The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
1–10 of 1001 posts
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#2How much money has the UK wasted on these at the same time as implementing austerity ?
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#3There's a claim in the article that it's too difficult to update the software on the F16s. Could someone (ideally with military aircraft software experience) comment on this? I don't understand -- I would think that software would be the easiest (but not necessarily cheapest) thing to upgrade. Computers have only gotten smaller and faster.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#4There's a claim in the article that it's too difficult to update the software on the F16s. Could someone (ideally with military aircraft software experience) comment on this? I don't understand -- I would think that software would be the easiest (but not necessarily cheapest) thing to upgrade. Computers have only gotten smaller and faster.
I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things that software developers rarely think about any more, but things that mean the software is only going to run on the hardware it's currently running on, and when the hardware vendor hasn't even sold that product for over a decade, I've seen government programs literally scrounge eBay to find replacement parts. So upgrading the software isn't just a matter of installing an upgrade. It's a total from the ground up rewrite and also requires new hardware.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#5I wonder if that also means that they are going to cut funding to the astroturfers who show up in every thread in every forum on every post singing the praises of the F-35 now.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#6There's a claim in the article that it's too difficult to update the software on the F16s. Could someone (ideally with military aircraft software experience) comment on this? I don't understand -- I would think that software would be the easiest (but not necessarily cheapest) thing to upgrade. Computers have only gotten smaller and faster.
I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things that software developers rarely think about any more, but things tha…
Worked around F16's and F22's when I was in and can attest that this is the source of the issue for upgrades. Everything in the software is so tightly coupled to the hardware that updating the F16's would be a monumental effort. The difference between a 4th and 5th generation air frame are night and day in terms of software capabilities. Hell, even the different between 5th generation jets can be massive on the software side such as the gap between F22 vs F35 the later being far more advanced on the software side.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#7“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated?
Do those things even matter?
I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a race. Just like you don’t bring your Ferrari to the farm to haul material (not anymore anyways).
The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down. Now we have electric cars with carbon fiber shells. The same is true for the F-35. The technology inside it has and will lead to the resurrection and long standing use of older planes like the B1 and U2. Where the airframe is solid but the tech and stealth is not. It will also lead to revolutionary new planes which are cheaper to make and build.
Through the F35s use of distributed computing and treating hardware components and their software as services, we’re not going to be doomed to the same fate as the F16 where we can’t find hardware. Instead, we’ll have more component oriented aircraft systems where each aircraft is no bespoke and can use from a menu of technologies.
So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.
Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?
Some may see this as a slippery slope. What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project. Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#8There's a claim in the article that it's too difficult to update the software on the F16s. Could someone (ideally with military aircraft software experience) comment on this? I don't understand -- I would think that software would be the easiest (but not necessarily cheapest) thing to upgrade. Computers have only gotten smaller and faster.
I can't comment from the perspective of the F16 specifically, but from experience working on upgrade efforts of military and IC ground processing systems, the challenge is the legacy systems are very tightly coupled to the hardware. They make strong assumptions about register size and number, bus bandwidth, filesystem block size, all kinds of things that software developers rarely think about any more, but things tha…
Also, I've read they want more room for avionics hw (with cooling and enough amps) in hatch areas, which is designed into new models.
Planes today are thought of as computer platforms as much as weapons platforms, though one would think Moore's law would solve the space/volume problem.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#9“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated? Do those things even matter? I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a…
This reads word-for-word like an email from a PM to management talking about how their project that imploded embarrassingly has so many intangible future benefits that really, it's a huge success when you think about it.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#10I would guess that the NGAD prototype[0] has given USAF leadership confidence to publicly alude to F-35 shortcomings.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34030586...