WhiteOvies
The problem of concurrency is raising its head again, there was a post saying that the F35 had reached 10,000 hours, just recently I think I saw a post saying the Rafale had reached 100,000 hours.
As I see it the F35 has a number of hurdles to climb, vault or indeed fly over before it gets to the configuration that it was initially promised as minimum war fighting configuration, 3f software.
The F35B at least has problems with stress in some of the spars, that as far as I am aware have not been sorted with a new light weight alloy.
To achieve a platform that the 3f software can run on there has to be a technical refresh of the systems in the plane, this I understand to mean take the plane back to the depot strip it down and put a new loom and set of processors in, then run a whole raft of acceptance tests again.
There are still as I understand it issues with regard to how much G any of the F35s can be taken to at the moment.
There is the tail hook issue with the F35C.
The helmet that is meant to be central to the data fusion has yet to be proven of course I do notice that the back-up plan for the BAE helmet has just been shelved.
I am not against testing and developing the planes at all, it needs to be done, I was just questioning if all this flying, not necessarily done by test pilots was adding value to the programme.
As I see it at the moment, the flight envelope for the plane is uncertain and unproven, the software running it is very much Beta release, so will not necessarily have the touch and feel of the planned or actual initial war fighting software, so why train top grade line pilots to fly a plan that will change a lot prior to being declared ready for service?
In a similar vein, I would have thought that the test equipment required to analyse the post tech refresh F35s will be rather different, Moore’s Law etc, from that designed to be ready for service 5 or more years ago, not quite the difference between setting the ignition on a 1960’s motorcycle with a fag paper and a stick as compared with a modern ECU equipped machine but somewhere along that continuum.
I do understand that the concurrency that everyone bought into is why the programme is where it is, I do also understand that unlike is it the Dutch Government that has one of its planes in storage, the Pentagon wants to show some progress with the project as it is such a large part of its budget.
I have noticed the recent reports about the physical construction process of the F35, that paint a far from rosy picture, as well as the reports of supply chain problems with “old” technology, what does concern me is the software, it always seems to be late, nothing unusual in itself however do we know if any of the V2 or V3i software releases will work on the post technical refresh planes, or will these be built and then stored till the software is released?
To reiterate, the testing and development needs to be done and concurrency has resulted in a number of planes being delivered to the services and other countries that will need deep level maintenance to bring them up to the advertised capability, as adjusted.