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Comment by kogus | Hacker News Reader

How does this reconcile with this article? https://www.f35.com/news/detail/f-35-chief-software-bugs-no-...

Those two articles are talking about two different things.

ALIS is the logistics system for the program that has an off-jet and on-jet component. ALIS takes the role of a traditional computerized maintenance management system and expands it to include an on-aircraft prognostics and health monitoring component. The idea is to have the jet tell you what's wrong with itself.

The article you linked to is about the F-35's mission systems software, which is really a software suite that encompasses all the computers on the aircraft itself. The MS software load provides all the stuff necessary to make the jet's hardware do what it needs to do to fight.

So, the plane will fly, it will just be hard to maintain and operate?

I don't understand your question. The plane will fly if [_______________]...what, exactly?

EDIT: I am merely seeking clarification, not trying to evade answering.

Sorry, I meant the F-35 software that ensure that the plane will actually stays in the air is fine, with no real bugs left. The ALIS software, that helps ground crew, maintenance and mission planing, I assume, is still buggy, so you wouldn't want to use it in a war time scenario?

I'm not sure I'm making a ton of sense. It's just really interesting, I'm in Denmark and our government are about to pick which fighter plane will replace our old F-16s, and the F-35 is the favorite right now. This is despite experts saying it's a bad plane. What I understood from your comment is that it will fly just fine, but bugs in the ALIS software would make it harder to operate than anticipated.

The software that keeps the plane in the air is a totally separate thing from ALIS.

My understanding is ALIS was part of the 'pork' side of the F-35. It has relatively simple requirements and was simply used to extract as much money as possible from the government. That said, they have tried to make it essential as possible.

Sounds kind of like when EA made SimCity have a required online component and claimed it was required for doing some game calculations.

I'm not the parent, but I read it as "Will the F-35 fly without ALIS?".

Perhaps more: Is it still a fighter plane without it?

The best answer I can find is, "I don't know."

For years, the F-35 project has been calling ALIS absolutely critical. Now, they seem to be saying that the F-35 can fly without it and that ALIS only keeps the cost of ownership down.

I suspect that the real answer to that question is either classified or closely held amongst a core group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security

Inconvenient facts that don't help the F-35 agenda are national security secrets.

What a biased way to look at things.

"... Bogdan is saying ALIS is not really critical after all, insisting the F-35 can fly without it for 30 days."

So I guess we can wait and see what happens on the 31 day? SNAFU is all that comes to mind.

"Your trial period has expired. Please enter a valid product code."

Given the low bars of success that seem to have been mentioned in this article, I'd wager there's still a lot wrong with the code.

I'm not wholly sure '15 hours uptime' on a computer system is all that confidence-inducing, regardless of whether or not the plane can be reset after however few hours of flight-time it's able to muster.

15 hours of uptime is outstanding when it comes to the avionics that aren't actually keeping the aircraft in the sky. Most legacy fighter avionics required restarts every few hours.

That's very interesting. Do you have any examples?

Not from my own experience. Just going from the professional knowledge of friends of mine with years of mission systems engineering support.

I'm just curious because I find it hard to believe that avionics in combat aircraft are or were so unreliable that they would have to be restarted every few hours. That would not work for e.g. bombers on long missions, fighters on CAP, etc. I can just imagine a pilot thinking, "Okay, we're about to cross the FLOT and I've got 20 minutes until the next avionics reboot. I'd better go ahead and reboot it now before we run into trouble..."

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