Source: Lockheed Martin.
David Axe, Daily Beast: World’s Most Expensive Jet Somehow Gets Worse
Forget the sonic boom—the U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter just hit massive turbulence that could delay its release yet again.
The U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter is again falling behind schedule in its 16-year, $60 billion development. The problem this time—the radar-evading plane’s 8 million lines of computer code, amounting to arguably the most complex software suite ever installed on a warplane.
The code delay is the latest—and possibly most damaging—setback for the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial plan to replace almost all of its Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighters with three different versions of the F-35 at a cost of more than a trillion dollars over the next 50 years.
Damaging, because the military and F-35-maker Lockheed Martin have increasingly sold the F-35 as a sort of “flying computer” whose software can outthink enemy pilots even when the enemy’s own planes fly faster, maneuver better and carry more weaponry than the F-35 does.
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WNU Editor: The F-35's computer coding problems is something that has been raised for the past year ....so it is old news. But what caught my eye was this report from Bloomberg .... The U.S. May Build 500 Jets Before Finding Out If the F-35 Works (Bloomberg).
