Only One of Six Air Force F-35s Could Actually Take Off During Testing

Fortune ^ | APRIL 28, 2016 | Clay Dillow

[JhawkAtty]

Congress should require Lockheed to pay Elon Musk to come in and assess whether the F-35 is just stillborn or whether its capable of being saved.

[ClearCase_guy]

“At this point, what difference does it make?”

[captain_dave]

The movie “Pentagon Wars” sorta explains it all. Here’s a YouTube excerpt:
http://youtu.be/pyakI9GeYRs

[CivilWarBrewing]

0dungheap is only happy to telegraph this information to our enemies. Nice work, 0dunga.

[Talisker]

It’s not the only recent example of “immature systems and software” stalling progress on the $400 billion F-35 program.

Hey they're only words. They don't actually have to mean anything. Especially upon critical reading.

[LegendHasIt]

Why do I have a feeling that this is actually “Part Of The Plan” rather than merely incompetence?

[Wolfie]

I would think the real discussions center on spreading the federal dollars over as many congressional districts as possible so the project can’t be killed.

[Arm_Bears]

There’s an old saying that the camel is a horse designed by committee.

[rawcatslyentist]

We’d be better off just launching huge wads of cash at our enemies, oh wait that’s exactly what we just did to Iran.

[SES1066]

Yesterday, there was the thread about a US Congress committee strongly requesting the USAF to hold off the decommissioning of the A-10 (Warthog) until a fly-off could prove that the F-35 would be an improvement / barely adequate replacement! I do have 'some' sympathy for the USAF in that with the severe budget constraints that are making mere training hours difficult, having to maintain the aging A-10 is something they would like to drop.

That being said, for a ground-pounder to place an air-support call, only to be told that you'll have to wait while the software is debugged (in about a week or so) is not an attractive scenario! This situation reminds me strongly of Arthur Clarke's short story "Superiority" (1951).

[jetson]

Why build jets so susceptible to EMP attacks?

[MortMan]

During a mock deployment at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, just one of the $100 million Lockheed Martin F-35s was able to boot its software successfully and get itself airborne during an exercise designed to test the readiness of the F-35, FlightGlobal reports.

Good test, but bad response from the Air Force.

[RedWulf]

>That being said, for a ground-pounder to place an air-support call, only to be told that you'll have to wait while the software is debugged (in about a week or so) is not an attractive scenario! This situation reminds me strongly of Arthur Clarke's short story “Superiority” (1951).

What we actually need are Russian style armored attack choppers for CAS. Ours are quite old and geared for destroying tanks, not CAS operations.

[JimRed]

Could the software providers be infiltrated by enemy operatives?

[pfflier]

It ain't the first time this type of stuff happened. The C-5A had a monster problem with self-checking software that prevented mission capability. Sometimes a C-5 preflight would take almost 24 hours.

That isn't the news. The news is that, as the system matured, we got over it.

All-in-all I see this as a good argument to keep the pilot in the cockpit and not trust a mega-system to one missing bit.

[stylin19a]

Does this mean the A10 wins the competition by default ?

[MarineBrat]

If builders built buildings the way programmers write software, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

[Skybird]

Add [Ctrl] [Alt] [Delete] to those pilot’s checklists. Especially to the EMERGENCY PROCEDURES boldface while in a dogfight or taking evasive measures. Yikes!

[Kommodor]

Nah, they’re just infiltrated by BAE, Northrop, Boeing, Raytheon, and (insert competitor/foreign entity here). Move along, nothing to see here.

[AFret.]

An elephant, is a mouse designed to meet military specifications...