USA's "Project Cancelled"

[RyoSaeba69]

XB-70 for the win!

As much as that aircraft was astonishing in look and performance and technology, the damn thng was a dinosaur. I recently red that little gem

JFK’s Forgotten Constitutional Crisis

How a bitter fight over the B-70 “Valkyrie” bomber turned into a constitutional showdown—and almost changed the course of the Cold War.

www.politico.com

Carl Vinson's Appropriation committee, Power and LeMay going as far as triggering a political crisis to corner Kennedy and McNamara, and get 150 RS-70 in service. WTF ??!!

 

[RyoSaeba69]

the A-10 over the A-9

It is actually much, much worse than that.

Where to start ?

AH-56 Cheyenne. A fantastic machine, for sure. But it pushed the state-of-the-art a little too far.

So they created the AH-1 as a stopgap for Vietnam. In 1965. Well... still in service 55 years later, the stopgap.

Then the Air Force started the YA-9 and the A-10 just to piss off the Army: they didn't gave a crap about close air support. But still, the Army had to be pissed-off, you see ?

Then Sikorsky created the S-67 Black Hawk.

And Bell tried to improve the Cobra into the Bell 309 "King Cobra" to help the case of their stop gap and make it a definitive winner.

Surely, the Army would pick one of these as a successor to the troubled Cheyenne, of which two were destroyed, killing one pilot and... one wind tunnel (no kidding).

Nope. The AH-56 carried on and by 1972 it worked extremely well. Only to be abandonned as "too fast, too big, too expensive". And then the Army made a comparative flyout of the AH-56, the S-67, the Bell 301 - only to reject all three of them.

And since the AH-1 was only a stop gap, they started all over again from a clean sheet of paper - YAH-63 versus AH-64 Apache. The Apache ended as a superb attack helicopter, but its unit cost escalated even higher than the Cheyenne before it. For much lower performance.

Meanwhile the Air Force (remember them ?) picked the A-10A and bought 700 of them.
...
Only to decide it was daylight and single-seater.
...
Republic created the A-10B two seater with night vision stuff.
...
Air Force said "it is too slow".
...
So they started the A-7F Strikefighter.
...
Only to pick F-16s instead for close air support. With the infamous gun pod tested durng GW1 which vibrated so much bullets went all over the place.
...
So they kept the A-10A in the end.
...
Only to try (and fail) to replace the rugged thing with F-35s.

A-10A still in service by 2020. Apache, too.

Sooooo... at the end of the day, the list of "CAS : Army vs USAF battle" read as follow
- AH-1
-AH-56
-YAH-63
- AH-64
- S-67
- Bell 301 (crap, was 309 "King Cobra") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_309_KingCobra
- YA-9
- A-10A
- A-10B
- A-7F
- F-16

ELEVEN FLYING MACHINES. Frack. And then the Army started the LHX as "the F-35 of light helicopters" and it dragged for twenty freakkin' years only to be canned in 2004. And then the Comanche successors kicked the bucket one after another, at alarming rates (2008, 2011, on and on it went, a graveyard of helicopters).

To the point I still have no clue whether both Comanche and the very antiquated OH-58s have been replaced by 2020 !

 

[Hammerbolt]

F-16XL anyone? And just... why? For once, the USAF chose well (F-15E)

 

[Garrison]

Some could be made to work, some would not. SSTO are damn hard, whatever the trick to make them happen (all rocket, or airbreathing).

Except for impossible SSTOs, NASA ininterrupted strings of failures in the 1988-2008 era were mostly political and budgetary. Dan Goldin got things moving, sure, but he was also a huge jerk and dangerously cutting corners, accepting a cut of 20% in NASA budget in the Clinton years (Goldin come in 1992 and went away in 2001). The twin Mars 1999 failures were warnings of what was to come with STS-107, and both are result of Goldin policies going wrong.

NASP / X-30 : nope. Tony Dupont was a crook and DARPA was too naive (the same jerk also started the Sikorsky X-wing compound rotorcraft with the rotor to be stopped during flight. It. did. not.worked. at.all)

X-33: same siliness, this time from NASA. Toward Lockheed, which on this peculiar case were just morons.

