F22 Raptors fail at International Date Line

Do you remember Y2K?  What a damp squib it turned out to be?  It certainly made my life miserable.  But let us look at 3 incidents, two of which happened yesterday and another about 3 weeks back.

• President Kalam fell on being tripped by the walking stick of 87 year old Manipuri - reported in Deccan Chronicle.
• We lost another Mig-21, when it crashed in Kurseong, in West Bengal's Darjeeling district – reported in The Hindu.

Then to the most hilarious, thought provoking article. I am always amused whenever I read about 'laxman rekha' in Ramayan.  After all, how can a line drawn in sand, keep away someone?  Difficult to understand, isn't it?

Now, forget about an actual line drawn in sand; An Imaginary line drawn only on maps has caused problems.

The US Air Force's brand new 5th generation 'air supremacy' fighter F-22 'Raptor'  suffered a software 'bug' while enroute from Hawaii to Japan, over the Pacific, while attempting to cross the International Date Line.  All their systems failed - they became deaf, dumb and blind.  Luckily all 10 (or 12 or 8 or 6 - nobody is sure) Raptors were being accompanied by KC-10 tankers, which 'shepherded' the Raptors back to Hawaii. [http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123041054]

Which got me thinking.  Now, we have a very nice and easy solution to all our cross border problems.  All we have to do is either:

• move all 87 year old stick carrying Manipuris to the Jammu and Kashmir border, so they can trip-up the long haired Pakistani terrorists trying to walk across; or,
• draw an Imaginary Line on map and all software systems will fail. Perhaps their guns would go off on their own, shooting them in their foot.

Wait a minute, don't we already have a line on the map called Line of Control (LOC)?  Wonder which line the Mig 21 tried to cross?  If it is anything like the following picture, no wonder the Raptors blinked off!



I have to draw a line here and get back to work (no pun intended).

---