F-35's biggest problems: software and bad relationships
killerapps.foreignpolicy.com
killerapps.foreignpolicy.com
* 1986 F-16 Inversion when flying over the equator - Flying the F-16 in simulation over the equator, the computer got confused and instantly flipped the plane over, killing the pilot [in simulation]. And since it can fly forever upside down, it would do so until it ran out of fuel. Note: some claim this is a myth and to my knowledge, it has never been verified, but I tend to believe it could have happened. Source - http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html
* 2007 F-22 Complete systems failure over International Date Line - At the international date line, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were—they could have been in real trouble. They were with their fuel tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii by visual, line of sight flight. Source - http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
Its not at all far fetched to assume if the plane suddenly rolled at its maximum rate that it would pull the pilot's spine apart.
It's not software, relationships, rivalries, cost, or maintenance. It's obsolescence.
By the time there's a full wing of F-35s in regular service, there will be drones capable of routinely shooting them down. The advantage of not needing to coddle a pilot and having all possible G-forces available will make even cheap drones distributed by corrupt Chinese or Russian backchannels superior to the best fighter jets in the world within ten years.
And a whole wing of such drones will soon come cheaper than a single F35.
Obama should do the same to the F-35 as he did to the F-22 and cancel it before it wastes more money.
The biggest advantage that drones have is a tactical one. And perhaps a manufacturing/logistical one if they can be produced in greater numbers, though at present that is not the case. Tactics only apply if there is a logistical balance sufficient to allow for a roughly even battlefield.
Traditional SAMs aren't quite the same thing and serve different purposes.
Not to mention that building a drone with capabilities similar to a manned fighter is a very hard problem and you can be quite sure that US's rivals (China, Russia) are decades away from fielding one.
Humans are very slow. Humans are also squishy, fragile, heavy, and can't take G-forces very well. (Really, at all.)
> the Mark 1 eyeball has some advantages over other optical systems
These are rapidly going away with machine vision research.
> and drones rely on a passive electronic environment
Only ones with a human pilot. The air-to-air drones that will be deployed at the tail end of this decade will be completely autonomous after they receive their orders.
There is ridiculous amount of progress in a-to-a drones at the moment. Very nearly everyone who used to build/design fighters is now concentrating on drones. There will not be a seventh-generation manned fighter, and the sixth-generation ones will be outclassed very rapidly.
And autonomous air to air drones still need to be able to accept instructions/commands while in route, during combat, etc. The idea that we'll simply unleash 100 drones and create a killzone isn't something that's going to fly...
The reason all the companies are building and designing drones is because that what the governments/militaries are paying for. Private industry simply can't afford to do much R&D that isn't already contracted for by the DOD etc.
Finally, drones are easy pickings for manned aircraft. For permissive environments like the 'Stans and Iraq, sure. Up against someone with a real AD network, forget about it.
The pilot sits very close to the roll axis of the plane. I find it hard to believe just rolling very fast would seriously hurt the pilot unless the plane could roll insanely fast. A pilot can really hurt him/herself by doing severe pitch and yaw changes, but I don't believe the g-loads (and the g gradient) during roll would be that high.
"Unlike previous aircraft, such as the F-22, all software for the F-35 is written in C++ for faster code development."
Seems that C++ is fulfilling its intended purpose nicely: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all
Or perhaps Bjarne's real goal was to end all wars ;)
Edit: Oh, and it seems somebody has not read The Mythical Man Month:
"Because of this delay and the increased complexity of the jet's third and final software block, Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department have added additional resources to fielding Block III software"
Source - http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
I'm sure that was a great comfort to the pilots in the F-22s.
The F-80, for example, if you flew it too fast (and the engine was powerful enough to do that in level flight) the airplane would suddenly "pitch up", fold the wings back, and crash.
There are endless examples of these kinds of "bugs" in leading edge fighter design that have nothing to do with software.
This killed a lot of pilots.
They are unlucky - there is no better alternative in writing this kind of software than Ada [well, there is SPARK but it is subset of Ada with annotations].
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
1. If you think you're 90 to 120 days behind schedule, you really have no idea how far you're behind schedule.
2. Somebody forgot Brook's law.
And... "ready to go to war by 2015"... guys, seriously... what war will it be? Is it an old one that is still going or an entirely new one that needs to be created to pay for this plane?
Sorry. Just ranting. No replies required.
We had a similar project over here in Europe (Eurofighter). So far they have been used to annoy Argentina purely through penis-waving and drop a couple of bombs on Libya and that's all. Then they ran out of spare bits and grounded them all.
This is a little interesting for me: I worked for Admiral David Venlet's brother, Rear Admiral Doug Venlet, back when he was the skipper of the USS Wadsworth. He was a very cool cat. Went on to carry "the football" for GW. Politics aside, that is a very unique job in the world. Two admirals out of one family. What was dinner like at that table?
> "We're gonna find things that we didn't know about and are gonna have to deal with them, but at least this scheduleis laid out to accommodate unexpected problems."
Bullshit- they played schedule chicken and got caught. It'll happen again.
It doesn't take a technical person to figure it out. I have seen history professors with more sense than the generals here. In another hundred years, i suppose our entire defence budget will be enough to afford one fighter jet, which can be shared between the air force and the navy 3 days a week each, with the Marine Corps getting Sundays....
Yeah. And it's not just software either, the Osprey had very similar issues with its planning and handling.
Should have been a skunk-works project kept under wraps until as late as possible, a la the F-16...and even that project didn't survive without a little bloat.
Like some others have said, drones are probably the equivalent rebel project that the F-16 was back in its day...
What people will do to spend more money in order to maintain an image of technical superiority.
It wasn't until it became apparent that the YF-16 was the real deal and probably going to be successful that it was finally exposed to the Pentagon procurement process, where it started to put on the pounds, and lost a bit of the agility that made the prototype aircraft famous (i.e. it had delta kinetic energy moves that the F-22 and F-35 can only accomplish via thrust vectoring).
The fighter mafia had tremendous influence in the development of the F-16 (and F-18), but it definitely wasn't a skunkworks program developed in secret and only unveiled at a later date like the U-2/SR-71 etc.
Long before software.
Adding more people to a delayed software project, now where did I hear that before?
[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost
Either terraforming mars or we might make it to Alpha Centauri by the next century.
> In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion.
So multiply by nine then.
Same with systems. A small team of hackers can work wonders on certain problems with no methodology and some TDD, but imagine 1000 of those small teams, many of them now with below average programmers, all working toward a single vision, that now need to integrate their individual projects, some of which can only be tested once our twice ever due to cost.
Huge budget => massive feature creep => massive manpower => huge overhead, extremely difficult communication/sync => failure to meet deadlines.