The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber
In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country’s industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government’s contracting website beta.SAM.gov.
Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B‐2’s Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft’s many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling.
While it’s hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists. This could be the result of them having been so secretive that, at some point, they were inadvertently destroyed altogether. They could also have been simply misplaced, or the parts may have been produced by a smaller contractor that has long since disappeared, taking the bespoke tooling with it.
Juxtapose that with this video from Northrop Grumman:
Early versions of CAD that are not supported anymore. Design schematics printed on actual paper. I suspect that a lot of that material was filed away and simply lost when NG and others went from paper archives to digital files.
I worked for a company that did that and it was tragic how much knowledge was lost because not every document was scanned in and stored.
Not to mention that those engineers have long since retired or died.
I can’t say with certainty, but I suspect the B2 is a lot like the Saturn V. Not many were built so many of its components were hand-assembled and built with tribal knowledge that was not written down. That’s why NASA couldn’t just have Rocketdyne crank out a bunch of new F-1 engines, they had the official plans, but the guys who know how to make them work had taken that knowledge to a beach house on the Gulf coast or the grave.
All that said, I think the commentary from the video is what is most sad.
If the B2 is America at its Cold War technical best, the zenith of engineering creativity of a nation with a purpose, then forgetting how to make critical B2 components and losing that information is the zenith of what we’ve become a decadent failing society.
I am reminded of the poem The Ruins. It is a poem from the 8th Century from the perspective of an Anglo-Saxon looking upon the ruins of Roman architecture.
These wall-stones are wondrous —
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
Ice at the joints has unroofed the barred-gates, sheared
the scarred storm-walls have disappeared—
the years have gnawed them from beneath. A grave-grip holds
the master-crafters, decrepit and departed, in the ground’s harsh
grasp, until one hundred generations of human-nations have
trod past. Subsequently this wall, lichen-grey and rust-stained,
often experiencing one kingdom after another,
standing still under storms, high and wide—
it failed—
We have these technological relics among us, built by an older, wiser civilization that lived on this land before us, and we look at those relics but cannot comprehend how they were created.
I weep to think that in the not-too-distant future, this is a nation where nobody knows how to make a jet engine and the B2 is reduced to a derelict for TikTok influencers and OnlyFans cam-girls to dance in front of and rub their tits on because nobody knows how to make them fly.
It well may be that plans or tooling was lost.
But, depending on the part and what it’s made of, it might also be that the original processes or materials can no longer be used due to EPA, OSHA, etc., regulations that have come into being in the interim. Think cutting and parts cleaning fluids as an example.
The problem is, given a relatively small number of parts needing to be made, and the change in processes and materials, how do you certify (in a formal sense) it will work exactly the same as, lasts as long as, etc, the original way of doing it? I’m not very familiar with the cert process for aviation parts, but from what I hear it’s a bear. This is a problem that crops up fairly regularly in other parts of the defense complex.
Having worked in these environments I bet it is a combination of all of it, tribal knowledge, the dudes that deisgned it are dead, the techinical info and tooling was misplaced or misidentified or accidentally destroyed or even purposefully destroyed at end of life instead of fixing it. All of these are super easy to happen especially when you at talking about a company dealing with 50+ years of paper records and massive facilities will all sorts of hidy holes abd nooks and crannies.
Pretty wild and sad never the less.
I have experience with stuff like this from two perspectives.
As a B-52 Electronic Warfare Officer, our main display (the ALR-20A) was a large CRT oscilloscope with seven “traces” covering a significant spectrum. The supply was dwindling and there were frequent operability issues, but new scopes and components could no longer be produced new because the manufacturer (American Electronic Novelty Corporation) hadn’t been in existence for decades and there were no other companies making anything similar. AFAIK, they’re still having to crutch these things 25 years after I got out.
As an Operations Analyst at a large defense contractor, your comment “Early versions of CAD that are not supported anymore. Design schematics printed on actual paper. I suspect that a lot of that material was filed away and simply lost” is an active thing there and at other places, involving not just neglect, but active destruction.
1) The corporation hears and ignores pleas from engineers/analysts to convert/store documentation every time there’s a system change, but since there’s no revenue from doing so, the corporation sees it as solely an expense and doesn’t bother, instead trashing all of the records. Some engineers squirrel away key documentation, and you have to know who has it. When doing vulnerability analysis on various aircraft, I needed to know what “LSS 12345″ (_____ Standard Shape ID, you figure out what the blank is) on a blueprint meant so I could know the material, thickness, etc. for the model. I only knew of one person who had the full set of shapes, contained in three 3-4” thick binders, often with 2-4 shapes per page.
