Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line – DailyTech.com
Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor is the most advanced fighter in the world with its stealth capabilities, advanced radar, state of the art weapons systems and ultra-efficient turbofans which allow the F-22 to “super-cruise” at supersonic speeds without an afterburner. The Raptor has gone up against the best that the US Air Force and Navy has to offer taking out F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18 Super Hornets during simulated war games in Alaska. The Raptor-led “Blue Air” team was able to rack up an impressive 241-to-2 kill ratio during the exercise against the “Red Air” threat — the two kills on the blue team were from the 30-year old F-15 teammates and not the new Raptors.
But while the simulated war games were a somewhat easy feat for the Raptor, something more mundane was able to cripple six aircraft on a 12 to 15 hours flight from Hawaii to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The U.S. Air Force’s mighty Raptor was felled by the International Date Line (IDL).
When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, all of their computer systems crashed. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to “reboot” the systems to no avail.
“It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes.”
Can you imagine the terror of seeing a BSOD image on the screens of a multimillion dollar fighter?
Good thing they caught before it was in combat. They could fix the bugs faster if they open sourced the software … lol.
reminds me of a story from several years ago. a Navy destroyer was dead in the water after an error code(it attempted to divide by zero) froze everything.
I
Imagine when something like this happens to the Airbus A380. At least these fighter pilots have ejection seats.
PhDs should be working on such advanced and important technology. And if you have a PhD you are to be such an expert at your field that you do not make these type of mistakes.
Remember when NASA lost a Mars orbiter? Well that was because NASA used the metric system and Lockheed Martin (hmm) was using the English system.
Pretty rediculous
4. You can’t be serious. PhDs don’t know how to program. They just know how to theorize.It was PhDs that lost the Mars Rover in the first place
Yup, the BSOD at 45,000 ft. Just pull ‘er over to the curb and check it out.
Jeez – is there such a thing as a magnetic pulse cannon? I can’t always keep comic book weaponry separate in my mind from the real military stuff. Maybe it’s because the same mentality creates them both. But if there is magnetic pulse weaponry, it would seem these planes could be swatted from the combat area left and right by any well equipped opponent. Hope they have good manual override systems.
I have a gut feeling that this isn’t a real story. I know there is a concept of local time, but I would guess that all military subsystems working on some kind of coordinated time (GMT?) throughout the world. And I know that the Global Positioning System works on a coordinated time, without any regard for the concept of local time (how could it?).
So the only basis for a problem like this would be some kind of conversion of the GPS time and location symbol to a local time and date, which really doesn’t make any sense in embedded type hardware, something the military suppliers probably learned many, many years ago.
Fricken Vista!
#8,
EMP weapons exist, and they are painfully simple to build. A weaponized version would be harder though.
first you make a big coil of copper. You connect one end of it to an antenna that can support the wattage and spread profile you want to emit. Then at the entrance to the coil you put the biggest rare earth magnet you can afford. when you detonate the emp bomb, you use a shaped charge to fire rare earth magnet down the coil.
Bzzzat!
Big old lightning bolt fires out of the antenna with a similar energy profile to the explosive you used. If you used a couple of hundred lbs of explosive, you are in the gigawatt range of pulse, about like the EMP pulse from a close by lightning strike. Wipes out unhardened equipment for hundreds of feet around. Use the same technique on a nuclear bomb scale device, and it is like you microwave everyone within a few hundred miles for a couple of seconds. Unhardened equipment, cars, desktop computers, pace makers, are wiped out for thousands of miles.
There was a proposal to use such devices (nuclear) back in the 80’s to power giant xray lasers to burn out the hardened electronics in boost phase ICBMs. The ideas around emp warfare were scrapped though because the country most vulnerable to emp warefare is the USA.
After they fix that bug, they can get to work on the day-light savings time bug.
It was because they upgraded their Version of OSX and realized that NONE of the applications installed on the computer were compatible with the “new & improved” OSX.
#2 – Yup…Good old NT 4.0 crashed an entire naval ship. If I remember correctly, it was even one of the new Aegis cruisers, the USS Yorktown.
Press Fire-Break-Flare to reboot.
#10 executed that joke much better than #13.
#5
The context of #1’s message appears such that it was intentional sarcasm juxtapositioning open source being quicker to fix against the backdrop of a secret fighter.
for some ODD reason,
we have to retrain Programmers, about the BASICS every 10 years..
Even when the Older programmers(I DONT THINK SO) should have explained ALL the new programming…
What is scarier is the thought of them running Microsoft on a multi-million dollar fighter jet. Un-fucking-believable!
In reading about the Abramoft/DeLay/KStreet GIANT FLEECING of we taxpayers, it becomes obvious that software is one of the best and easiest way to rip off the government.
For starters, congressmen (like, let’s say Ted Stevens) have absolutely know idea what they are buying and why. But they will pay millions for it.
Second, the government never uses off-the-shelf stuff — it all needs to be written new — but they have no idea if you cobbled it together using old and found crap by workers in India earning $3.25 an hour.
Lastly, if your program is a useless piece of junk, Congress just wants to sweep their bad purchasing decision under the rug. They’ll even pay your cost-overruns to make you go away.
They should make these DeVry programmers test fly the plane with their code before releasing. That way only non Darwin Award winner would write code.
What does International Date Line (IDL) have to do with the physics of mission critical systems, the controlling aerodynamic surfaces and such, nothing.
What idiot would write code that would interfere mission critical program flow with non-mission critical International Date Line (IDL) stamps.
Some idiot probably wrote code to enforce a preventive maintenance activity due on a given date time, by force grounding the plane. Or some communication requiring a date time stamp, again a non mission critical system.
21,
Agreed….WHICH IS REDICULOUS
Imagine when something like this happens to the Airbus A380.
The A380 has highly redundant systems plus mechanical/hydraulic backups, as do all commercial aircraft. It’s unlikely to undergo a failure like this. I would have thought these fighters would have redundant systems too – maybe they were left out to save weight?
Why National Defense doesn’t use Microsoft support……….
Ground Control: Top Gun, please come in TG. Hello?
Top Gun: I read you GC. Our instrument screens have all gone blue. It says we have an error 81AA3392a. Help
GC: Sounds like a BSOD TG. You are going to have to reboot.
TG: Huh!!!! What the %$%#$ are you talking about. How do I do that.
GC: No problem. First hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys, then hit the Del key
TG:Errr, GC, I don’t seem to have those keys on my dashboard. Aren’t those normally found on a keyboard???
GC: …..
GC: OK, sounds like we have to do a cold reboot. Can you unplug it from the wall?? …………………………………………………..