this here is one of those 'not sure if i should laugh or cry' links:
the most advanced fighter in the world ... was able to rack up an impressive 241-to-2 kill ratio [during war-games] ... [but] was felled by the International Date Line (IDL) ...
When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to "reboot" the systems to no avail ... the Raptors had their refueling tankers as guide dogs to "carry" them back to safety ... They had no communications or navigation
summarized pseudo misquote: "aircraft which cost $125+ million USD apiece were [disabled by] a few lines of computer code"
the F22 IDL story made me wonder if the F/A-18G that 'killed' an F-22 was able to do so particularly because of electronic warfare capabilities...? no idea, but i'd love to ask that Grizzly driver ;)
there might be a couple of take-aways here...
#1 - increasing reliance on critical computerized systems which are not backed by redundant systems and are fragile will present significant new risks. think about the F-22 design philosophy versus my favorite airborne weapons platform: the hawg!
the A-10 has "triple redundancy in its flight systems, with mechanical systems to back up double-redundant hydraulic systems ... [and] is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator and half a wing torn off." you don't have to google far on the A-10 to find a variety of stories about how well it performs under the stress of combat operations. reportedly, "the 165 Warthogs that flew in Desert Storm [had a] 95.7% mission capable rate ... the highest sortie rate of any USAF aircraft ... [while] roughly half of the total A-10 force supporting Desert Storm suffered some type of battle damage ... [just] five A-10s were lost in action".
yes, physical survivability is very different than electron system fragility, but there may be parallels. if the F-22 is tough to target with traditional weapon systems, maybe a better approach is a big ass radio antenna and a decent fuzzer ;)
#2 - highly homogeneous systems deployed into production can fail spectacularly. relatively survivable critical systems like DNS root servers are deployed on varying hardware and software to avoid this issue. once the JSF becomes the mainstay fighter of western nations, then a similar 'vulnerability' could theoretically disable entire air forces. don't worry, all JSF code is written in C++ (wikipedia) so there won't be *any* software induced failure points... lulz...
ps: speaking of crappy code and fragile software, i recently discovered that the back-end of sslvis is b0rked. i'll be getting it fixed up, getting features added to the back-end, and moving it out of beta as soon as i can... sorry!!