2) I had been the lead liason between the company’s program for a new model aircraft and the lead customer, and had built up over a dozen thick binders full of compliance reports showing the customer accepting each requirement. When I went off the program, the new manager of the overall program was trashing all sorts of stuff and I sent him an email explaining their significance. I got the “read receipt,” no response, and the documentation was destroyed.
3) My classified analysis section had six or seven large filing cabinets full of reports/documentation we regularly required or needed for historical reference. We were forced to have 2/3 of it destroyed (and barely hung on to the last third) because of things like “If you haven’t used it in X time, it’s worthless” or “Why do you need to know the composition of 1970s Soviet armor plate? The USSR is gone now,” all by a REMF-type administration that supposedly knew business, but not engineering/analysis. Part of the excuse is that “It’s available on SIPRNET,” which we DIDN’T F’ING HAVE!!! Even on the program that I worked on that *did* have SIPRNET, I could not use it for anything else, because: A) it was strictly forbidden programatically to do searches on non-program info, B) the connections were restricted to specific channels, and C) you risked your clearance if you tried to do research.
I once attended a state Professional Engineers conference. The topic of one session was digital archiving of sealed drawings, and the growing demand to provide digital products for clients. One of the points made was to always keep the paper originals. In part, because changing technology meant that todays whizzbang storage media could well be unreadable in ten or twenty years. For example, what do you do if you need to refer to a report done in Word Star stored on a 5-1/5 inch floppy disk for a court case.
You have no idea how true this is.
I was involved in construction oversight for a federal government project. Of course, the contractor disagreed with some contract interpretations and took the government to court over it.
I got a request, almost 3 years after the project was done, for some discovery. They wanted emails relating to a specific modification that I had worked on, and I had emails with the end user that were included as part of the mod. The emails with the end user had been sent with digital signatures, that were needed to be able to be verified to open.
Guess what, after 3 years, some of those digital signatures had changed, and guess who got a nasty gram message from the contractors lawyers saying they couldn’t open specific emails…. Thankfully, it wasn’t just me that had that issue, so the government lawyers had to figure it out.
Find a geek who has old computer stuff?
Well, I would have pointed you to the living computer history museum in Seattle, but it’s indefinitely closed due to Covid.
https://livingcomputers.org/
No, LCM was always a vanity project of Paul Allen, not a resource for the public. Yes, it’s closed, but given that Paul Allen has died there is only a small hope that it will ever reopen; Covid isn’t the real problem.
The Computer History Museum in CA (Menlo Park?) is another matter, that is a serious outfit run like an actual museum.
But the simple answer is that you don’t need to talk to either, and they aren’t even the best resource. There are online communities of retrocomputing enthousiasts, operating via mailing lists. The best one is cctalk@classiccmp.org — see also the website at http://www.classiccmp.org .
“…OnlyFans cam-girls to dance in front of and rub their tits on…”
I didn’t know until now just how much I want to see that…
It gets worse.
The average age of an AC mechanic around here is 53. I had a electrician tell me the average age of electricians was like 56. I’ve heard the same with plumbers.
Can the younger generation learn? sure. But what’ll be missing is that tribal knowledge as to how things were built.
I had this happen troubleshooting a sound system the other day. After spinning for days they contacted me, and when I heard it, I knew straight away it was a short. I simply asked the maintenance dude if he’d been in a ceiling and where. Showed me right where he taped up the wires – wrong.
No knowledge of what a short sounds like, no idea to ask what changed.
During a recent freeze here in TX, the number of requests for help on how to turn off water, or what to do because a pipe is gushing in their house was staggering. And, worse yet, they went to social media instead of making a phone call.
I read site where they say to enjoy flush toilets, they may not be around much longer. Used to be funny.
One of my hobbies is sometimes called “retrocomputing” — preserving old computer systems and keeping them running. That’s fairly closely related to the CAD files issue, and I suspect that the people in that community could help a lot with stuff like is discussed here. For example, while I don’t personally have tools to read WordStar files (but I know those exist) I can definitely read 5.25 inch floppies, in several formats. And others can handle much stranger stuff. Things like 6-track magnetic tapes from the MIT Whirlwind computer, vintage 1950.
So if the relevant files still exist, it’s likely that they can be read and converted.
