Software Bug in F-35 Radar Causes Mid-Flight System Reboot 153
Reader Lisandro writes: The F-35 Fighter jet can't seem to catch a break. An advanced AN/APG-81 AESA F35 radar system has been found riddled with a software bug that causes it to degrade and stop working. The solution? Rebooting the system while in the air.
Major General Jeffrey Harrigian, director of the Air Force's F-35 integration office at the Pentagon, was quoted as saying "radar stability - the radar's ability to stay up and running. [...] What would happen is they'd get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail - "something that would force us to restart the radar." The issue was spotted in late 2015, and thankfully, it was caught during the testing period. The software version "3i" is affected. An update aimed to resolve the bug is expected to be delivered to the US Air Force by the end of March.
Major General Jeffrey Harrigian, director of the Air Force's F-35 integration office at the Pentagon, was quoted as saying "radar stability - the radar's ability to stay up and running. [...] What would happen is they'd get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail - "something that would force us to restart the radar." The issue was spotted in late 2015, and thankfully, it was caught during the testing period. The software version "3i" is affected. An update aimed to resolve the bug is expected to be delivered to the US Air Force by the end of March.
Classic memory leak. (Score:3)
It looks to me that it's a classic memory leak.
It should have been caught in testing, but of course someone wanted to save money and then it's testing that gets shaved first.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
A serious question here.
Has anyone experienced memory leaks caused by race conditions and how (un-)common is it? Those would be much harder to catch and might also only appear in real world scenarios.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're using the standard model of whoever allocates the memory is responsible for freeing it, then it should never happen. Now I understand that sometimes you need to break that paradigm, but a programmer who does this should be very aware of this and careful when they do it. And in any case, again, pointers should always be initialized to NULL, and if reusing a pointer you should check if it's null before assigning to it, and after freeing, it should always be nulled. Even better, use an autopointer
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:4, Interesting)
Extremely common, actually. It's one of the major pitfalls and difficulties of doing multi-threaded programming and one of the hardest things for programmers new to multi-threaded design to learn how to solve. It can also be extremely difficult to debug, even for experienced programmers.
Improper garbage collection is another extremely common bug that becomes harder to find and debug with multi-threaded programming, and that can also lead to memory leaks.
There are time tested techniques to mitigate these issues and strategies to find and squash the bugs, but as you said, they can be extremely hard to reproduce while testing.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it sad that we still write software for mission critical systems that isn't formally verifiable. You can build a software system where you can prove it won't leak. It amazes me developers forget how to write a proof after they get their degree. This isn't just for fighter jets though. If your cloud goes down your company can lose billions. It makes sense to write software you can formally prove won't fail because the stakes are high.
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you actually every tried writing a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm at all, let alone a non-trial one dependent on external subsystems and with huge amounts of state?
Yes, I have tried, and raised funding, and managed in fact to run one layer of our formal modelling language in real time (slowly). But we decided that the proof languages (Z and ML, with a sprinkling of CCS) weren't up to the task, and nor were we.
Rgds
Damon
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
It's possible to write complex systems using modular design: do one thing and do it well.
Concurrency and latency need be ensured (and debugged) via the interface layer (a dedicated module for interfacing between modules).
This is why you have a single car area network bus, and why both Ethernet and the Internet have taken off so well. They follow the Unix design philosophy, unlike the F35... otherwise there would be a simple way to restart the radar module without having global side effects.
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's possible to write complex systems using modular design: do one thing and do it well.
And you'll soon discover your simple modules start interacting in ways that you did not anticipate or understand. There are also unlikely to be any tools available to analyze how your set of modules work as a whole.
Every nontrivial system has emergent behavior. You can't eliminate complexity with hand waving.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't eliminate complexity with hand waving.
That's probably why Chuck Moore eliminates complexity by keeping things simple.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't eliminate complexity with hand waving.
The purpose of modularization isn't to eliminate complexity but to compartmentalize it. This allows for design and problem resolution by mere mortals.
