You should be able to maintain Sovereignty of the military hardware you purchase, particularly in these extremely software heavy defence tools, like aircraft.

I'd imagine, if you can't build your own kit, the one thing you should be able to do is control how it operates without some lunatic at the helm being able to turn it off on a whim, surely?

I for one would be looking to do that on pretty much any deal that involved buying kit from another nation, because, as we've just seen, an ally can turn into something not quite that, in a short tantrum or two.

Given, I doubt source code is available, I don’t see the reverse engineering of the F-35 flight system software, the removal any locks etc and so enable the aircraft to return to service in the sort of timescales a conflict situation would demand. There again, perhaps there is a skunk works team buried deep in the MOD (deeper than an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant) who have been working this problem for years…

Well this bloke is on to a loser for a start if he thinks that the engine is Rolls Royce (it is fact a Pratt & Whitney F135), the RR involvement is simply the lift fan. In terms of jailbreaking the software, good luck with that. Some of the minor systems code comes from BAe which we could amend, but I'll bet a round of drinks that the weapons systems and most critical avionics is entirely down to Lockheed Martin.

Beyond contractual assurances, would it even be possible to confirm that a modern aircraft doesn’t have remote kill-switch functionality buried in its code?

I think it's fair to say that (a) if a kill switch existed it would have been identified by now, and (b) if it did exist, it could be circumvented.

The reason I'm confident in saying it doesn't exist is because it is totally unnecessary. The 'real' kill switch isn't hardware or software, it's supply chain. F-35 airframes may be rated for 8,000 hours, but the componentry isn't - the MTBF (minor) is around the 4 hour flight time mark, and the MTBF Major around 30 hours; which means that when the US turns off the parts tap, any country who isn't the US has an F-35 fleet with a combined lifetime of around 30 hours before they start dropping from the sky.

You can't fight a war on 30 hours.

The Swedish JAS Gripen.

More flexible, faster, far cheaper and the Swedes will let you build them yourself in your own country. There's no kill switch either.

You forgot to add that you can buy 4 Gripens for the price of 1 F35.

You forgot to add that you can buy 4 Gripens for the price of 1 F35.

ComicalEngineer,

You really can't. And it's not even close. In fact an F-35 is possibly cheaper than a Gripen. When Norway selected F-35, they said that Gripen was more expensive, as you can imagine SAAB disagreed! Most of the Western fighters are pretty similar cost-wise, I think the big exception is the F-18, and maybe the F-16 - although that keeps getting upgrades, and so the costs keep creeping up again.

The US budget office said that the F-35A was costing them $75m (I think that's now gone up to $80m). Estimates for the Gripen seem to wander between $65-$85m. However the F-35 comes without engine, and those have been getting more expensive, due to upgrades and shortages, so the flyaway cost of an F-35A now is probably $90-$95m? The Eurofighter and Rafale both seem to be round-about the $100m mark, along with the F-15EX (maybe a bit more).

However, operating costs are a different matter. And there, the Gripen is king. From public estimates, you get about $5,000 an hour operating costs. The Rafale and Eurofighter are about $20k an hour, and F-35 is up around the high $30k mark, and operating costs are not falling, as promised. Partly because not enough was invested in spares production, and now we're amazingly, short of spare parts. Who'd-a-thunk it? Again F-18 are nice and cheap to run - that really does seem to be a highly capable, and affordable aircraft.

Part of Gripen's advantage here is being physically smaller. Against F-35 it also doesn't have to worry about stealth coatings, or an absurdly complicated supply chain. Although that complexity is partly deliberate, and what makes it a joint strike fighter. Even the US don't completely control F-35's supply chain, and various countries make bits that are vital to its operation, so that if anyone does get cut off, the whole thing could fall apart - making everyone's F-35s useless.

So you can operate Gripen for much less money. It's going to cost much less over its lifetime, though probably about the same at the start. But it's also less capable. And as stealth aircraft become more common, that will probably become more important. In ten years time the aircraft world is going to look very different again. There'll be new 6th gen (if that even means anything) aircraft coming into operations, Russia ought to have a decent number of stealth aircraft (admittedly of dubious quality) in squadron service, and are selling them to Algeria. Trump may have sold F-35 to the Saudis (and others) though he'll have to get a move on before he loses control of Congress. China has got two frontline stealth aircraft now - and many more in development - and once their new shiny comes along, they may be willing to sell to allies, like Pakistan. Hell, they might even be willing to sell to Russia - if SU-57 really is as bad as some people think. Ten years is not a long time in military procurement terms nowadays. People are buying F-35 for a reason.

People are buying F-35 for a reason.

Yes, that it is the only modern high capability semi-stealth attack aircraft in the Western shops.

Europe has the know how and could have produced a current generation competitor to the F35, but it seems to me as a casual observer that nobody in Europe wanted to pony up the development cash in previous years. The Typhoon, Gripen and Rafale are all older and less capable. And depressingly, evidence of how European manage to mess things up. Individually, all three are nice assets, great at airshows and in their design roles, but three separate development budgets to produce three competing canard delta fighters at about the same time.

Like a badger,

Nobody in Europe would stump up for a new stealth aircraft except the UK in the 90s. With no partners we'd have had to pay the vast expense to go it alone - so joined F-35. At least we're getting something like 15% of the workshare - and since LM have failed to get our weapons integrated we've only bought 5% of the aircraft ordered. The last government OK'd the purchase of another 25 - taking us to 73 - but that was on condition we were satisfied our weapons would be integrated. I believe it's still in the budget, but a budget is not the same as a contract.