On the F-1 engine: a few years ago I read about a company that is working to bring that engine back into production. Their method was to 3d-scan the whole thing, and then create a new design using modern production methods. I forgot if they had already reached the test run stage when that article was written. It was clear the resulting engine (call it “F1 Mark 2”) would be less expensive, more reliable, and perhaps more powerful than the original.
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. With modern CAD-CAM, you can essentially disassemble something, scan the parts into a computer, and mane a copy.
Many years ago, I encountered some fascinating documents from the Heroic Age of the space program, including a lot of wild schemes, some of which seemed plausible at first glance (others being clearly preposterous).
Put me in mind of Kipling’s The Palace. All these ideas documented in great detail, filed, and forgotten.
Somewhat more recently, I had an interesting small project: someone had an old piece of equipment that was perfectly serviceable except that one electronic module had failed. Said module was designed around an analog math chip, long out of production. I had to (1) figure out the functional spec of the module, (2) identify a substitute chip that was still available, and (3) make it perform the same function.
A couple of years later, and I would have used an ARM-based MCU with built-in ADC and DAC to do the math, giving more accurate results, faster, with lower power consumption.
In general, if the functional spec for an electronic module is available, it ought to be possible to re-implement the function with newer technology. If the functional spec has been lost, creating a replacement gets to be a challenge.
Coming at this from the IT perspective now, I totally understand the desire to can old legacy systems. They can be a security and management nightmare! And what should be done, paper copies of records from that system made and redigitized if necessary or conversions is rarely done in favor of keeping the old system going and limping and bandaided along.
This is done for many reasons, part is not wanting to give up the familiar for the new, some is not trusting the data in the new, some is not wanting to give up on an outrageous capitol expenditure, and some is not wanting to spend the time and money to convert information. All are reasonable and valid reasons but often they just combine to become such an insurmountable obstacle sometimes.
I’d also say anything digitized today, in as close to a non proprietary format as exists such as a word doc or pdf etc, would be trivial to migrate to new software and hardware over the years. Where it gets more difficult is when you start talking about preserving the functionality of databases, proprietary software, and hardware, and the like.
Management nightmare, perhaps. Security nightmare? Very likely not at all. For one thing, old systems were typically designed by people who do understand security, rather than people who couldn’t care less. It’s no surprise that Windows is insecure while Unix is secure (all things being equal). So is VMS, which is still in use partly for that reason. Quite apart from that, it’s hard to attack things not widely understood. “Security by obscurity” isn’t a substitute for the real thing but as an extra layer of defense it doesn’t hurt.
Eric, your point is exactly right and in the classic computers community this is widely practiced. People have built tape data recovery machines that way, that’s how the Whirlwind tapes were read. And a guy in Maryland built a very nice device using a modern miniature computer (BeagleBone) that can emulate any MFM disk drive — the kind that showed up in early PCs and many other small computers starting around 1980 or so. Works perfectly, at a cost of $150 or so plus some very nicely crafted software.
Another consideration on the security front: you don’t have to go very far back to find a time when computers mostly weren’t networked… or, if they were, it was a proprietary network, and the system was intended to operate either standalone or with very local connectivity. A box (or cluster) in a locked room with the only connection to the outside world being the electrical supply is pretty darn secure.
I should look up that BeagleBone thing; there may be an ST506 or similar, in one of the moving boxes, with some old projects that didn’t get properly backed up.
Yes, a disconnected system is certainly more secure. But a lot of the old systems came from a legacy of timesharing, which meant a system on which many of your users are college students bent on mischief. Protecting a timesharing environment is why VMS, and Unix, and RSTS, and PLATO are fundamentally more secure.
On the ST506 thing, look at https://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/ . Very nice. David is really good at answering questions about it, too.
All things are not equal that is precisely the problem. I think we are all aware of the way the approach to security has changed throughout the years and how things acceptable in 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015 are not acceptable today. Plain text was commonly used for many things. Man in the middles were much easier for many things. Some software is unpatched or unpatchable with known flaws (WEP comes right of the top of my head). Some hardware has critical vulnerabilities that cannot be corrected (think of the somewhat recent Intel chip architecture issues, you obviously cannot change the physical composition of a chip that is already in use). The list goes on.
When older systems are required, the best security is isolation when possible. Of course physical isolation trumps logical.
The problem with WEP isn’t the software, it’s the specification. It was written by people who were so unqualified to do the job that they didn’t even realize they were utterly clueless. They made mistakes severe enough to earn you an F in Crypto 101. That debacle is the reason I treat *any* IEEE security specification with a large chunk of salt.