Although Canada is spending more than $500-million on the development of an American-built stealth fighter and is considering earmarking billions of dollars more to purchase the planes, the United States will not be sharing key software needed to maintain the jets.
The Canadian military is considering buying the Joint Strike Fighter, a deal that could cost between $3.8-billion and $10-billion, depending on which estimate the Defence Department uses.
But Pentagon officials say no country involved in the development of the aircraft will be given access to the software codes that are key to the high-tech plane’s electronic systems. Without that information, Canada will not able to maintain or upgrade the aircraft in the future without U.S. help. The codes control most systems on the plane, ranging from weapons to radar and flight performance.
A fight over the availability of the information has been brewing between the United States and Britain, which has threatened to cancel its order for 138 of the planes unless it can maintain and upgrade the aircraft on its own.
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I suspect that there’ ll be more raison d’etre behind the U.S.’s decision than the ever anxious to engage in American bashing LSM is going to have access to. I’m quite happy at this point to take our DND’s word on this over that of any respresentative of the disgraced and discredited LSM. Let’s not pick up our toys from the sandbox and go stomping off in a huff for home just yet.
Perhaps its time to look elsewhere to purchase our fighter planes. Or go back to making our own like the fabulous Avro Arrow. A project cancelled by the Diefenbaker Conservative Government.
A safety-and-trust situation where all 3 viewpoints are 100% correct.
But why would this known issue come up, again, today? Oh, it’s a public relations deflection to do with Britain’s inquiry into their military failures in Iraq? And the embarrassing – Why can’t Britain’s military fly their Chinook helicopters?
We’ll see a lot of these Britain-military-fail spin-doctor items in the next few weeks. Remember – PERCEPTION RULES!
A minor example. Tories BAD because they spent $20M holding group meetings in RESORTS! It doesn’t matter that an out-of-season resort is less than half the cost of meeting in a metropolitan area. It doesn’t matter that those $20M meeting are now going to cost the taxpayers $50M, there’s no headline there.
I’m not very excited about this. We’ll work it out.
@Jack: Work it out?
…. it’s more likely we’ll do what we’re told.
Just like doing ‘what we were told to do’ with the unpopular U.S./Canada ‘Soft wood’ agreement during Bush Jr’s watch, even during the second go-around negotiations which obviously to this day, favors the Americans.
No Jack. Trust me, this IS serious. Not only the Brits, but the Aussies are very unhappy with the project. Software support is a major problem for all new hi-tech systems, and what we have here is the US government (not necessarily the contractors) telling everyone “don’t worry, you’re going to love this”. Fat chance.
This aircraft is being marketed at just about anybody that is capable of signing a cheque, not just the famous “four” (UK, US, Canada, Australia). Turks, Greeks, Japanese, – everyone and anyone. Now, if everybody is standing in line to get software fixes or updates, and there is only one place producing, who gets priority? And if you have secret data that you think is important are you willing to share with everyone (HINT: A definition of “NATO SECRETS” is the Greeks putting something in a database that they don’t mind the Turks seeing – in other words pretty dilute stuff).
To top it off, the aircraft has some dietary issues to work through. Basic aerodynamics states “if lift plus thrust is greater than weight plus drag even a brick can fly”. In this case the engine thrust is well below the weight, which means that lift becomes far more critical. Earlier “teen series” (F-16, F-18, etc) had a better than 1:1 thrust to weight ratio.
There will be issues down line and it will get ugly.
raison d’etre …
(1) The National Militarises want to ensure there is not code that says – IF you are owned by Country-A AND you receive this signal THEN fall out of the sky.
(2) The Top-Secret group doesn’t want the action-reaction code known by their enemy – IF a missile is coming from Direction-A THEN turn left (where another missile is loitering). Combat pilots have great multi-tasking skills (Bush) and fast reaction times (Bush-shoe); but are way, way too slow in a multi-threat environment.
(3) The Manufacturer doesn’t want their flight code changed – it’s embarrassing when an un-tested and un-simulated code change causes the plane to fall out of the sky. And sure screws up future sales even when it’s an unauthorized user-modification. Like the Brits are trying to do with their Chinooks.
(4) The Security group wants code upgrades compiled – tested – simulated in a central location. The code is written in the high-level Alda language which is then compiled ( one line of code = thousands of computer instructions [there's not 8M lines-of-code, but easily 8M computer instructions]). The Alda compiler is public. So, IF Country-A does their own compiling, AND their Alda compiler has been “modified” THEN … well you get the general picture.
LSM? M for Media, L for Lying, S for … Oh! **snort**
I don’t see why this would be a problem. All of the upgrades that have been required by our current CF-18 fighters have been engineered and handled by Boeing since its merger with McDonnell Douglas, so it isn’t like Canada’s military even has the expertise in place to start playing around with the Joint Strike Fighter’s source code. It is completely normal for end customers not to get the source code for the products they purchase because it is a protected corporate or state secret worth far more than the product itself. This is the same reason that Canada blocked the sale of RADARSAT-2 technology to the US firm Alliant Techsystems Inc., on National Security grounds, after spending $525-million Canadian taxpayer dollars developing it. The US government and Lockheed Martin have to protect the JSF’s source code after spending hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars developing it, most particularly from China and Russia who could use the source code to develop counter measures that render the aircraft and investment useless, or competing aircraft for a small fraction of the real cost.
