The F/A-18 E/F Block 3 is Rooted in Failure!

At the time of filming this video in 2020 Boeing is rolling out the first updated f-18 super hornet rhino in the context of a service life extension program that is going to improve the useful life of the aircraft up to 9000 hours but what matters the most these aircraft will also be upgraded to the block 3 variant with an outstanding array of improvements that are going to keep the plane at the leading edge of technology and effectiveness. All of this despite the fact that the original idea is about 50 years old and the plane came into being only thanks to 2 utter industrial failures. Three What? Well I think it was three failures not two What what do you mean with three? In the history of the f-18 there were actually three key failures that made the plane into what it is today. Well alright if you think you know better then please be my guest Hey everyone my name is Jenny Ma and I also run an aviation channel here on YouTube where I break down the engineering and the history behind a lot of different airplanes but today I’m here to tell you a little story about the history of the F/A-18 hornet. In the late 60s a group of air force officers became known as the fighter mafia and no this wasn’t a godfather fight club mashup.

02:12 - Instead they advocated for a new lightweight fighter aircraft for the air force that will be dedicated to air-to-air missions so this eventually led to the establishment of the lightweight fighter program. Now the history of the lightweight fighter program would require a long video in and of itself but what matters in this context is that in 1974 the program reached the stage of a fly away competition between the two main contenders the yf-16 built by general dynamics and the YF-17 cobra by Northrop and eventually the U.S Air Force selected the YF-16 as the winner of this competition and it would go on to become a modern staple for the u.s air force also known as the F-16 viper but it wasn’t the end for the YF-17 either because by the early 70s the navy was also looking for a new aircraft to replace its existing fleet of attack and fighter aircrafts including the A-4 the A-7 and the F-4. They were in search of a new multi-role aircraft however with a tight defense budget congress mandated the navy to abandon its plan for new aircraft and instead look at pre-existing designs so they experimented with a simplified version of the F-14 tomcat and a naval version of the F-15 Eagle but both turned out to be almost as expensive as the original jets.

So the navy turned their attention to the lightweight fighter program 03:28 - once again now they actually weren’t huge fans of the F-16 the winner picked by the us air force because they deemed it too structurally fragile to be converted into carrier operations but they did see potential in the YF-17 especially from the reliability of its twin engines so the navy proceeded to redesign the YF-17 extensively giving birth to the F-18 hornet. So first the failure of the YF-17 sowed the seed for the eventual F-18 but a few decades later in the 80s another failure would shape the history of the FA-18 going forward. In 1983 the navy was in search of another replacement aircraft and this time it was for the A-6 intruder bomber now this new aircraft was expected to be a technological marvel making use of composite materials and integrated radar antenna but more importantly it was going to be the very first application of stealth technology to a carrier-based plane. A team composed of Mc Donnell Douglas and General Dynamics was awarded the contract and this new plane was named the A-12 avenger. However since stealth and composites were still relatively new technologies at that time the engineers encountered problem after problem and eventually the weight of the aircraft ballooned and the cost spiraled out of control.

So in 1990 04:42 - the US government decided to pull the plug and, at that point, the Navy had to find a solution fast so the answer was a heavily modified F-18 Hornet also called the Super Hornet. So secondly the failure of the A-12 Avenger directly contributed to the growth of the F-18 program. But wait the Navy still wasn’t done replacing jets it still had one more to go and that was the F-14 Tomcat. Now the f-14 has always been a very large and complex jet with high maintenance and a focus for air-to-air combat missions so the Navy was looking for a smaller and simpler replacement jet so in 1988 the Navy started to consider a navalized version of the jet that would eventually become the F-22 Raptor. Now they were drawn to its power and stealth but it wasn’t meant for carrier operations and as it turned out a navalized version of the F-22 would have required a weight penalty of 10 to 15 percent.

This would have reduced the performance but also required 05:38 - a redesigned wing. This is similar to what happened to the navalized version of the f-35. So it was decided that this trade-off was not a very good one and this attempt at adding a new aircraft to the inventory ended with a failure. But with the disintegration of the soviet union in 1991 the original threat that the F-14s were designed to meet actually disappeared so this further added a question mark to their permanence on the flight decks. The navy was left with just one option and that was to ask the F-18 to do well everything.

So these three failures eventually 06:11 - pushed the Navy to focus on a truly multi-role platform and that would eventually become the F-18 Hornet and the Super Hornet. Thanks for letting me stop by ! Thanks Jenny! I guess I was giving the YF-17 for granted so go and check out Jenny’s channel and her video on the F/A-18 after watching this! The F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet is a real multi-role platform and I insist on the term platform. Marrying the same conceptualization as the United States Air Force the Navy is focusing on the weapons carried and the network-centric integration of the plane as a node of the communications network. The actual design and performance of the plane seem at this stage to matter less than they used to do even just 20 years ago. They’re not irrelevant obviously but less important.

I believe that this approach has some risks but this is a subject for another 07:15 - day. What matters is that we need to keep this approach in mind while we analyze the plane. The first element to consider is the service life improvement program so every structure metal or composite suffers from fatigue fatigue is a name given to the proliferation of micro cracks within the structure when it is exposed to loads close but inferior to the breaking point over time these brakes proliferate to the point where a structural element may break even if the load is not above the breaking point a service life improvement program is first and foremost the replacement of the structural components that are known to be subject to fatigue for a naval plane like the f-18 corrosion could also be an important factor too from this point of view the f-18 airframe has been designed with the life extension in mind. The Rhino has a relatively limited number of structural parts if compared to older planes and this has several advantages. Well there is less stuff to replace so the operation is quicker; also fewer seams and junctions mean an increased general robustness with the weight being equal which is also very helpful for a carrier-based plane.

