
F-35's biggest problems: software and bad relationships - mishmax
http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/09/17/f_35s_biggest_problems_software_and_bad_relationships
======
16s
Software issues are common in jet fighter aviation. Here are two little known,
but potentially deadly issues:

* 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...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-by-the-international-date-line-03087/)

~~~
majormajor
The first one, if it's real, confuses me: how does the plane turning upside
down kill the pilot?

~~~
noonespecial
Fighter planes are very different than any other craft "driven" by people.
They are so fast and so strong that if you give the stick a good yank while
flying one, the forces involved will kill you (unless of course good fly-by-
wire software knows your limits and intervenes).

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.

~~~
WildUtah
Which points to the real problem with the F35 and all next generation fighter
planes.

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.

~~~
noonespecial
Such drones have existed for some time now. They are colloquially known as
"surface to air missiles".

~~~
InclinedPlane
The logistics of aerial domination are pretty much the same whether you're
talking drones or piloted craft. If you are the attacker you use ECM and
missile/bomb bombardment to take out the radar/SAM stations. Meanwhile, you
try to destroy as much of the enemy's airplanes on the ground as possible. If
you have superiority in the air you take advantage of it, destroying every
enemy thing that flies whether it is piloted by a crew or not.

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.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
The biggest advantage of drones is you get to reuse the pilot. The second
biggest advantage is you get to use a team instead of one pilot.

~~~
rbanffy
A key advantage is that drone pilots can learn something from having their
planes blown to pieces.

------
luriel
From wikipedia:

 _"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"_

~~~
16s
An entire squadron of F-22's (non C++) lost all systems when they crossed the
International Date Line en route to Japan in 2007. The pilots almost lost
control and only survived because they could visually follow fuel tankers back
to Hawaii. You can't blame that on C++. All systems have bugs.

Source - [http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-
down-b...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-by-the-
international-date-line-03087/)

~~~
smacktoward
_All systems have bugs._

I'm sure that was a great comfort to the pilots in the F-22s.

~~~
WalterBright
All airplanes have bugs, too.

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.

~~~
arethuza
I was reading to "One Minute to Midnight" about the Cuban msisile crisis and
the account of flying a U-2 was pretty scary - at high altitude they had a
_very_ narrow range of speeds at which they could fly, fly too fast and the
wings come off, fly to slowly and the plane stalls.

~~~
outworlder
This is called the "coffin corner". It varies for different aircrafts, but
they all have it, including commercial liners.

~~~
WalterBright
The P-51 had an interesting problem shared with other high torque single
engine fighters of its day. If you're coming in for a landing, with the engine
idling, decided to abort and firewalled the throttle, the airplane would
rotate about the crankshaft.

This killed a lot of pilots.

------
ef4
> The development of the jet's Block II software is 90 to 120 days behind
> schedule, according to the two-star general. 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...

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.

~~~
cubicle67
dave's law - Software development always takes 50% longer than expected, even
when you allow for dave's law

~~~
hackmiester
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the
development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other
90 percent of the development time." —- Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

------
jmount
Check out Augustine's laws: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustines_laws> . I
believe he said software was a boon as all other ways to add expense to an
aircraft eventually are limited by weight.

------
infectoid
Jesus christ! $1.5 trillion... but... healthcare, education... NASA!

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.

~~~
eckyptang
I admire your cynicism. It matches mine.

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.

~~~
gaius
It's worse than that. They can only bomb if they have a 70s-era Tornado along
to aim for them.

------
niels_olson
> Comparing the troubled F-35 program to a massive aircraft carrier that two
> years ago "was gonna run aground," Bogdan said that F-35 program manager
> Vice Adm. David Venlet and his team, with Lockheed Martin and with the help
> of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, "has steered that ship...away
> from the shoals so it won't run aground."

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?

~~~
hudibras
Another fun fact: David Venlet has an air-to-air kill of a Libyan Su-22 in
1981.

------
randomfool
Generals in charge of software projects. I worked at Microsoft, I know how
well non-technical overseers manage projects.

> "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.

~~~
einhverfr
Actually it's worse than that. This is an ambitious project, to build an even
more complex and cutting-edge software driven plane. Compare the inflation-
adjusted cost of the B52 development cycle with that of the B2 and you will
see where this is leading. Similarly between the B2 and the B52 we see a 100x
increase in cost per unit, just as we see a similar increase between the F-4
Phantom and he F-22.

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....

------
caycep
I think the biggest problem is that it's the pentagon's flagship program, and
it suffers from bureaucratic bloat, military-industrial complex crony-ism, and
typical pentagon big-project feature creep.

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...

~~~
Symmetry
By all accounts Boyd (of OODA loop fame) did a really good job of saying "no"
to unnecessary features people wanted to push onto the F-16.

~~~
greedo
Funny thing about aircraft is that a well-designed aircraft can excel in many
roles despite those roles not being part of the design spec. The F-16 was
designed (at least in the YF-16) to be purely air to air. Turned out to be an
excellent ground attack plane. F-15's motto was "Not a pound for air to
ground." yet the F-15E Strike Eagles is excellent at strike and interdiction
roles.

------
ladzoppelin
I can't imagine how hard developing for this must be. Every bug could possibly
kill people but the project still has to meet a deadline. Does anyone think it
might be to early to integrate this much software into a fighter jet?

~~~
icegreentea
Software has been absolutely crucial to aviation for decades. The last
generation or so of fighter planes can only be flown by a computer (they are
aerodynamically unstable and require constant feedback and control). And for
an idea on 'amount of software', you should give this a look.
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-
car-r...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-
code)

------
WalterBright
Most (all?) military fighter planes have had odd flight conditions where they
would get into a fix that would kill the pilot, and it happened often enough.
A large part of pilot training is avoiding those conditions.

Long before software.

------
eranation
"...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..."

Adding more people to a delayed software project, now where did I hear that
before?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month>

------
dangoldin
Damn. I can only imagine what a bunch of hackers could do with $1.5 trillion.

~~~
luke_s
Well, according to wikipedia [1] we could have run over 8 Apollo programs for
that cost.

[1] : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_cost>

~~~
Gustomaximus
1970's dollars are not the same as todays. Further down on the Wikipedia page:

> 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.

~~~
jfoutz
if we take a moment, and divide 1.5 trillion by 170 billion, we see that we
could afford over 8 complete Apollo programs with 1.5 trillion dollars.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Thanks, I stand corrected.

------
ungerik
Try Go, just make sure to use 64bit memory ;-)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3805302>