Re: (Score:2)
The ability to "compartmentalize" complexity is limited.
As I said, the complexity still exists in the way the compartments themselves interact. Mere mortals usually still can't deal with the problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Already out of date (Score:2)
... as opposed to definitely spending billions to write verifiable software that will be out of date by the time they release it.
Having their tech be out of date is usually preferable to have it being unreliable, provided that bug patches, etc..., are backported as necessary.
Spending billions to get the software right on the F-35 would make sense. We are going to make thousands of the things and use them for generations. The software is also likely to be stolen at some point, so it is better for us to take the time and make it as perfect as possible so that even if stolen, other nations do not have an easy time finding and exploit
Re: (Score:2)
I thought that C++ would make it easier to contain subsystems as implementations of a collection of classes. Beat the shit out of a class and then test the next class. Any patches to the class would wait, or require a separate class to include the base class.
Of course, they probably wrote the whole think in assembly.
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:5, Informative)
As others below have mentioned, it is very difficult to formally verify large complex systems. However, it is made even more complex in that there aren't enough research results to cover such a system in its complexity. Also, computer scientists tend to think the world revolves around their code, so if they get that correct, then the system will run correctly. The real world isn't like that, and it is not all captured in software, much of the system is hardware. Trying to capture the correct interaction between hardware and software is very, very hard...and it isn't clear that even if you could that you could verify the result before the universe dies.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:4, Insightful)
It should have been caught in testing, but of course someone wanted to save money and then it's testing that gets shaved first.
You mean like it says in TFS?
Re:Classic memory leak. (Score:4, Interesting)
The other detail missing here is that 3i isn't fielded yet. That is something like Block 2F which is only installed in the Marine Corp unit right now. Oh by the way - There is only one unit of Marine F-35s that are "on-duty" right now - the entire rest of the fleet is under test/development.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it should be caught in an early phase of testing, possibly of the unit itself long before it even gets into the full system.
Re: (Score:2)
In a lot of software development regimes, unit tests are one-shot affairs. If a bug requires continuous operation to manifest, you won't see it until at least subsystem integration, and if the program is pressed for schedule integration burn-in will be shortened and you won't see the bug (if you're unlucky) until the full-up integrated checkout before acceptance testing... the last bastion before it goes to deployment.
So, on one hand, congratulations to the program on capturing it before fielding, but OTOH,
Re: (Score:3)
It should have been caught in testing, but of course someone wanted to save money and then it's testing that gets shaved first.
Too often this is true. Not only do you, as a tester, have to fight for a case of testing with suppliers, you often have to fight off internal forces too. Suppliers hate you for demonizing their product and QA and your bosses hate you for subsequent late deliveries. Everybody hates testers.
One thing I've found to be a somewhat working solution is to present cost saving estimates directly related to successes in software testing to our management. They speak money and that's what you should speak to them too
Re: (Score:2)
but of course someone wanted to save money
No one wants to save money. Defence contracts are "cost plus", so cost overruns lead to higher profits for Lockheed. Congress is happy, because more money goes to the subcontractors in their districts. The Air Force is happy with the overrun, because a bigger project means a promotion for the officer that manages it. The public is also happy, because higher defense spending makes us safer.
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on, who here hasn't had to reboot during air to air combat?
Re: (Score:2)
It's one thing during flight simulation where a BSOD is just an annoyance, during combat the effect can be a tad more annoying for the pilot.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm...did he get the joke, or didn't he? Well played, sir.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on, who here hasn't had to reboot during air to air combat?
... a problem that is aggravated by system's insisting on the installation of innumerable update packages on every reboot.
MISSILE LAUNCH DETECTED!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE IMPACT IMMINENT, EJECT! EJECT!
Installing radar software update 4 of 68....
For this update you need Microsoft Silverlight, install Silverlight [Y/N]:
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot we recommend you upgrade to Windows 10.
