[LINK] F-22 Raptor stumped by International Date Line

[Gordon Keith]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:00, Tom Worthington wrote:
>   t 07:35 AM 28/02/2007, Stilgherrian wrote:
> > >From http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=6225 ...   On a
> >
> > 12 to 15 hours flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa,
> > Japan. The U.S. Air Force's mighty Raptor was felled  by the
> > International Date Line (IDL)....
>
> It is a little difficult to see what the bug could be. The military
> use "Zulu" time, known to civilians as Coordinated Universal Time
> (UTC) or colloquially as GMT
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time>. They don't
> use local time, so there should have been no change when crossing the
> international date line; neither the date nor time recorded on the
> aircraft would change.

It's unlikely to have anything to do with date/time.

It's very likely to have something to do with latitude going from -180 to 180.

If the navigation computers are doing any calculations based on the start of 
flight position and don't know the world is round then crossing from 180 west 
to 180 east is likely to really confuse them.

I suspect they might not do well flying over the poles either.

Regards
Gordon