
Pentagon Report Faults F-35 - protomyth
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_01_23_2014_p0-657478.xml
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GVIrish
For another source on the woes bedeviling the F-35, check out this article
from Vanity Fair:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-
figh...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter-
lockheed-martin)

Some of the highlights include:

-DoD skimped on requirements and instead relied on the contractor to fill in the gaps. This led to the plane being designed without protection from lightning strikes which means it can't currently fly in bad weather

-The plane was supposed to have 70 percent parts commonality between variants. It is now 25 percent

-The plane couldn't do supersonic flight because Lockheed Martin didn't test the stealth coatings at the higher temperatures generated in supersonic flight

-The DoD let Lockheed Martin skip a lot of real world testing in favor of computer modeling

~~~
lettergram
Good god, talk about repair costs...

~~~
a3n
Good god, talk about opportunity costs.

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beloch
V/STOL capability was the one thing the marine corps absolutely insisted on,
requiring the massive fan that makes the F-35's body so wide and high-drag.
The decision to use a one-body-fits-all-applications approach means that even
the non-V/STOL versions of the F-35 are fat pigs as far as military jets go.
That's why these planes are so bloody slow by modern fighter standards and one
reason why countries, such as Canada, that have no need for V/STOL variants of
the plane are dropping out of the program.

In short, the marines screwed this plane up for everybody but themselves. If
even they are not happy with the result then the F-35 project is an utter
flop.

~~~
caycep
And honestly, the A-10 is still the plane they want...

~~~
ceejayoz
Not really. It's not carrier capable, which means it can't really get where
the Marines need it a lot of the time.

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GVIrish
The Joint Strike Fighter program is a prime example of the military not
learning anything from its failures in the past (like the F-111). Hell,
they're not even learning from the failures they've had in the history of the
JSF.

If you've got 50 percent or less of the software capabilities in a system with
8 million lines of code, and it's supposed to be deployed in 18 months you're
in deep shit. Yet, the program's backers blithely proclaim they're going to
make their dates, ignoring the fact that the program is years overdue and 70%
over budget.

Not only has an enormous amount of good money been thrown after bad, the
military has staked the future of air power on this one aircraft so no one
wants to admit that it should be cancelled.

~~~
pekk
That sounds great and all, but cancelling doesn't exactly speed things up
either...

~~~
TrainedMonkey
From what I understand main issue is that they are trying to build
"transformer". Basically they want Navy, Marines, and Airforce to use same
software/chassis.

Obviously Navy, Marines, and Airforce all want different features, and
requirement to the chassis renders it extremely frail (they had to cut a lot
of weight for VTOL capability).

So considering that, it actually might be good idea to stop completely, fire
all top airforce/navy/marine brass involved and restart as 3 separate projects
from scratch, albeit using all the technology already developed.

Morale is already super low and it is hard to see bright future for something
so overpriced, over budget, over engineered (in a bad way), and over
politicized.

~~~
GVIrish
Some say this is the most politically-engineered weapons system in history
(along with being the most expensive). Production for the parts of this
aircraft is spread over 45 states. So you can only imagine how difficult it
would be to scrap or reduce the size of this project.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
The lesson from the Space Shuttle is that contractors lose big time from an
unflyable abortion with a low operational tempo. If Morton Thiokol had
sacrificed short-term profits to rethink the boosters, they'd have sold them
10 times faster and still be selling them today

~~~
monkeyspaw
I am unfamiliar with this history, but it sounds fascinating. Can you
elaborate a little more, or point me to an article discussing this?

~~~
Daniel_Newby
The Air Force hijacked the Space Shuttle design process and forced it to
deliver gigantic loads to polar orbit (a very tricky task). Then they
abandoned the Shuttle, leaving it misdesigned for a nonexistent mission.

Morton Thiokol is a solid rocket company in the northwestern U.S. The Shuttle
launched from the southwest U.S. The solid rockets, with tubes of propellant
inside, had to be cut into sections to make the long journey. The joints were
heavy (very bad for rockets), and a leaky joint destroyed the Challenger.

The horrible Air Force requirements made refurbishing very expensive and slow.
Everything had been stripped of so much weight that it was too fragile and
needed detailed inspection and repairs for each launch.

Morton Thiokol was crammed into the program to get Shuttle votes from their
state's senators. The catch is that the crammin-crap-in process doomed the
program. But if Morton Thiokol had threatened to cancel the program unless it
was reinvented, they could have come out as a real rocket company supporting a
fleet that launched every month. Honestly, the innovations SpaceX is coming
out with could and should have been done by the Shuttle program, instead of
the idiot business "leaders" chaining themselves to the worst possible ideas

~~~
nkoren
I will never forget seeing a Lockheed Martin presentation about their bid for
the X-33 contract. They had a slide titled "technical features", which looked
roughly like this:

    
    
      * Linear aerospike engine
      * Conformal carbon-composite LH2 tanks
      * Integrated metallic TPS
      * Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts
    

As far as I was concerned, the rest of the programme was a foregone conclusion
from that point forward. Lockheed Martin of course won the bid -- the other
bidders, with much simpler and more technically sound proposals that _weren
't_ driven by the need to split the project across as many districts as
possible, of course lost -- and spent $1.3B without putting a single piece of
hardware in the air.

The shuttle was a similarly foregone conclusion with a lot more money behind
it. You're absolutely right that one of SpaceX's primary innovations, thus
far, has simply been to not let politics get anywhere near the engineering
process.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Indeed. The bitterest thing is that cheap access to space would have flowed
forth a river of money to tech companies in every voting district. They could
have sold uncancellable payloads like it was going out of style, and instead
they crucified themselves on a single doomed political game.