Re: (Score:3)
Now isn't that exactly how M$ makes it money, charging for upgrades for ever. It looks like the F35 is the perfect military industrial complex aircraft, forever requiring upgrades and bug fixes and not just from the US government from every government required to fork over 2% of GDP tribute payment to the US military industrial complex. After all they don't really need high quality weapons, just good enough to attack the terrorists they create. Russian and China as just the bogey men to drive tribute paymen
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, Russia meddled and took part of Georgia because the evil U.S. was there. And they decided to steal part of the Ukraine for the same reason. And those islands in the S. China Sea, why Vietnam and the other nations to which they are closer are only doing the bidding of the U.S. hence the need for China to militarize them. N. Korea, yep, those naughty Americans are preventing the Norks from slaughtering the Sorks as they deserve. And those Muslim fanatics, why they'd be fluffy bunny rabbits were it not f
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, Russia meddled and took part of Georgia because the evil U.S. was there. And they decided to steal part of the Ukraine for the same reason.
Because the US State Department spending $5 billion to "influence" the political situation in a country directly on Russia's border couldn't *possibly* provoke a response, right? Crimea is one of Russia's few warm-water ports and an essential link to the Mediterranean. How do you think the US would respond to political instability in Panama, especially if it was caused by another major world power? Oh wait, we already know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And those islands in the S. China Sea, why Vietnam and the other nations to which they are closer are only doing the bidding of the U.S. hence the need for China to militarize them.
Something like 80% of the sea traffic going through the SCS is either to or from China. China, which is ~20% of humanity, compared to ~2% combined for Vietnam and the Philippines. Do the Needs of the Many and the Greater Good not apply? And US think tanks have written extensively about strangling raw material imports to China in the event of a conflict. Yeah, no way the Chinese might have a rational self-interest in securing the lifeline to their economy in their own backyard.
. And Assad of Syria, we just know he was playing secret footsie with Americans before he decided to slaughter his people and chase a few million out of the country.
Don't you think Assad would rather have a few million additional taxpayers contributing to his economy, even if significant portions of them are the unhappy Sunni majority? He certainly seemed to be getting along fine in 2010. Funny how the provision of funding, foreign fighters, and weapons from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey (all Sunni states) roughly coincides with Assad's refusal to allow the planned Qatari/Saudi pipelines across his country. Pipelines to Europe that would undercut his patron Russia's economic interests.
On a related note, do you express as much disgust at the suppression of popular dissent in Bahrain, or is that ok because King Hamad of Bahrain "is our man"?
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Russia invading a sovereign country is perfectly acceptable because they weren't doing what Russia wanted them to do. Of course, pointing to another country doing something kind of the same excuses what Russia is doing, it is all perfectly acceptable to annex the territory of another country.
Great Powers do it all the time. I don't expect it to change. But I do aim to point out the hypocrisy and/or naivete of anyone who thinks the US's foreign policy has altruistic motives or that the "Other Guys" are inherently evil.
Yeah, screw those other countries, China has a huge population, so they should just be able to steal territory that they have no valid claim to.
Might makes right. Just ask any sovereign nation that's been subject to a US invasion. As an aside, note that no nuclear-armed state has suffered a regime change at US hands. And yet Americans are surprised when antagonists pursue nuclear arms? As for "stealing territory they have no valid claim to"....the validity of their claim stems from their ability to enforce their will. Hence the fortification of their man-made islands. Also note that the US has progressed to a uniquely insidious alternative to directly "stealing" territory: the Petrodollar system. But it requires constant enforcement by the US, and controlling/manipulating central banks, financial institutions, and the exchange of oil are all aspects of this enforcement.
2000: Saddam was planning to switch sales of Iraqi oil from dollars to Euros. Within 3 years he was deposed.
2009: Gaddafi was doing his best to reconcile with the West. Unfortunately for him, he also planned a gold-and-oil-backed Libyan currency. He was dead within 3 years of shaking Obama's hand. And the "rebels" sure were quick to set up a Central Bank (less than 2 months into the civil war).
