Hey Beave,

I understand your points and your friend's as well. I was not there at the beginning, but do know when I made it to the program during 1987 they were never referred to as fins. They were rudders only. By this time many changes had come to life from the very early bird your friend flew and what we ended up with. The enlarged rudders on the actual production version compared to the smaller rudders on the early FSD birds along with other flight control system parameters (possibly from all his test flights, god knows they learned a lot very fast due to their expertice) made her what she was; one of hte most acurate bombing platforms we have ever seen. All of our tech manuals that we wrote in the late 80's to fix that beast referred only to rudders. Keep in in mind all parts referrences had to match Lockheeds data, no exception there. It was that way until I left the bird in mid 1998. It is truly possible that nominclatures changed during the early days, I just know from my time with the black jet; 1987 - 1998, they were never reffered to as fins. The base was a sub fin and the moveable portion was a rudder. Maybe from those names we can see where they might have been called fins in the very early days. That would not surprise me at all.

Also one other small note is the FCC was never queried in the flight control process. It was the FLCC. I am confident this was a typo due to not knowing all of our acronyms for parts. The FCC is the Fire Control Computer (weapons delivery computer) and the FLCC is the Flight Control Computer of which there was only one with (4) main branches for the quad redundancy. There were not 4 independant flight control computers. Used the same one as the F-16 keep in mind. Also the FLCC would query the gyros first, then the FMC (Fuel Management Computer) before delivering any inputs. At least tht is the way the fault isolation manuals lead us in serious flight control malfunction troubleshooting. This was the same on the F-16 as well, same flight control system. I never flew it, but damned I sure fixed a hell of a lot of them in my many years with that great aircraft!

I would love to have a few beers with your buddy and hear some of his stories. A few hundred hours in that bird in its early days could deliver some stories that I am confident would blow anyone away. I just had a few hours - better than 27,000 hours fixing them in my eleven years.