By contrast...

Ares V, Ares 1 are standard rocketry, they should have worked correctly.

Shuttle-C was perfectly workable, died because of SSME costs.

X-38 was workable too but died because of budgets and politics. Same for X-34, a fine concept.

Shuttle ? hard to find a viable concept among the bazillons considered in 69-72. But SRBs - meh. Pressure-fed would have been a saner option. And light the goddam SSMEs in altitude, not on the ground. Simpler engines, less dangerous. Saturn S-IC would be even better except for recovery.

Techically of course the Ares V didn't really die, it is just got a fresh coat of paint as the SLS and if you are going to talk about money pits... Ares I has been reincarnated several times, as the Liberty and the Omega, different upper stage same SRB derived first stage, and has been constantly rejected. The real crippling issue for all the NASA projects was the cost plus contracts they had to keep handing out that essentially killed any incentive to deliver working hardware. A number of them could indeed have easily seen service with some budgetary discipline.

 

[Riain]

The difference between the failures of the 60s and 70s with those of the 90s and 00s is that in the 60s and 70s the US had serviebale to good options to fall back on. For example the AH56 failed but the AH1 was a good attack helicopter that served the US Army well until the Apache took over. Similarly when the US Navy TFX and VFAX projects fell over the USN was able to quickly get the VFX F14 and the A7E to cover the gaps.

This generally didn't happen in the 90s onwards, failed projects and truncated programmes forced the US to go down pretty bad paths of updating stuff from the 80s for years even decades longer than they should have.

 

[Sam R.]

The F-35 is what happens when people forget Robert McNamara.

.sig worthy. Well done.

 

[RyoSaeba69]

One of the weirdest ironies with Ares 1 was that SRB+S-IVB+Apollo on top - could have been a far better bargain than Shuttle... in 1969-72, rather than 2005 ! Titan solids were cheap, S-IVB, J-2 and Apollo had been paid... by Apollo.
A combination of the three could have been a winner. In 1972.
The 2005 re-incarnation by contrast was all wrong. They recreated a S-IVB from zero in the worst possible way (air-started SSME ? really ?) and put it on top of a Shuttle SRB. With an overweight Apollo (Orion) on top.

 

[RyoSaeba69]

the AH56 failed

It did not really failed. Not by 1972. Lockheed's Jack Real (= the same company Clarence L. Johnson or Ben Rich, but for helicopters) summarized the Army decision to screw the Cheyenne and go for the Apache with the following sentence

"Those (Army, Pentagon) fools behaved like kids in a candy shop !"

 

[Garrison]

Oh and if you want a case where the US dodged a bullet. Back in 2014 the pressure was on for NASA to 'downselect' the Commercial Crew program to one bidder, meaning Boeing of course. On this occasion NASA pushed back and kept two contenders, Boeing and SpaceX. The second SpaceX manned Dragon is due to arrive at the ISS at 11pm EST tonight. The Boeing Starliner will be repeating its unmanned test in early 2021 after the first attempt turned up 80 software faults and failed to actually reach the ISS...

 

[Bougnas]

The problem with the Cheyenne was that the Airmobile lobby in the Army was effectively hijacking the CAS role with that aircraft, and pushed for too much tech. The USAF complained and the Army handled the matter internally. Maybe the USAF was still a bit too protective of its CAS job but the Airmobile lobby was going too far.

A more austere helicopter fully suited to the Army would probably have been less risky and costly. The Cobra was close to that one although a bit underpowered for using missiles at first.

 

[RyoSaeba69]

The Cobra was close to that one although a bit underpowered for using missiles at first.

Bell completely agree with your post. And they created the Bell 309 (not 301 - my mistake !) just for that.

Bell 309 KingCobra - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Even then, the Army went from zero with the YAH-63 and YAH-64 competition (facepalm).

I can understand they rejected the Cheyenne (too big) , Cobra (too small), and S-67 (no need for a US Mi-24, really).

But frack, the Bell 309 seemed to be a viable upgrade to the basic AH-1 design.

But no.

It made too much sense, so let's create the Apache instead, with another competing prototype just in case.

