UK Demands Sourcecode for Strike Fighters

An anonymous reader writes ""The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets" Lord Drayson, minister for defense procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be "switched off" by the Americans without warning."

Comments

Australia wants it too!

[narkotix]

linky

Re:Is that for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is for real. Unfortunately, the current administration seems to feel that it does not have to abide by its agreements in letter or in spirit. It's kind of the Darth Vader thing: "I'm altering our deal ... pray I do not alter it further."

This arguement with the UK has been stewing for sometime, and I think the UK is right to pull out. Canada is the only country with an ITAR waiver at present -- to the best of my knowledge. Since you can't *give* the Canadians weapons, it is a largely meaningless agreement in their case. And the Bush administration probably wouldn't give the software to the Canadians either (although they might hire them to help write it).

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Yaztromo]

Following years of exaggerated fears of Japanese hi-tech domination, Washington feared that this new fighter would be superior to anything that American companies could develop.

The history of the US doing this goes even further back than the 1980's. Well, at least as my grandfather told the story.

My maternal grandfather was a mechanic on the Avro Arrow project here in Canada, which, as the Wiki article quotes, was "...the biggest, most powerful, most expensive and potentially the fastest fighter that the world has yet seen...".

Now my grandfather was a consumate story teller, and certainly told his share which held dubious claims, but he had also done a number of remarkable things in his lifetime, and was long a very close follower of politics, so it was sometimes hard to differentiate between what was true, and what was just a good story.

Still, the way he told the tale, a major reason why Canada cancelled the Arrow program was due to pressure from the US, which didn't like the fact that Canada had developed a significantly more technologically advanced interceptor than the US contractors were able to develop. According to him, it was direct pressure on Ottawa from Washington to kill the project and instead buy a huge number of BOMARC missles from the US that brought on the end of the Arrrow programme.

Looking at the Wiki article, he may not have been that far off. The BOMARCs were purchased as soon as the Arrow programme was cancelled, and the US did pressure Ottawa to cancel the programme (although perhaps not for the reason Grampa cited). The engineering talent from Avro was quickly poached off by the US Government for the US space programme. Most experts believe that this single act set Canada's long advanced aerospace industry back by decades (during WWII, for example, it was a Canadian company that started making planes with standardized parts, so they could easily be interchanged).

Sadly, the BOMARCs were eventually phased out because they were expensive and completely ineffective. The Arrow could have been re-purposed, or even re-designed, but even this was not to be -- for reasons never explained, all of the plans for the Arrow were destroyed, alone with all of the working prototypes. The Canadian Government poured all of that money into the Arrow, and didn't even bother to store the blueprints for future use or defense research.

Whether it was my grandfathers "keep Canada down" conspiracy theory, the "interceptors aren't useful in the age of nuclear missles" official line, or a combination of the two, the end result has been the same: the BOMARCs sit in a warehouse in North Bay (last I heard at least...", the great bulk of which were copletely faulty and worthless, and we lost a symbol of national pride, and perhaps worst of all, lost some of the greatest brains behind our aerospace industry of the 1950's that put us at the forefront of aerospace research.

As an interesting aside, some years ago my grandfather showed me the some of tthe specially designed tools that were created to work on the Avro Arrow which he kept in his garage. He passed away nearly 5 years ago, and I have never been able to find out what happened to those tools (and am not sure if I could identify them anyhow -- the one I remember looked like a long piece of metal rod with a hook on the end, which could be easily confused with any number of metal rods he had in his workshop). If they could be identified and separated from the rest of his old tools and bits and pieces from over the years, they probably belong in a museum somewhere (heck, so far as I know, the rods he told me were "tools" could very well have been "parts", such as control rods of one sort or another).

Yaz.

Similarly, the TSR-2

[MROD]

In the 1960's pressure from the US caused the cancellation of the british TSR-2 programme. The government cancelled the TSR-2 and ordered F-111's.. which were then cancelled a few years down the line. A total fiasco.

Similarly, all the plans and prototypes for the TSR-2 were destroyed.

Re:Similarly, the TSR-2

[Mutatis Mutandis]

This was at a time when the development programmes for advanced combat aircraft (and other military equipment) were successfully expanding into truly phenomenal cost overruns. The TSR-2 development cost estimates first doubled, and then tripled. The F-111 was so attractive to the UK government because its estimated unit price was about half of that of a TSR.2.

Of course, the UK had no monopoly on cost overruns, and McNamara's pet project went through the financial roof as well. The F-111 became even more expensive than the TSR.2 would have been. The TFX project that produced the F-111 tried to be all things to all people, actually rather similar to today's JSF project, and predictably it failed to do that. (You can easily guess my opinion of the JSF project.) The F-111B version for the US Navy was cancelled outright.

Besides, both the TSR.2 and TFX projects were arguably too far ahead of their time. The F-111 did not become a really effective combat aircraft before its first generation of pilots had retired, and its fragile 1960s electronic systems replaced by more modern and reliable ones. There is every reason to assume that TSR.2 would have suffered from the same problem.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we should harken back to the mid 1940's when the British were developing a jet engined plane to exceed Mach 1... Washington suggested a joint venture, and Britain agreed. Once Britain had sent them all their research and plans Washington decided it'd didn't want to do a joint venture anymore, but thanks for doing all the research. Then followed by chuck yeager breaking the sound barrier in a plane that looked strangely like the British one.