errors, and base webpages dis-played the wrong date for several days, but no major issues occurred. Partly this was thanks to ASC’s four-person “Y2K Project Management Office” established in 1998 to manage Center-wide Y2K compliance, combined with the herculean efforts of the 88th Communications Group, the 88th Civil Engineer Group, and the 88th Logistics and Operations Group.
In the end, the Y2K bug was a real IT issue, even if it would never have resulted in the “world-ending” catastrophes the media of the late 1990s pictured for it. But, thanks to global preparation for the issue, including within the DoD, few major system failures actually occurred on 1 Jan 2000.