Re: Certified C compilers for safety-critical embedded systems

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Alexandre E. Kopilovitch wrote:

> By the way, I remember that F-104 Starfighter was very deadly airplane in
> Germany. Germany bought many F-104 and plenty of them crashed (you know,
> Soviet newspapers were greatly delighted with that, and picked every case
> eagerly) - much more (at least in proportion) than in USA. I always thought
> that there should be some cultural difference (between US pilots and German
> pilots), which caused that effect.

Yep, but the cultural difference was not in the pilots but in the 
training regimes.  The F-104 was an unforgiving aircraft.  In the USAF, 
F-104 pilots, I talked to said that "only" two crashes in a simulator 
session was a good day.  The Germans apparently concentrated more on 
training pilots for "normal" missions and flight regimes.  Since normal 
reflexes could be deadly, and the Cobra Dance was only one instance, the 
USAF training concentrated on getting rid of those reflexes.

I knew several USAF pilots that flew both the F-104 and then the F-4 
Phantom II.  They said one of the hardest things to UNlearn from their 
F-104 training was that in the F-104 you always advanced the throttle in 
steps.  Going from low power to full military power (or to afterburner) 
too quickly was likely to be lethal.  So if you were expecting combat, 
you sat at a throttle setting that would allow you to go "all the way" 
in one step.  In the F-4 the biggest concern was fuel state.  In full 
afterburner you could exhaust all internal fuel in less than two 
minutes.  But the F-4 could spool up rapidly, and adding afterburner was 
icing on the cake.  So the pilots learned to conserve fuel when 
possible. When combat threatened, of course, the first thing they did 
was to go to full military power, with or without afterburner depending 
on the situation and fuel state.

Incidently in Vietnam a lot of pilots won fighter to fighter duels then 
didn't have enough fuel to get back to base, or even to areas over 
friendly forces.  Early on, they had to bail out.  Later, both the Navy 
and Air Force tended to send a couple of F-4s with "buddy packs" -- 
external fuel stores and probe and drouge air-to-air refueling kits -- 
along on any CAP (combat air patrol) missions, and even some CAS (close 
air support) and bombing missions.

-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, 
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