Real Engineers

There's a recurring fashion for beating up those who would build software for a living with tales of how "real" engineers do it. This started with the woefully misguided "Software Engineering" conferences of the late 1960's and continues on-and-off to this day.

As a response to this I like to collect examples of "real" engineers screwing up. Not out of malice, but out of a desire to ground certain aspects of my professional life in something resembling fact. Here are some reported facts about the Lockheed Martin F-22 "Raptor" fighter aircraft:

1. the aircraft has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies


2. the canopy needs refurbishing after 331 hours of flying, less than half the design goal of 800 hours, and this costs $120,000 a pop


3. the aircraft is almost twenty thousand dollars more expensive to fly per hour than its predecessor (which costs an already eye-watering 30+ grand per hour—what do they run on, Chanel No 5? Single malt whisky?)

And so on. Just to add to the fun, the development cycle for this aircraft was so long that the class of mission for which it was designed no longer takes place.Is this the fault of the folks at Lockheed Martin? Not really. It's the fault of a system that put politics ahead of engineering, a circumstance under which no-one can be successful.