Slashdot Mirror
Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight
mgh02114 writes "The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet." The Peoples Daily of China reported on Feb. 17 that two Raptors had landed on Okinawa.
The F-22 can carry the standard USAF air delivered nuclear weapon as maintained within the US military arsenal today, either one internal or two external. The radiation from the weapons has no effect on the stealth, either before or after detonation (the stealth capability involved is an advanced form of that used on the B-2 and B-1B bombers, both of which were at their inception designed to be purely nuclear armed bombers).
When I worked at a high end civilian GPS equipment manufacturer, we had a test department where, among other things, a complete list of "special" dates and locations were kept on file. Any new position solution software release was regression tested against all previously known and guessed potential date/time rollovers, as well as making sure that motion across geographic coordinate boundaries didn't cause erratic behavior. Obviously whoever supplied the inertial navigation solution for the F22 hasn't quite gotten there yet... Testing in the lab is cheap. Burning a couple of tons of Jet-A and putting a bunch of people at risk is not.
Less is more.
The F-22 has a fly-by-wire control system. If there really were a crash of ALL on-board computer systems, communication and navigation would not have been the most immediate concerns!
Well, whatever the issue - which is probably something similar to what you suspect - it's now fixed. Here's the transcript from CNN this morning. Since the F-22 is fly-by-wire, it's also worth pointing out that all systems didn't crash, else these F-22s would be sitting in the Pacific. I've no doubt it affected navigation, communications, and similar subsystems, and was probably related to physical location in terms of time, position over the Earth, or both, given the nature of the issue.
>> 25 Years from development to deployment, the F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighting machine in the air. It was no match for a computer glitch that left six of them high above the pacific ocean, deaf, dumb, and blind as they headed to their first deployment. So what happened? We turn to a man that's at home in the cockpit. Retired Air Force General Don Shepperd. Let me set the scene, Don. These F-22s, headed from the Air Force base in Hawaii to an Air Force base in Japan. They were approaching the international date line, pick it up from there.
>> You got it right. You want everything to go right with the frontline fighter. $125, 135 Million a copy. The F-22 raptor is our frontline fighter, air defense, air superiority, and it can drop bombs. It is stealthy and fast. You want it to go right. On the international deployment to the pacific, it didn't. At the international date line, whoops. All systems dumped. When i say all systems I mean all systems, navigation, part of the communications, fuel systems, and they were -- they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers -- tried to reset their systems. Couldn't get them reset. Tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. Certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. Turned out okay. Fixed in 48 hours. It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code; somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes.
>> This is almost like the feared Y2K problem that happened to these aircraft. We should point out, the computer problems in 2000. The computers absolutely went absolutely haywire and became useless?
>> Absolutely. When you think of airplanes from the old days, with cables and that type of thing and connects between the sticks and the yokes and the controls -- not that way anymore. Everything is by computer. When your computers go the airplanes go. You have multiple systems. When they all dump at the same time, you can be in real trouble. Luckily this turned out okay.
>> What would have happened if these brand-new $120 million F-22s had been going into battle?
>> You would have been in real trouble in the middle of combat. The good thing is we found this out. Any time -- before, you know, before we get into combat with an airplane like this. Any time you introduce a new airplane, you are going to find glitches, and you are going to find things that go wrong. It happens in our civilian airliners. You don't hear much about it. These things absolutely happen. And luckily had time we found out about it before combat. We got it fixed with tiger teams in about 48 hours and the airplanes were flying again, and completed the deployment. This could have been real serious in combat.
>> You had these advanced air -- not just superiority but air supremacy fighters in there, up there in the air, above the Pacific Ocean, not much more sophisticated than a Cessna 152 with a jet engine?
>> You got it. They are on a 15-hour flight from Hawaii to Okinawa. When all their systems dumped, they needed help. Had they gotten separated from their tankers or weather gotten bad they had no reference and no communications or navigation. They would have turned around and could have found the Hawaiian Islands. If the weather had been bad on approach there could have been real trouble. You get refueling from your tankers and you don't run -- you don't get yourself where you run out of fuel. You
The Shuttle does indeed have two sets of flight software, Primary Avionics Systems Software (PASS), and Backup Flight System (BFS). During critical phases of flight, PASS is loaded on four of the GPCs and BFS is loaded on the fifth. BFS doesn't have all the capabilities of PASS - it is intended to take over in case of an emergency.