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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."
Well, that's completely reasonable (note the sarcasm). It's insane to believe that we're even trying to withhold the code. I mean, would you buy a tv from a neighbor if they kept the remote? Chances are they'd hit the mute halfway through a Farscape rerun.
linky
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Gee, give us a few jets and we'll get right on writing Open Source Software for them...
Well after 1776 and 1812, can ya blame America for a little fail-safe? /tongue_in_cheek
Maybe they'll post it on Sourceforge ;)
More info about the Joint Strike Fighter's navigation software here.
"US Congress looking at cancelation(sic) of plans for a Rolls-Royce engine equiped(sic) version"
Not quite. There are two engine versions right now. The primary version, F135, is by Pratt-Whitney. It uses Rolls-Royce LiftFan (c) components for the F-35B STOVL. After the first several dozen engine/fan sets, GE was supposed to be able to bid with its F136, which has slightly greater RR partnership with the core turbojet and still uses RR LiftFan components. In other words ALL F-35B aircraft will use the LiftFan components.
RR gets a large slice of the engine pie regardless. It is just slightly larger with the possible GE participation. One of the ideas here is with a competitor's version as an option, there can be a bidding war in the taxpayers' favor.
And, until they mount bayonet lugs on the F-35B pitot tube, it won't really be a close ground support aircraft.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
Lockheed's chief scientist, Dr. Gaius Baltar, stated last Friday: "There is absolutely, I repeat, absolutely, no way that the Joint Strike Fighters could be shut down with a software instruction".
Probably because the US has an aggressive R&D program that routinely produces superior combat aircraft systems. In the case of Australia specifically, they also get access (being old steady allies) to really fancy avionics and electronics packages which have no peer in the world of weaponry. The airframes and powerplants are extremely good too.
The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design. The real selling point to countries like Australia is that they get more advanced versions of the software, electronics, and sensors -- the parts responsible for lethality and survivability to a very large extent -- which are one of the real strengths of US military R&D. The US will sell stripped down fighter jets to just about anyone, but they are very selective about the avionics as that is where the real capability lies in modern combat aviation. JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.
Australia buys US aircraft because the US is willing to sell it very advanced avionics and electronics for those aircraft. The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market, which for military purposes is pretty important, particularly if you are a non-populous country like Australia that cannot rely on quantity to make up the difference.
You can take an example from the commercial world - I worked for startups which had to put their source code in escrow as part of pilot agreements with Fortune-100 companies.
So I don't think it's unreasonable or even extra-ordinary for the Brits to want the source too. Just prudent.
The F-35 was designed from inception as an exportable combat aircraft. It is the replacement for the F16/F18, does not have all the features and capabilities of the F-22, and is intended to be "strippable". On the other hand, it is a lot cheaper than the F-22. It can properly be placed somewhere in between Cold War era combat jets (F14/F15/F16/F18) and the current state-of-the-art (F22).
As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today. The Russians are not producing anything better than western Europe these days, and are slipping further behind because they cannot afford to spend the kind of money required to keep up. A Sukhoi Flanker would be dead right around the time it even knew it was being engaged. The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.
While I understand why the F-35 was developed, it is kind of an ugly and unremarkable jet. It is still very capable, particularly with the smashing avionics/software the US can put in the thing, but was never designed to be the "ultimate" anything. Of course, the F16 has a similar history but turned out to be an extremely successful combat aircraft.
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.
When Finland bought F/A-18's from USA they were the top-of-the-line planes back then (and they are very, very good even today). Now, fighter-aircraft have a system which transmits data between the plane and the ground and integrates the plane in to the greater whole, and the Hornet is no exception. One of the first things we did was to rip the US-designed system out, and replaced it with a Finnish design, for the sole reason that the US system was just plain inferior.
Europe and their Eurofighter Typhoon? Like it or not, that is a VERY capable aircraft. F-22 might be a bit better, but F-22 also costs a lot more. And according to the only pilot that has actually flown both, they are neck and neck. He does say that F-22 has supercruise, but The Typhoon has it as well.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
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.
If you have to criticize the French, you should at least pick a different subject. Here is the beginning of the Wikipedia article -- and I can confirm most of it, since the cooperation described was well known in France at the time:
/.
French president François Mitterrand gave full support to the UK in the Falklands war. As a large part of Argentina's military equipment was French-made, French support was crucial. France provided aircraft, identical to the ones it supplied to Argentina, for British pilots to train against. France provided intelligence to help sabotage the Exocet missiles it sold to Argentina. In her memoirs Margaret Thatcher says of Mitterrand that "I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support...throughout the Falklands crisis". Sir John Nott, who was Secretary of State for Defence during the conflict later acknowledged: "In so many ways Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies".
Sad to see traditional knee-jerk anti-french feelings are alive and well on
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Look at a map for God's sake. Do you notice a large archipelago just over a narrow strait? A nation with 10 times the population of Australia that has invaded neighbours several times in my memory. They could ship troops over by the million without a strong air and naval capacity to stop them. If Muslim fundamentalists came into power it could get very hostile overnight, considering our PM has sent out trops into Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention putting tropps in East Timor when it seceded from Indonesia (that was the right thing to do, though it pissed off the Indonesians).
We are at peace with the Brits; We have always been at peace with the Brits. =)
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