This Doesn't Look Good: F-35B Operational Test Doc Leak

Of course the test was partly a PR exercise, otherwise it wouldn't have been reported so widely and footage distributed to all of the media agencies.

When I read comments like this "If the most expensive weapons system in history can’t even get off the ground often enough to train pilots adequately, then all the money spent on it has been wasted." I'm sorry but I just tune out.

That type of rhetoric is absolute rubbish and just points to sensationalist cheap journalism.

The report itself was not exactly easy reading for anyone involved in the program, but that was more due to the hype released by the marine corps than the actual results.

And of course Lockheed made sure everyone was alert during a highly publicised test of their (currently) most high profile project, can you imagine the flack FA and WIB would be giving them if they weren't and something went wrong. You just can't win.

This is a more a shame for Tyler and the reporter at WIB and the Marine Corps than it is F-35

Cheers
Robbie

a reply to: Maxatoria

I'm not so sure. The 787 software was ready on first purchase. A civilian air carrier would never book a passenger until it was assured all the code had been vetted and tested. I know you'll all go quote the articles about the power glitches now....but the truth is a lot of this can be done in simulator, the software doesn't need brick and mortal test results to operate properly. In fact the software doesn't even know if it's flying a sim or the real thing.

They can throw far more combat and non-combat situation at the sim than a single F-35 will ever see in its lifetime to properly flush out bugs in the software. How backwards would it be if they needed to fly the thing every time just to check if it worked.

What I'm saying is that is the software development team that is holding back this project. The aero engineers did a damn fine job creating a transforming bird, its the other half of the team thats slacking. Could you imagine if AA was told by BA, here is the aircraft you ordered and paid for, go a head fill it with people, but you won't be able to land in a crosswind until we release the block 3 software in 4 years.

This is essentially what the DoD has been told.

a reply to: aholic

Because they chose to go that route. Their choice was to go with software released in blocks, and get the program going, then upgrade as they went, or wait until the software was done (and it makes the 787 software look like a calculator) and delay testing until then.

a reply to: aholic

any physical modification to the plane will need to be refered back to the software guys and even changing something simple could mean they need to change their approach and this is before we get into the brasses wish list that probably increases every day which may involve many changes under the hood so to speak meaning that you just got the machine gun sorted but now they'd decided to alter it slightly you need to cater for the fact and then actually get someone out at a test bed to actually see if it works and sims only have so much use as if it jamms due to a production problem the only way of finding it is to test it

a reply to: Maxatoria

Makes sense to me. I just wonder if we're becoming over reliant on software.