2012: Iran was planning to sell oil in exchange for gold. Despite having them bracketed with bases in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military was in no position to invade. So Iran instead found themselves promptly disconnected from global financial institutions: http://www.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]
2014: Ukraine has a revolution....and suddenly all the gold is missing from their central bank. Now they are stuck with fiat currency and IMF obligations. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com] Meanwhile, Russia and China are buying up gold like crazy ( http://www.mining.com/china-ru... [mining.com] ), and started their own alternative-IMF (the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). Both have stated intentions to end the US's hegemonic influence. These are two nuclear-armed Great Powers that are closing the conventional military gap, and despite shaky economies, having been consistently moving to eliminate US dollar influence across their entire sphere of influence. Which, IMO, will eventually be a good thing for everyone, including the average (productive) American citizen.
Oh, let us ignore all the people Assad was murdering, and that a large percentage of the population wants him out of office.
If you have a problem with murderous heads of state that are unpopular, perhaps you should look a little closer to home before trying to solve other people's problems? https://theintercept.com/drone... [theintercept.com]
Lets just prop up that dictator because he is our friend and is nice to us.
Yes, the Russian relationship with Assad closely parallels the relationship the United States has with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Ya know, the guys who are busy bombing the shit out of Yemen? These are also the same people who are VERY close ideologically to ISIS and al Qaeda....who we've spent the past 15 yea
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like the F35 is the perfect military industrial complex aircraft, forever requiring upgrades and bug fixes and not just from the US government from every government required to fork over 2% of GDP tribute payment to the US military industrial complex.
I'm not a fan of the F35 program, but this is still done in meatspace with aircraft as old as the B52.
The aircraft manufacturers are constantly pushing new hardware updates, new specs on how each bolt should be tightened, etc. Those don't come for free.
It is even possible that ongoing costs will be lower with something software-based rather than hardware. It turns out that way often.
I don't expect it to get cheaper, but if it doesn't it is in spite of software updates, not because of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot we recommend you upgrade to Windows 10.
Hehe.... that would have been cool but I mostly regret that last line, it should have been:
MISSILE APPROACH WARNING!!!
Installing radar software update 3 of 68....
MISSILE IMPACT IMMINENT, EJECT! EJECT!
Installing radar software update 4 of 68....
Currently updating ejection seat firmware, please try again later.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
thank you for calling ITI Advanced Combat Systems
please press 1 if you are in a combat situation other wise please hold for the next technician
beep
please in put your mission number
beep boop beep booop beeep boop beep boop beep beeep boop boop beep boop beep
mission verification complete we will now transfer you to a support technician
hold music
thank you for calling ITI may name is nahmeed how may i help you
look budy my radar is froze up and im dodging a mig 35 at the moment how about you fix this thing so
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... I do not know where but somewhere in there should have been, "Please hold while I do the needful."
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Funny)
My first thought was alternate movie dialog.
Maverick: Talk to me Goose... Where's the bogey?
Goose: Uh... hang on a moment Maverick, we're just going through a reboot... any... minute... now...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh come on, who here hasn't had to reboot during air to air combat?
I've had a LAN game of Descent ruined by Windows daylight savings time, does that count?
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
actually "rebooting", ie, flipping the power switch or circuit breaker, isn't at all uncommon on avionics equipment on military aircraft.
we aren't talking about typical computers that go through a boot process anyway. this is ruggedized equipment that largely lacks any thing resembling an operating system or RAM or much else a typical Slashdot reader would be familiar with.
anyone who's spent any time working on military aircraft as a maintainer, particularly the avionics systems, knows that inflight glitches are not at all infrequent. and when they pop up on the Master Caution* or elsewhere, often the first corrective action the pilot takes is to power cycle the specific piece of equipment. most every system is on its own breaker, and pilots are trained in what can and what cannot be power cycled in flight. the majority of the time, that's enough to fix the glitch.