RE #9: Not quite true Brian. Granted, hardware, flight control software, and some radar work is done by Boeing, but mission computers and the EW kit (as two examples) are maintained and updated in Canada (Bombardier and the CF respectively). If all software support is done by Lockheed in the states say goodbye to quite a few well paying jobs in Mirabel (see where this is going?).
But, sticking with the purely tech-weenie things (I’ll leave deep conspiracies to others) Lindsay raises a valid point in post #8. If you remember back at the Air France crash we carried on a discussion of systems integration testing, and how seemingly unrelated things can impact each other. The third point Lindsay raises is another view on this issue. In the old days (1980 – 90) each system had it’s own computer, with very little interaction. But even then integration testing uncovered subtle little “gotchas”, such as when the landing gear was raised (in a simulator fortunately) all of the weapons were jettisoned (a minor glitch – trust me!)! Nowadays, all computers are incredibly tightly integrated, which might be considered a good thing, but it also means that the integration testing requirements have increased exponentially. Imagine having to prove that changing the frequency on the radio does not command your engine to shutdown in flight (no, I’m NOT making that up). Now imagine having to even try and figure out all the other neat and interesting ways that all this software can possibly kill you.
Still with me? Good. For the next mental exercise, imagine that you have the Royal Airforce shelling out billions for this aircraft, and it’s all money going out of the country cause you can’t put your countries product on the aircraft. The urge will be irresistible to politicians to demand that their products be included when they buy the aircraft. Now the poor bloody systems integrator has to worry about the ENTIRE test program all over again. And then the Israelis want their systems on their birds, etc, etc.
But if you only have ONE source, and nine countries wanting to integration their own products, who gets priority? The Brits, because they’ve ponied up the most money? Canada, because the US wants us to stay in Afghanistan? Or perhaps Turkey, because Obama wants to show he’s friendly to the middle east? Who decides?
Software support on this project is going to be a nightmare.
I always wondered how you ended up with duplicate posts. Now I know. Slow internet and no patience.
Sorry Jack
It’s OK. F-22 anyone?
Export sale of the F-22 is barred by American federal law, so only the F-35 (Joint Strike Fighter), which shares much of the same technology, will be available for purchase by us foreigners. Releasing the source code could also defeat the entire purpose of the Joint Strike Fighter program, which was to avoid too many variants by replacing several disparate U.S. and UK aircraft with a single family of multipurpose aircraft, but I base my speculation about the problem stemming from Canada and the UK’s complete failure to deal with Chinese industrial espionage on the fact that Britain has had trouble obtaining International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) wavers, required for the transfer of sensitive technology from the US government, for this very reason.
I could be wrong; but I think the F-22 is just a JSF test-bed and is only going to actual semi-production so money is spent now in powerful senatorial (D) areas that need votes. Hey, the Japanese agreed last week to buy some – because they need something now. And this overrides any US Law.
I wonder how that EuroFighter project is working out? I haven’t heard much lately – I bet some Euro Provinces are p*ssed at the Brits for using the F-35 to spin doctor the Brit’s military supervisory errors.
Back on subject – I didn’t see any mention that a country’s programmers and technicians could not go to the super-secure site do the code-test-simulate-install of their own routines into their own aircraft. This will probably be allowed in the contracts.
Sorry Lindsay: The F-22 was a separate (and much more capable) air superiority fighter, rather than the “Jack of all trades” F-35. Interesting test story on the 22, they were testing the canopy one day at Edwards AFB. Just repeatedly opening and closing the lid. Unfortunately the pilot sort of double-hit the canopy switch, which caused what is known as an “unknown state” (wouldn’t close fully, wouldn’t open enough to let the guy out). No air conditioning because the engines weren’t running, and the poor devil hat to sit in the cockpit for 6 hours until they decided that the only thing to do was cut open the $200,000 canopy . Last year the USAF had the first F-22 deployment to Japan. They got as far as Hawaii and had to turn back – their navigation software couldn’t handle the international date line … Ah, fun times had by all.
Eurofighter (Typhoon) is doing OK, but again it is strictly an air to air fighter, no air to ground capability to speak of. Which is why the Brits are counting on the F-35 to replace the Harrier (getting old and hard to maintain).
The reason F-35 is so attractive (at first look) is that it is being sold as all things to all people. It’s a strike fighter (little air-air, lots of air-ground), that has a vertical take-off and landing variant (to replace Harriers).
Brian: The Chinese are suspected of compromising the F-35 design computers (Defense Industry daily News about 8 months ago), but it was probably via the Turkish Air force component of the design team. But you are correct about countries wanting to buy the F-22 over the F-35 (Aussies, Japanese and Israel) but the US refuses to sell them (partly in fear that it will cripple the F-35 market). Britain is supposed to have a favoured nation exemption to most ITAR restrictins, but fat lot of good that’s doing them.