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skywhopper
I look forward to Philip Greenspun's reaction. Each one of these planes costs
more than the year-long healthcare.gov maintenance contract he freaked out
about.

~~~
username223
_sigh_. Perhaps it's time for Greenspun's 11th rule: never go full Libtard.

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larsmak
They should have just incremented on the F-16, now that is an exellent fighter
- so elegant and simple. One of the F-16 designers has some great insights on
the F-35:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQB4W8C0rZI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQB4W8C0rZI)

~~~
branchan
This guy is advocating that all aircraft should be designed for short range
dogfighting when this aircraft most likely designed for beyond visual range
combat. Of course it's gonna lack the maneuverability. Try comparing it to the
F22.

~~~
jfb
It's not at all clear that fighter aircraft are going to be doing much in any
future conflict with e.g. China regardless of how quickly they can shoot down
30 year old technology.

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bliti
I took a tour of one of the factories where the F-35 is built (or one of the
components of the airframe). It is the one located in Atlanta, Georgia. The
scale of the place is just mind-numbing. There was a row of C-130 in different
stages of assembly and next to them the production line for the their wings.

On the F-35 side, there was this huge robot that looked like a flat toolbox.
It moved the airframe part from one station to the next. Just amazing. The
whole assembly line looks like something out of a movie.

I was told that the F-35 had a lot of C++ code, and that is the reason it was
not meeting deadlines. It was an interesting bit of gossip to hear, but I'm
not entirely sure how that would come into play. I'm also not sure if C++ has
been used before in this type of application. Given how ingrained Ada, C, and
Fortran are in the industry.

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vonmoltke
Ada is dead for new development by fiat of the DoD. They finally figured out
that having all their real-time code written in a language almost nobody
outside of DoD uses is a bad idea.

Fortran doesn't fly; that is, (almost)[1] no real-time code is written in
Fortran. It is still used for simulations, but is steadily being replaced my
Matlab since the latter integrates better with various engineering workflows.

C is definitely still the winner for the embedded code, but is losing to C++
as time goes on. Java is also making inroads for implementing the interfaces
on operator consoles.

[1] I know of at least one program that deployed signal processing algorithms
in a semi-operational state in Fortran.

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Tloewald
The software problems are bad enough. Then there's the hardware which is
crippled by the marine corps's insistence on VSTOL which means that it will
never be effective. The plane is all but an open joke within the air force.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
The Chair Force decision makers aren't any better. The A10, one of their most
successful programs ever, is/was also an open joke, it is the red-headed step-
child of aircraft.

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Refefer
I think modern software engineering really needs to start banking on provable
languages with strong type systems. Instead of hoping and testing with Monte
Carlo sims, let's prove an algorithm once as correct and move on from there.

~~~
skywhopper
More provable code is not the answer. Proving the functionality is meaningless
if you can't decide on what the functionality should be. And this project has
all the classic hallmarks of a requirements quagmire. The requirements are
poorly specified and contradictory, and provable code and strong typing can't
solve that problem.

~~~
jerf
Indeed, it makes the problem worse... the strong typing and provable code
stubbornly insist that the requirements are contradictory and refuse to even
compile. But managers don't want to hear that, of course, so we go back to the
dumber languages that happily compile even so. This does not make the
requirements any less contradictory of course... it just means that the dumber
languages will let you blithely code on, and are guaranteed to do something
stupid at run time instead. Progress!

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protomyth
page 3:

"The current software generated too many nuisance warnings and resulted in
poor sensor performance. Further work on software had been slowed by testing
required to validate earlier fixes, the report said."

"It said Lockheed had delivered F-35 jets with 50 percent or less of the
software capabilities required by its production contracts with the Pentagon."

~~~
greyfade
Sounds like Lockheed needs to rethink its software development process. It has
clearly failed.

~~~
taspeotis
Whenever I read about software that needs to be perfect I think of this
article [1].

> But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What
> makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never
> crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is
> perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats :
> the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just
> one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17
> errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000
> errors.

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-
stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

~~~
Someone
But [http://defensetech.org/2013/05/24/congress-
orders-f-35-softw...](http://defensetech.org/2013/05/24/congress-
orders-f-35-software-plan/) claims over 10 billion lines. At 2.5 errors every
million lines, that ends up at 25.000 errors, if they can keep up that rate.

If that 10 billion is accurate (I can believe 10GB of binaries, but 10 billion
lines seems too much to me, even including support software), maybe the
project is too ambitious.

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datahipster
TIL that the $392 billion budget for the F-35 program could have funded NASA's
annual budget from 1992-2012.

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jasonwatkinspdx
There's both a RAND study and a wargame exercise that found the F-35 severely
lacking. You can read more here:
[http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/the-f-35s-air-to-air-
cap...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/the-f-35s-air-to-air-capability-
controversy-05089/)

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
These analyses seem to overlook the impact of MADL and multi-aircraft sensor
fusion. The fire on remote capability, meaning you have a fix on a target that
you haven't even detected yourself, plays out huge in stuff I've seen, and it
seems believable.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Unfortunately that's not an advantage unique to Blue side in this analysis.
The Su's have a networked co-operative radar as well. There are a few public
lectures you can watch from the designers if you like. Su in general favors
continuous upgrades of existing inventory so customers don't have to wait for
production of a new jet to field it either. They're quite confident in their
electronics gear, even to the point of claiming purely passive detection of
the F-22 at 50km.

Comparing feature bullet points is a pointless exercise. Neither of us being
an actual expert on this stuff (I assume), it's most reasonable to take the
pros at their word. Doubly so when they're being critical rather than cheer-
leading.

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001sky
The F35 procurement, would be a good sequel to this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA)