This is actually easy to understand: junctions 08:45 - tend to be weaker than solid material because the discontinuity concentrates stress. If you want to know more about this please let me know in the comments below; it is a subject worth a video in itself. Fewer junctions also mean fewer areas subject to fatigue. One classical area subject to fatigue in fact is the material around the rivet hole. Fewer joints mean fewer weak areas so it’s no surprise that the plane useful life can be extended by 50% with such a replacement program.

09:22 - The new block tree planes will be equipped with conformal fuel tanks above the inner section of the wing the f-15 have done for ages and now they are becoming quite common for example on the f-16 or under a foul on the f-18 they have been available for a while albeit they had been rarely used now they will be standard equipment on the block 3 holding 515 gallons on each wing a total of three thousand one hundred and seventy kilos of fuel roughly corresponding to a fifty percent increase over the internal fuel the purpose of two conformant tanks is to replace the wing mounted 480 gallons tanks freeing up two hardpoints and reducing the drag if compared with a classic configuration in some sources it is said that the addition of the two conformal tanks reduced the plane drag implying that we are talking the clean configuration drag but this seems difficult to be true actually it is almost sure that the wave drag at transonic and supersonic speed is going to increase but please notice that this fits well with the concept of platform we were discussing before to free up two additional hardpoints for the weapons some penalization on the pure performance of the plane has been accepted in practice this won’t have any particular detrimental effect because the plane is never clean but still it is indicative of the line of thinking in any case the tank mounted on the center line of the plane with 330 gallons is not going to go away the tone to add the extra fuel but also for a very bizarre feature the infrared search and track today is an essential sensor for many combat planes it uses the same technology as a forward-looking infrared and it can be used as such but the infrared search and track main output is a track on a screen not an image it complements the radar or the information received from a data link concurring to form a complete tactical picture presented in a unified representation to the pilot all of this if the plane is obviously capable of data fusion which is the case the united states has pioneered infrared search and track with very crude units mounted on the classical interceptors of the century series but since radar performances kept improving and at the time sensor fusion was not possible it was abandoned only to be picked up by the soviets in the 80s who in turn pioneered its integration into the plane combat and fire control system the european designs of the 90s all rely quite heavily on the infrastructure and track that is considered a very important passive sensor it is now returning on american planes and the f-18 is no exception save for the fact that the infrared searching track is placed on the nose of the centerline fuel tank and this is quite a bizarre solution and it implies that the fuel tank would be permanently mounted on the plane this will probably happen anyway because it is a standard configuration for the a18 but it won’t be possible to jettison the tank lightly in air combat because the cost of each tank will be in the millions the lockheed martin a and asg 34 infrared search and track works in the far infrared and it is the same unit mounted on the united states air force legion pod which does not contain fuel the legion pod has the particular feature to provide pod to pod communication thus providing to the carrying plane a picture derived from more than one infrared search and track if available why is this important because infrared search and track cannot natively provide a distance from a target but using two looking at the same target and knowing the earth’s position it is possible to triangulate the target position to be fair this is not the only way to extract the distance information from a nurse but it’s surely a very effective way a navy pilot who tested the feature said it is eye watering i’ll let you interpret that the f-18 block three earth centerline 10 doesn’t have the same feature but since the f18 is designed to be a node in a network the information is changed directly among planes and this takes us to the next point the f-18 block 3 has an acs to allow the pilot to easily process the information from the dtpn which is an oem as compliant and uses the new ttnt since i believe this point is obvious thank you very much for watching and okay okay okay it’s just a joke just a jerk relax so the acs is the advanced cockpit system it is basically the usual large touchscreen that replaces almost everything else in the cockpit at this point in time it’s becoming pretty common so there’s not much to say about it the ttnt is the new super secure and super reliable data link connecting the planes or better it is the standard used to implement the data link among different planes the important bit is that it has quite a large bandwidth which is needed to support the oms standard more on this later dtp n stands for distributed targeting processor network it is basically a piece of the fire control architecture that is responsible for integrating the information that comes through the plane sensors and the ttnt into a coherent picture usable by the pilot again today many modern planes are capable of this kind of integration some f-35 fans think that only the f-35 has it sorry guys it’s not the case the oms standard is a u.s government-owned architectural specification it defines the messaging protocols and formats between different computers on the different pieces of hardware in the past monetary network standards used to define the hardware and the electrical specifications of the network for example ubiquitous mil std 1553 defines how cables and connectors must be built together with voltages waveforms of signals and other electrical specification the 1553 is like the ethernet standard in commercial networks to make a comparison however to make two computers communicate developers had to establish a protocol they had to make decisions like if i send you a comment string like one zero zero one zero zero you missile computer start cooling the sensor if i receive one one zero one zero one it is you missile computer telling me that the sensor is cool no use to say this is a remarkably complex job that takes a lot of time and resources and it needs to be repeated over and over for each of the weapons you want to integrate with the plane this is the reason why integrating a weapon in a plane costs so much the oems standard simplifies the job defining the communication to a higher level for example the oems has standard ways of defining a target track a video a video stream or text messages exchanged among platforms to make a comparison it is like working directly with files and folders without caring too much about the hardware behind however it is rather intuitive that the integration job is simplified and complex information exchanges like the one that allows to present a unified tactical situation on the acs from different sensors well they become possible if you like this video i’m sure you will love the videos that are going to appear beside me the meanwhile please like dislike subscribe and hit the bell so you won’t miss anything if you could consider supporting the channel on scribe star patreon that would be amazing and you will have my gratitude forever and meanwhile thank you very very very much for watching see you in the next video .