SR 71 Blackbird: The Legacy of Murphy's Law – Chapter 4

SR 71 AGAINST MOSCOW – JUDGE BY THE MURPHY LAW

Chapter 4 – SR 71 Blackbird: The Legacy of Murphy’s Law

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Many say about manufacturing:”what start wrong, you’ll end wrong”.But this is just a saying, while Murphy’s Law, this is real and exists. The father of this law was an Engineer specialist in capability Maj. Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr.

In a project called MX981, conducted in 1948-49, at Edwards Air Force Base, California – United States, where the design goal was to determine how much G force (gravity acceleration) a pilot, or human could be withstand. The device was a rocket sled, where the same after reaching a speed of 320 km / hr ( 200 mph) was slowed to a speed of 0 km / hr ( 0 mph) in less than 1s. In the first tests had been used dummies, but scientists wanted something more real, it came to the volunteer captain John Stapp from USAF.

MX981 Project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX981_project

Murphy was the engineer who adapted a set of sensors to measure G-forces that would be submitted to the USAF Captain John Stapp. But on the first real test with Stapp, the sensors did not record datas from any measurement, even despite had been suffered broken bones, concussions and broken blood vessels eye because the forces resulting from the strong slowdown. The cause of the failure in the reading of the instruments was an error in the connection of sensors supposedly done by a technician, and when Murphy grumbled his hypothesis in front of the press that was covering the event, and the press did not fail in recorded this: “if there are two ways of doing something and one of them will result in a disaster, that’s how this guy will do. “

The team that worked on this project later had improved the remark said from Engineer Murphy, and transformed it into law: “if it (a problem or failure) can happen, will happen.”

Although much is known about this law, few have the knowledge that this remark ended into a structured method, called FMEA, that means: Failures Method Engineering Analysis, which can described as the cataloging of the events that generate faults or failures and prioritize them in order to establish the appropriate actions to prevent these events will become real or reduce the frequency at which its occur and the dangerous of this. There are two main types of FMEA, one is adressed to desing phase of the project and the other to process phase of the project, because this its easy find FMEA called as DFMEA( Desing Failures Method Engineering Analysis) and PFMEA( Process Failures Method Engineering Analysis).

Currently this tool is widespread, especially in automotive and aerospace industries, however in the 60’s the first to implement its use were in the NASA, especially in its high-risk projects to accomplish a manned mission to the Moon. But when someone examines the challenges to conduct a reconnaissance mission in a aircraft manned over the Soviet Union would be possible to observe that both missions had much in common, and both were high risk as the last one could degenerate in the III War World.

A superficial analysis would be possible to observe many aspects in common between the development of spacecraft as Saturn V and aircraft SR 71, since both would make extensive use of titanium in its structure, computer systems for control and navigation, suites equipment and systems for the crew life support and others.

So how those projects had occurred almost simultaneously and because this was possible that the teams had cooperated in the search for solutions to common problems, such as a task force. In fact the Engineer Maj. Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. served on the staff of both projects SR 71 and Apollo Mission, among others as the F 4 Phantom II. His last known work was the development team of AH 64 Apache for the U.S. Army.

Chapter 1 – The Soviet Planning To Defeat The SR 71 Program :https://sites.google.com/site/sr71xmoscow/home/chapter-1—the-soviet-planning

Chapter 2 – MiG 25 RB X YF 14 Tomcat II Over Sinai in 1973 :https://sites.google.com/site/sr71xmoscow/home/chapter-2—mig-25rb-foxbat-x-yf-14a-tomcat-ii-over-the-sinai

Chapter 3 – MiG 25P to MiG 31A , From SHADOW to DARKNESS :https://sites.google.com/site/sr71xmoscow/home/chapter-3—mig-25p-to-mig-31a-from-shadow-to-darkness

Chapter 4 – SR 71 Blackbird, The Legacy of Murphy’s Law : https://sites.google.com/site/sr71xmoscow/home/chapter-4—the-murphy-law-legacy

REFERENCES

ASAS – ASAS Magazine – http://www.revistasas.com.br

APA – Australian Power Analyzes Website – http://www.ausairpower.net

AIRFORCES – Air Forces Monthly Magazine – http://www.airforcesmonthly.com

GORDON, Yelfin. MiG 25 and MiG 31: Defensive Front Line. Leicester – UK: Midland Prublishing Limeted, 1997.

HACKETT, General Sir John, BARRACLOUGH, Brigadier Sir Jonh, BURROW, Sir Bernard, HUNT, Brigadier Keneneth, McGEOCH, Vice-Admiral Sir Ian, MACRAE, Norman, STRAWSON, Major-General John. THE THIRD WORD WAR – AUGUST 1985. New York – USA: Macmillan Publishing, 1978.

BOLLARDIÈRE, Jacques Paris, PRATS, Juan P. , KISTER, Pierre. THE WAR AND THE DISARM. Editions Grammont. Lausanne – France, 1979.

OVERSCAN’S GUIDE TO RUSSIAN MILITARY AVIONICS – [email]avionics@overscan.co.uk[/email]

WIKIPEDIA – Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://www.wikipedia.com

MiG 25 FOXBAT – http://www.vectorsite.net

FAS – Federations of American Scientists – http://www.fas.org

Google Images: Imagery Sources – http://www.images.google.com