Between 1966 and 1972 the US Army really went into some kind of binge-pornfest of advanced attack helicopters - AH-1, Cheyenne, Bell 309, S-67, YAH-64, and YAH-63.

 

[Blue cat]

But at least the Perrys could do their job from the moment they hit the water: multipurpose escort frigate. The LCS can't do anything when launched, it has to wait to "load mission modules"...

Or the Gepard, or the tracked Rapier, or the AMX30 DCA, AMX13 DCA, AMX30 Roland, SIDAM 25, Otomatic... basically the entire NATO had mobile air defence... except the US army...

I seem to recall the US Army did procure small numbers of the Roland SAM system (on a US chassis IIRC ?) and also at one point selected the ADATS system which was subsequently cancelled after the cold war ended.

 

[Hammerbolt]

I seem to recall the US Army did procure small numbers of the Roland SAM system (on a US chassis IIRC ?) and also at one point selected the ADATS system which was subsequently cancelled after the cold war ended.

The project was terminated in 81, after a single batalion was equiped.

 

[steamboy]

Only by looking at the picture, that thing screams "FIREPOWAAAAAAAAAR" I can't see any aircraft able to resist that thing.
ROTFL)

The problem with this thing IIRC was that the vibration of the 37mm gatling basically shook it apart.

 

[RyoSaeba69]

The problem with this thing IIRC was that the vibration of the 37mm gatling basically shook it apart.

That's annoying indeed. Well for a start, recoil all by itself would be enough to bury it underground.

 

[Bougnas]

Bell completely agree with your post. And they created the Bell 309 (not 301 - my mistake !) just for that.

Bell 309 KingCobra - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Even then, the Army went from zero with the YAH-63 and YAH-64 competition (facepalm).

I can understand they rejected the Cheyenne (too big) , Cobra (too small), and S-67 (no need for a US Mi-24, really).

But frack, the Bell 309 seemed to be a viable upgrade to the basic AH-1 design.

But no.

It made too much sense, so let's create the Apache instead, with another competing prototype just in case.

Between 1966 and 1972 the US Army really went into some kind of binge-pornfest of advanced attack helicopters - AH-1, Cheyenne, Bell 309, S-67, YAH-64, and YAH-63.

I kinda understand the Army's desire to start from scratch and get a future-proof design with the AAH, and it would be unfortunate to delay it, but one wonders what the Kingcobra would have offered. Being a low cost and simple option means it could have been procured instead of production AH-1S which came in 1976, and probably could have entered service at the same time.
However, it would likely have been a superior airframe to the small Cobra-S, with the gearbox being rated for greater power (2000 shp instead of 1800 for the single-engine version, 1800 instead of 1530 shp for the twin-engine version), better avionics and extra ammo for the cannon.

Not as good as the Apache mind you, but having something better than a Cobra by the mid-70s and still has reserve for improvements would arguably be better than waiting until 1984-87 for an Apache that will still take some time to be trouble-free.

 

[Driftless]

Pork bellying. By far.

There are so many examples that it is almost silly. There are aircraft that use a specific engine, but Congress has REQUIRED the Air Force to support the development of, and low series production of an "alternate" engine, just in case the primary, which has a long service history, somehow becomes "unacceptable". It was, of course, a coincidence that the "alternate" engine was manufactured in the home state of a member of the Armed Services Committee. Similar thing happened with the LCS, except this time it was a WHOLE class of ships. Rather than build one design after the same sort of competition common to allocating contracts for aircraft (the F-22 was selected over the F-23, the A-10 over the A-9, etc.) the Navy was "encouraged" to procure both. The fact that NEITHER ship was ready from Prime Time mattered not a whit, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics both received multi-billion dollar contracts. Hooray for the shareholders and employees at the yards building the ships (all voters, to be sure). Best part is that General Dynamics, possibly seeing disaster in the making, sold the whole Independence LCS variant program to Austal USA (i.e. a wholly owned subsidiary of an Australian company, Hooray for Austal Australian shareholders who are decidedly NOT U.S. voters). The Navy literally plans to more or less throw the first two ships of each LCS variant away, rather like the first waffle that comes out sort of wonky, the difference beither the the waffle doesn't cost a couple BILLION dollars.

