Source: Lockheed Martin.
David Axe, Daily Beast: World’s Most Expensive Jet Somehow Gets Worse
Forget the sonic boom—the U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter just hit massive turbulence that could delay its release yet again.
The U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter is again falling behind schedule in its 16-year, $60 billion development. The problem this time—the radar-evading plane’s 8 million lines of computer code, amounting to arguably the most complex software suite ever installed on a warplane.
The code delay is the latest—and possibly most damaging—setback for the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial plan to replace almost all of its Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighters with three different versions of the F-35 at a cost of more than a trillion dollars over the next 50 years.
Damaging, because the military and F-35-maker Lockheed Martin have increasingly sold the F-35 as a sort of “flying computer” whose software can outthink enemy pilots even when the enemy’s own planes fly faster, maneuver better and carry more weaponry than the F-35 does.
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WNU Editor: The F-35's computer coding problems is something that has been raised for the past year ....so it is old news. But what caught my eye was this report from Bloomberg .... The U.S. May Build 500 Jets Before Finding Out If the F-35 Works (Bloomberg).
4 comments:
The problems with the F-35 are two:
1. The development of this complex air system has taken much longer than scheduled
2. In spite of this, the program is funding the manufacturing of poor-performing, faulty, useless jet fighters and issuing them to units, thus making those squadrons not combat capable. That's the "500 jets" that Tony Capaccio writes about.
It ain't right.
3. Multi-Sercice / Multi-role aircraft means that in several decades only one manufacturer in the US will have any experience and/or staff expertise in actually producing aircraft. This is a big problem if the philosophies behind this aircraft (3 variants) prove unsuccessful.
OTB & OTS because the TPM was not met because the technology was not mature. How in the ____ did that happen?
Or maybe there is more to the story.
Anzino,
It's called " concurrent " development. One of those "new age" management phrases.
The idea is, that by the time you have tote "hardware" platform in production, the "future tech" be it software or electronics will be robust and ready.
It's like the Ford class Carriers, that can neither launch or recover aircraft.
Rather than use steam catapults and traps, which have a 50 year history of working, they built the entire ship around mag lev, which 1:5 times, simply ripps the launch aircraft apart, and 1:8 times ripps the trap aircraft apart.
They've been working on the calibration software for 5 years now, and still have problems.
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