Hearings by Senate committees and the House of Representatives in the United States are, very often, an opportunity to learn certain crucial information regarding the development of current programs. But this year, it seems that the flagship program of the 2010s, the F35, is under a continuous flow of criticism and doubts, to the point that we are coming to question the very sustainability of the program in the short or medium term. term. The latest shocking announcement came from Raymond O'Toole Jr, the Pentagon's acting director of Operational Tests and Evaluations, when asked about the new version of the Lockheed-Martin device, designated Block 4, and which must allow the aircraft to reach a first level of full operational potential.
However, according to Raymond O'Toole Jr, the task is much more difficult and complex than expected. Indeed, if the program plans to implement every six months a new version of the software package which powers and implements all of the F35's systems, each new version arrives with a very large number of problems , to the point of making the the entire system is unstable, and alters the proper functioning of existing systems. The problem is so serious that the Pentagon now doubts that it will be able to validate the systems within the desired timetable, and is asking that the current periodicity be simply doubled, to allow bugs to be corrected, and to ensure proper functioning. of each of the iterative versions before applying them to the devices deployed as a unit.
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