After that is Congress' love of cutting procurement numbers, mainly for shits & giggles. They effectively crippled the F-22 programs by cutting production from 648 airframes to 187 series production airframes. At the same time they required that other, less capable aircraft remain in production ( I understand that Boeing put the Committe at the very tip-top of their Christmas card list) and, vastly worse, forced the USAF to keep worn out airframes in flight status (keep that in mind the next time you read about an F-15C, which were last built in 1985, being involved in an incident).

Next is the truly toxic relationship between defense contractors and the Pentagon Project Managers responsible for overseeing the projects. The project manager's jon is supposed to be that of a watchdog, the person in the loop that can call "BS" and stop things in their tracks. That is mainly gone, partly due to politics (as outlined above) and partly because annual Efficiency Reports form Project Manager's are based on how well the project is progressing. Since anything short of an Excel rating (which puts you in the top 49% of each rating officers subordinates), even as an O-4, is unlikely to lead to Stars on the shoulderboards the results are fairly obvious.

In all the system needs a total rebuild.

In all the system needs a total rebuild.

I believe you are absolutely correct. The cynic in me also believes that truckloads of unethical money would be doled out to any extent needed to retain a bad system.

 

[RyoSaeba69]

Not as good as the Apache mind you, but having something better than a Cobra by the mid-70s and still has reserve for improvements would arguably be better than waiting until 1984-87 for an Apache that will still take some time to be trouble-free.

Even more since Cold War ended by then ! Luckily Saddam come right on time to make the Apache useful. Twice ! (1991 and 2003 !)

 

[Bregil]

If anyone hasn't seen it yet, "The Pentagon Wars" should be high on your "to-watch" list. As a US Army Veteran and taxpayer it was equal points entertaining and infuriating (and also answered a lot of the questions I had regarding the Bradley's development). It doesn't cover the pork-barreling ably described by CalBear earlier but it does a fantastic job showing a lot of the other problems in the process.

Another interesting case study of something that should have been canceled from the outset was the ACU development process. They spent over $4 billion to roll out a brand new camouflage pattern that didn't even work (it was formally adopted while testing was still ongoing) and ultimately (after a lot more casualties, time, and money) adopted Multicam. Incidentally, Multicam was already in existence before the ACU program even started (and which the brass had consistently been told by the troops on the ground to pick)......

EDIT: The "scuttlebutt" (ie: unofficial rumor) reason why the brass was so reluctant to adopt Multicam was that it had been developed by the private sector rather than through DARPA and thus it wouldn't enhance anyone's performance review. Even when the Army finally bowed to Congressional pressure to "look into" Multicam, they suddenly got very conscious about making sure that sufficient testing was completed and outfitted 2 battalions deploying to Afghanistan with new uniforms. One of them got Multicam while the other got a modified version of the much-maligned ACU pattern (even after being forced to admit that their pattern was inferior, they still tried to stay with it). Finally after an extensive testing period (a full rotation in-country) the brass conceded that Multicam was the superior choice and began to issue a replacement uniform (about 2 years after being ordered to do so by Congress). As someone whose service career spanned the entire duration of the ACU, I had a front-row seat to this train wreck (which was even worse when one considered all of the other uniform they were pushing through at the same time). So much money wasted just so someone could "leave their mark" on the service on their way out the door...........

 

[Not James Stockdale]

The Constellation program's main problems were with engines. The Ares I upper stage was supposed to use an SSME, but those can't air-light (neither can a Vulcain) so they had to develop an entirely new engine shaped like a J-2 but twice as heavy. The Ares V core stage started out at 8.4 meters (Shuttle ET diameter) with SSMEs but ballooned to 10 meter diameter with RS-68 motors, only to find out that ablatively cooled nozzles don't handle being heated from outside very well. The RS-68 was designed to fly on Delta IV cores, at least 5 meters apart and with good airflow, so they didn't work stuck on the bottom of a much fatter rocket with much closer neighbors. Ultimately, Shuttle-derived architecture was the main problem, and the SLS is only vaguely shaped like a Shuttle ET, but it's basically an entirely new rocket with entirely new hardware and an entirely new manufacturing process.