and typically the first thing that happens when the pilot returns is a rep from each of the main work shops (avionics, flightline, airframes, ordinance, life support) meets him as he is exiting his aircraft, in order to ask if any gripes came up during the flight. this way they can get a jump on it before the pilot even gets back to the maintenance control to write the maintenance order describing the glitch.
there a thousands of wires, with hundreds of connectors, each connector a cannon plug consisting of several dozen pins, any one of which could have gotten slightly bent (or even broken) upon reconnection, making an imperfect electrical connection or faulty data bus signal (depending on system). Or a wire may fall out of the backend of the pin from a faulty installation of the retainer of the cannon plug. or the plug itself may be not quite fully seated; you'd think it would be easy, but there's a reason we have cannon plug pliers (aka "bi*ch grips"). There's also millions of solder joints and splices that can fatigue from vibration. sometimes a contact simply gets dirty cause oil or grease (we wipe everything constantly, but still happens).
(*speaking of PITA to maintain: due its nature, being tied into EVERYTHING (hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet of wiring, depending on aircraft type), the Master Caution Panel (MCP) itself is often the actual point of failure, throwing false indications. one of the first things we frequently did in tracing a gripe was to first eliminate the MCP itself)
Re: (Score:2)
We were playing Artemis (a starship bridge simulation game on multiple computers), and the captain took us pretty close to one of those devices that eats everything in its path, just to show it to some of the newer players. At that time, the Helm computer crashed, and we couldn't move until it rebooted and reconnected. Fortunately, Engineering was able to divert a lot of power to the forward shields, so we lasted long enough.
Only the radar system needs rebooting (Score:5, Informative)
Software Bug in F-35 Radar Causes Mid-Flight System Reboot
Alarmist headline.
First of all, the bug doesn't cause a reboot. It requires a reboot to put the radar back into a useable state.
Secondly, it is only the radar system that needs rebooting.
Re:Only the radar system needs rebooting (Score:5, Insightful)
Third it's already been resolved. My dad worked on the Canadian Maritime Helicopter Project for years. During it the papers had an article talking about some snag that was hit and how horrible it was. I sent my dad the link and his response:
"Yeah that was my thing and 8 months ago, it was pointed out and in less than a day resolved."
Media exaggerating? Never...
Re: (Score:2)
Media exaggerating? Never...
That said, they are in good company. We're talking about an aircraft that is severely delayed, underperforms compared to spec and with a programme cost of twice what was originally planned.
Now, that things are going to take longer, perform less than expected and be more expensive than anticipated is almost a given in these projects, but the F-35 breaks a couple of records even given that. They don't call it "The plane that ate the Pentagon" for nothing.
So who's exaggerating more? My money isn't on the news
Re: (Score:1)
Which one of the resolved versions was that resolved you dad did:
feel free to add other definitions of resolved that you
Re: (Score:2)
Since the bug causes the system to require rebooting, it is a simple cause-and-effect problem requiring a reboot.
But that makes the summary logically incorrect. If a situation arises requiring a certain action to fix it, the situation does not cause the action.
If a bug in systemd caused networking to fail, and required the manual intervention of a reboot to fix the problem, it would not be logically correct to say that the bug caused the reboot.
Next, TFS used the word "system" and not "systems", so your point is again not well considered.
Without further information, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that "system" might refer to the entire system.
Re: (Score:2)
BIng, bing, bing!!!! We have a winner for the Most Unlikely Story to Suck in a Rant on Systemd. Please collect your award and post your speech, we're dying to hear all about it.
Re: (Score:2)
Godwin has company. Gtall's Law (or named in honor of someone else if it has already been suggested in another thread) seems kind of stuffy. Maybe it would be more modern and fun to make it a verb form: "He just Poettered that discussion." "Dude, you're totally Peottering!"
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't a rant. I just needed an example or something that might a bug serious enough to require a reboot. I've never used systemd and don't have much of an opinion one way or the other.
