Shot Down By The Hidden Flaw

[ErnstBlofeld]

The Strategy Page:

The U.S. Air Force is facing growing problems with software reliability for aircraft. This is largely the result of so much more software being used to operate these airplanes. For example, flight testing of the F-35 was halted on October 1st, so that the software could be fixed. It was believed that a software error was causing fuel pumps to malfunction. The F-35 source code comprises about 8 million lines of code (a file about two gigabytes in size, that could easily fit on a thumb drive). Most modern PC operating systems have source code ten or more times as large, but PC bugs don't cause a $100 million aircraft to crash. Creating flawless software is very difficult, and expensive. It gets more complicated as the amount of software involved increases. This is an aircraft vulnerability that gets little media attention, yet it is very much present, and a growing threat at that.
Then there's the security risks. The contractors who created the F-35 software, did not let the source code anywhere near the Internet, to insure that Chinese hackers did not grab it. But this software is only valuable if it works. In terms of software, the F-35 is more advanced than the F-22, and has three times as much source code, and even more chances of something going wrong. Source code is the plain text version of the code that is written by programmers, and then turned into the 0s and 1s by a compiler program so that it can operate inside the dozens of microprocessors inside the aircraft.