The right aircraft wins…again

[taxi1]

I can't take any of your post seriously if you're going to compare Hydrox to the great bastion of sandwich cookie that is the Oreo.

Oreos are a copy of Hydrox

I did not know that until 20 seconds ago. Thanks wikipedia.

 

[wink]

I can't take any of your post seriously if you're going to compare Hydrox to the great bastion of sandwich cookie that is the Oreo.

One word. THINS! Oreo Thins are a case of the sequel being better than the original. And either are better than 'droxies. Thins much better,

 

[sevenhelmet]

Oreos are a copy of Hydrox

I did not know that until 20 seconds ago. Thanks wikipedia.

Happens every day. Contour action camera vs. GoPro. It’s about branding as much as it is about having the better product.

 

[hlg6016]

One word. THINS! Oreo Thins are a case of the sequel being better than the original. And either are better than 'droxies. Thins much better,

Double stuff or nuthing baby!

 

[phrogdriver]

Unrelated, the Osprey does have very real issues with Icing and its' anti-ice equipment. The anti-ice equipment is extremely robust if working, but the anti-ice equipment is expensive and time-consuming to maintain due to the heavy use of composite throughout the aircraft, not because it is a tiltrotor. Composite can catch fire, so special care needs to be taken when running heating elements through it.

There are other aircraft with composite materials with perfectly decent IPS. While a blade burn is bad, the MTBF on the blade IPS is still abysmal.

That's more a function of a design that dates to the 1980s. Each wire is hand-laid into the blade, leading to quality escapes. There are a lot of circuits done in series, vice parallel--think like old Christmas tree lights while one failure causes everything downstream to go out. Then there's a IPS controller that is similarly ancient.

On top of that, because an IPS failure can damage a proprotor, many crews don't test it properly, which means that 1) stuff keeps breaking but is not identified and 2) there's insufficient demand signal for MALS to order sufficient parts. That causes people to test it even less, and stuff keeps breaking until there's a cold weather deployment and EVERYONE TESTS IPS AT ONCE AND HOLY SHIT NONE OF THEM WORK AND 3 BLADES ARE TOAST.

Oh by the way, this lack of regular maintenance leads to lots of maintenance malpractice with IPS whenever they actually do touch it, and they break nearly as much as they fix.

It's just a bad design, but qualifying and fielding a new blade is prohibitively expensive compared to the utility of the system, so the USMC will limp along with it until a major aircraft refit is done.

 

[GaryWright75]

There are other aircraft with composite materials with perfectly decent IPS. While a blade burn is bad, the MTBF on the blade IPS is still abysmal.

That's more a function of a design that dates to the 1980s. Each wire is hand-laid into the blade, leading to quality escapes. There are a lot of circuits done in series, vice parallel--think like old Christmas tree lights while one failure causes everything downstream to go out. Then there's a IPS controller that is similarly ancient.

On top of that, because an IPS failure can damage a proprotor, many crews don't test it properly, which means that 1) stuff keeps breaking but is not identified and 2) there's insufficient demand signal for MALS to order sufficient parts. That causes people to test it even less, and stuff keeps breaking until there's a cold weather deployment and EVERYONE TESTS IPS AT ONCE AND HOLY SHIT NONE OF THEM WORK AND 3 BLADES ARE TOAST.

Oh by the way, this lack of regular maintenance leads to lots of maintenance malpractice with IPS whenever they actually do touch it, and they break nearly as much as they fix.

It's just a bad design, but qualifying and fielding a new blade is prohibitively expensive compared to the utility of the system, so the USMC will limp along with it until a major aircraft refit is done.

Indeed. That said, the few Air Force plopter bubbas I talked too just looked at me funny when I asked probing questions about the wisdom of flying in colder weather in Northern Europe, and the Air Force cross-transfer guys I talked to said constantly broken IPS was just a weird artifact of Marine Corps maintenance priorities and historical basing strategies in warmer climates, and wasn't a thing in the Air Force. They could have been bragging, but I suspect the system absolutely is maintainable if maintaining it is a priority.
Also, is demand signal really the problem? Many moons ago when I was regularly getting told "CAN X DUE MX" it was always money and production capacity that was the excuse we never had any parts of whatever type. If 90% of the fleet is rolling around with all the CB's to a subsystem pulled, someone, somewhere, is aware of that and made an evaluation and determined that is a situation they can live with in exchange for resources elsewhere.
Marine Aviation has hopefully changed for the better recently with all the divestitures though? I thought that getting rid of extra stuff for less stuff that work more gooder was kind of the point of all the hoopla around FD 2030. Mostly jumped on Airwarriors out of nostalgia and curiosity if the state of things is still roughly as I recall.

 

[Best-22]

From the Air Force side our Japan and England squadrons maintain the anti ice systems better than our (former) Florida squadron and it tracks with what phrogdriver said.

A new rotor blade design almost made it into next year's budget as part of the reliability improvement push, so it might still happen one day.