Re: (Score:2)
Fair point. More alarmist than necessary, then.
Riddled with a single bug? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, to a programmer a "bug" is an error in logic. To a user a "bug" is an error in results. A single result may stem from many errors, particularly if we're talking about some kind of resource starvation, which this sounds like. If the starvation was caused by a single line memory leak, well that wouldn't take that long to find and fix. But if it were a faulty approach to managing memory used extensively over several years of development, you'd have a substantial body of logic errors that would take so
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ISTR... (Score:1)
Didn't we have this same headline for the F-22, back in the day?
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't we have this same headline for the F-22, back in the day?
Dunno but didn't that have a thing where it cutoff the oxygen supply to the pilot?
"Hi, tech support?" (Score:5, Funny)
"Yaeh, my jet is plummeting to earth at mach 3. Any suggestions?"
"Have you tried turning off and on again?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
I thought you were channelling the Swedish Chef
Reboot isn't a solution, that is a work around. (Score:5, Insightful)
completely normal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
If the F35 was just a test plane then it wouldn't be such an issue but they are already in production. It's the new model for the military industrial complex. Spread the work out across the whole country and get it into production as early as possible to make it as politically tricky to cancel and keep as much money coming in as possible.
The issue with the F35 isn't that these issues are happening with test pilots who are highly trained to expect anything to happen at anytime. The problem is that planes th
Version what? (Score:5, Funny)
The software version "3i" is affected.
As a general rule, when your version numbering system needs to use complex numbers, something's going wrong with your project.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, it's not complex, it's imaginary.
If you want to be a smartarse about it, get it right. Imaginary numbers are complex numbers whose real part is zero.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Requisite quote (Score:2)
"Th' more they over th' plumbin' th easier it is to stop up th' drain."
-Montgomery Scott ST3
"Riddled with a software bug"? (Score:2)
Really? Were Bonnie and Clyde "riddled with a bullet hole"? Come on, editors!
Be lucky we didn't buy F-35 from Verizon (Score:2)
If we'd bought them from Verizon it could be years before we get upgraded to the fixed software version. Or we might just have to by the F-36 to get the update.
'Autonomous cars' can't seem to catch a break (Score:2)
{Major Autonomous Car Manufacturer} announced today the discovery of a bug in their control software that prompts a reboot of the cars' systems in mid-drive. "driving stability - the cars' ability to stay up and running. [...] What would happen is they'd get a signal that says either a driving degrade or a driving fail - "something that would force us to restart the cars' autonomous control systems."
This reporter notes that if autonomous cars had a full set of manual controls, instead of just a big red 'STOP' button on the dash, human occupants of the vehicle would have an opportunity to save themselves from a firey death, instead of the surviving family members merely receiving an insurance payout.
Don't worry! (Score:2)
It'll be totally fixed in the F-36 and it'll also include cool sound effects when the radar target windows minimize and maximize!
Over the Air update now available. (Score:2)
Get it? Over the Air update? new meaning to the word software crash.
F35 Blue Screen Of Death (Score:2)
is no longer just a figure of speech.
Common occurrence (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the dude from Ars. Like most news on /. these days you can read about most of it days prior on other sites. :P
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot is an EU site.
So it's all mainland Europeans who keep using American English spellings in the comments? Seems it's just down to us Brits to spell things properly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can we deliver Congress along with them?
They don't need much life support due to all the hot air they generate.
Re: (Score:2)
You can but, I should warn you, attempt no landing there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
First off the F-35 was never meant to be a primary air supremacy fighter, it was meant to be a multi-role stealth strike thus the deficiencies in ACM are to be expected. It is sacrificing wing area to get an internal weapons bay large enough to fit a 2,000lb JDAM. Something that the F-22 can't do. It also has a much longer range than other
Re: (Score:2)
You likely mean the F-104. That aircraft was basically a rocket-powered dart - it had such a poor glide ratio that if you experienced a flameout below 15,000ft the standard procedure was to eject and ditch the plane [916-starfighter.de].
