Is the $400 Billion F-35's 'Brain' Broken? (cnn.com)

Zachary Cohen, reporting for CNN News: Almost 2,500 of the world's most advanced warplanes, with a total price tag of $400 billion, and they may not have a "brain" in the bunch? That's the fear of federal watchdogs who say problems with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's complex logistics software system could lead to a grounding of the entire fleet, not to mention future cost increases and schedule delays. Documenting risks to the F-35's Autonomic Logistics Information System, which Department of Defense officials have described as the "brains" of the fifth-generation fighter, an April 14 Government Accountability Office report says a failure "could take the entire fleet offline," (PDF) in part, due to the lack of a backup system. The report also outlines concerns related to the lack of testing done to ensure the software will work properly by the time the Air Force plans to declare its version of the aircraft ready for deployment this August and the Navy reaches that milestone in 2018. The Marine Corps declared the first squadron of its F-35 variant ready for combat in July 2015, with the intention of upgrading and resolving the software issues before its first planned deployment in 2017.

Comments

giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how that isn't clear to everyone by now.

Re:giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle

[msauve]

The US spends more on the military than the next 12 countries combined . Those who want a strong military would do better to make them more efficient in their spending, rather than increasing it. And, the US military budget could easily be cut in half without losing a bit of security against the current bogeyman.

Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, and he was right. The national debt is a greater threat to the country than any foreign foe.

Re:giant boondoggle is giant boondoggle

[Anonymous Coward]

We are past that point by a couple of years.
The reason it's still around is all the pork.

Ground Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Brains? ALIS is ground support diagnostics software for use by maintenance techs. It's not even needed to fly the aircraft. This is the least of the F-35's problems.

Re:Back in the 20th century when it began

[bjwest]

I work with USAF pilots, and in fact am sitting right now in the Current Ops of a major AF base. Fact: no officer coming out of pilot school wants drones. None.

You're either lying, or we're in one hell of a state of insecurity. When I was in the Navy, in our secret and above areas we weren't allowed to have cell phones or even pagers, and there sure as hell wasn't internet access in there. If you are sitting in a Current Ops center accessing the internet, thanks for possibly helping breach our national security.

Re:Back in the 20th century when it began

[ColdWetDog]

Shhhh. His basement is whatever he wants it to be.

Don't mess up his day.

Re:Nothing but a scam.

[Fallen Kell]

Actually you were more right the first time when saying the problem was created by Congress. It isn't the industry's fault at all and certainly isn't the CEO's faults. Congress said thou shalt build one plane to rule them all. One plane to find them, one plane to bring them all in and in the darkness bind them.

The industry is simply bidding on the contracts that Congress is making. And in this case, then dealing with all the feature creep that Congress has caused by telling the Air Force, Navy, and Marines that they all need to use this one plane to replace all their existing needs.... There was a reason we had specialized planes for specialized purposes. A plane that is carrying several tons of bombs will not do so well when having to dog fight against other planes. A plane that has VTOL capability will have a lot of space taken up by all the extra power plant requirements needed for having enough thrust to lift straight off the ground and/or hover for landing. A plane that has short, foldable wings to be able to fit more onto an aircraft carrier will have more structural drawbacks than airframes that do not have foldable wings.

It is all the feature creep to make a single plane that does everything which is the problem. Don't blame the industry. The industry didn't invent these requirements. Someone who has zero technical ability said to someone else wouldn't it be great if all our planes were the same because then we could save on maintenance and training costs because it is all the same platform, and a bunch of other people which no technical ability looked at the numbers for projected cost savings over the lifetime of the airplanes and said yes, that would save money. But none of those people looked at the technical challenges and costs involved in engineering a single plane that could do everything that 5-6 existing planes do when they said replace all those existing planes with just a single one which does all the same roles that those other planes could do, only better...

Getting Desperate

[inhuman_4]

These F-35 FUD writers are getting desperate.

They call it the "brains" of the plane. It isn't. The brains are the sensor fusion computers. This is the Autonomic Logistics Information System. Key word: Logistics. It's a maintenance system. They say the whole program is a failure because the fancy maintenance system could ground the fleet. Except most of the USAF flies just fine without this type of system. Oh, and the problem isn't that it doesn't work, it is working. It's that it hasn't been thoroughly tested. Why? Because it's still in testing. Then they complain that there is no backup system if it doesn't work.

So they cry that the program is too expensive. Then cry some more because there is no redundant replacement for a non-critical system. Of course if there were a backup system they would be complaining that the program spent millions on duplicated efforts. It's just stupid.