Re:F-35 is a "Little Turd" (Score:4, Interesting)
The F-104 was a fantastic jet. But a terrible military jet.
That thing was made to be a fast, last minute, bomber interceptor. It was built to get there at Mach 2+, fill the bomber's ass with lead and get home. Originally, it hadn't provision even for missiles!
But them, Pentagon changed the rules demanding a multi hole aircraft, and Lockheed started to hack the airframe. As a technical achievement, it was a formidable one. But again, as a military weapon, a questionable one.
The best "worst" hack was the F-104G, made for Germany. They almost doubled the combat radius - but made the thing yet more harsh to handle. A lot of German women were made widows by this plane.
Curiously, Italy was also an operator for this aircraft, but without a single recorded casualty (perhaps nobody managed to take it off! =P ).
The bottom line I had read is: the F-104 is a formidable plane in the hands of formidable pilots. And a catastrophe waiting to happen in everybody else's.
Re: (Score:2)
But them, Pentagon changed the rules demanding a multi hole aircraft, and Lockheed started to hack the airframe.
That was clearly the wrong approach. A drill would have been better than an axe. Drilled holes have better manufacturing tolerances.
Re: (Score:2)
But them, Pentagon changed the rules demanding a multi hole aircraft, and Lockheed started to hack the airframe.
That was clearly the wrong approach. A drill would have been better than an axe. Drilled holes have better manufacturing tolerances.
At first, I stared to your response for some minutes without understanding it. Until I finally realized I typed "hole" instead of "role" - and laughed my ass out until near a heart attack. :-D
Ah, the neverending amusements on speaking foreign (to me) languages. :-D
Re: (Score:2)
One nickname for the F-104 was "Missile with a Man in it". Remember that, at this time, missiles were experimental and unreliable.
Re: (Score:2)
You likely mean the F-104. That aircraft was basically a rocket-powered dart - it had such a poor glide ratio that if you experienced a flameout below 15,000ft the standard procedure was to eject and ditch the plane [916-starfighter.de].
The remaining cartons [916-starfighter.de] also worth to be seen. They summarize perfectly what I had read about the plane. :)
Re: (Score:2)
This one [916-starfighter.de], in special, appears to explain the XB-70A #2 disaster [youtube.com].
(ok. enough for today)
Re: (Score:2)
A retired Air Force fighter pilot once said that "the best part of the Starfighter was its name".
Apparently it was a dreadful bag of bolts that couldn't be relied upon to takeoff, circle the field, and land safely.
Re: (Score:2)
This. The F-35 program has eaten ofer $1.3 *trillion* US dollars by now. It is insane; you could use that money to triple the current F-22 fleet (a vast superior, but also more expensive, aircraft) the US has and still have left over cash to fund its entire program all over again.
At this point is hard to justify the F-35s existence. It is cheaper to build and fly than the F-22, yes, but so much money has been pour on the project that those savings will never offset its cost. Same as with the possibility of
Re: (Score:2)
The F-35 at 1.3T is replacing 3 models of aircraft. It's current LRIP fly away cost is _already_ cheaper than a new F-15, let alone an F-22 (when it was in production).
No, it is intended to replace three models. I'm still waiting on any explanation (official or not) on how a F-35s is expected to replace the A-10 on CAS duties. Hell, the US might be better off just buying a fleet of Super Tucanos from Embraer and writing it off as losses on the total program cost.
Re: (Score:2)
It is. In fact the F-35 is intended to replace four aircraft within the US military: F-16, A-10, F/A-18 and the AV-8B. Get your facts checked.
Re: (Score:2)
Directions to reboot a quasi-frozen Linux box:
Press and hold Alt and SysRq keys.
Hold them and press these in order with a pause between each: REISUB
Re: (Score:2)
Dammit, now that's funny.
Re: (Score:3)