I think that pulling in Japan has made a better Tempest coalition than the Typhoon one. Since Germany has acted as a roadblock to so much of Typhoon's progress. But that could still go horribly wrong, as a new country's defence industry tries to tie in with ours and Italy's (who are used to each other).

God knows what'll happen with FCAS. I suspect it'll survive though. I think it's too late for Germany to jump ship and join us. Although they're talking about it publicly, the workshare is all sorted out. Why leave being treated as a junior partner by France, to be an actual junior partner in an already sorted out program? Plus France maybe can't afford to go it alone this time, as they did with Rafale - so they'll have to make a reasonable deal with the Germans. Plus It's France's job to flounces out of the joint program...

For some interpretation of "alternative", sure. Gripen is an excellent design in terms of what it *was* designed to be, the slight issue here is that it clearly was *not* designed to be a true alternative for the F-35, either generally speaking (e.g. being a steatlth/low observable platform) or once you start looking at specific variants of the -35 (i.e. the B and C specs required for carrier operations)

So yes, Gripen may well serve as a suitable alternative for F-35 in some scenarios, but sadly neither it nor any other platform (either alone or in combination with others) currently provides a complete alternative to hitching yourself to the F-35 wagon if the requirements you have from the F-35 literally are not met anywhere else. Our decision to abandon any hope of refitting QE and PoW with cats and traps, and thus sinking billions into carriers where the *only* fixed wing option for the forseeable future is F-35B, is looking increasingly burdensome...

Our decision to abandon any hope of refitting QE and PoW with cats and traps, and thus sinking billions into carriers where the *only* fixed wing option for the forseeable future is F-35B, is looking increasingly burdensome...

That decision was made for very good reasons. Basically you can generate more sorties per day from a given size of flight deck with STOVL operations than you can with CATOBAR. Plus you don't have the horrific pilot training requirements needed for arrested landings - which allowed us to operate a joint force of RAF and RNAS F-35B - where you can call on a squadron that's not done carrier ops in months and just fly them to the carrier and it'll all be fine. If you try that with arrested landings, you'd probably crash half the squadron, according to carrier pilots I've heard interviewed your landing skills start to become rusty after only a week or two of not doing one.

However, the capability still exists. The carriers were designed with a lifetime of 50-60 years. They've been built big enough, and with enough space, to be changed and upgraded. They could add the angled flight deck necessary to CATOBAR operations, but it would take a long refit. It would reduce the number of sorties the carriers could make, but allow them more capability, such as having fixed wing AEW (airborne early warning) aircraft and tankers. This couldn't just be plugged and played into the existing carriers though, when the Coalition looked at doing it back in 2010. They were already being built, decisions had been taken as to what they were doing, and none of the long-lead time items had been ordered, such as catapults and arrestor gear. We had the EMCAT research project, which was stopped when we decided to go STOVL, but given how much trouble the US had with their electro-magnetic catapults I'm sure that would have delayed the ships being built by several years - hence the huge cost estimates to make the change halfway through the build. Hence why they didn't go through with it. The carriers were even given space by the engine rooms for steam generators of some kind, so they could go old skool, but that will have been filled with stuff by now.

To point out though that France have ordered such goodies for PANG (their new carrier). And they're paying about $1.2 billion for the catapults and arrestor gear, and another $2.5 billion for just 3 E2D Hawkeye AEW aircraft. Those figures include for some support, plus training gear, but that's what we paid for one whole carrier! Another reason we went STOVL was price.

Finally, during the Falklands war, there were days when flying ops would have been impossible in a CATOBAR carrier, because the weather was too awful. And the weather in the North Atlantic, Norwegian and North Seas can be almost as bad. Which is another reason the RN selected STOVL. It's a complex and nuanced decision. But given it takes multiple years to procure a new naval fighter, if we decide to take that step, we can change the carriers in time to be ready for the new planes.

> Basically you can generate more sorties per day from a given size of flight deck with STOVL operations than you can with CATOBAR

You absolutely cannot and only idiots are still repeating this piece of BAe propaganda. The American carriers spank the QEs at sorties per day and it’s not even close, and the Americans can sustain it too. As was proven on the last deployment where they managed only 18 in 24 hours. The Americans can do 18 in an hour.

You absolutely cannot and only idiots are still repeating this piece of BAe propaganda. The American carriers spank the QEs at sorties per day and it’s not even close

The UK carriers are designed to be able to sustain 120 sorties a day. That's with an air-group of 48 though, probably 36 F-35 and 12 helicopters. We've not tested that, so claiming the QE's are at full operating capacity isn't true, despite them putting out that press release last year.

I think the US are designed for 160-170. Because their carriers are bigger. As I said, you get more sorties per area of flight deck with STOVL ops than with CATOBAR. This is because you don't have to set up for catapult shots, and you generally don't do landings and take-offs at the same time.

Whether the QEs can actually do 120 a day can't be known, because nobody has ever operated more than 24 fixed wing aircraft off a STOVL carrier, as was done last year.

My suspicion is the LM will fuck around so long integrating weapons that we'll not buy any more F-35 until we get a few replacements for early ones in the 2030s - meanwhile the RAF will have given up their Bs to the Navy and whatever money was allocated is spent on Tempest or maybe a few extra Tranche 4 Typhoon. At which point, short of an actual war, it'll be too disruptive of training to put a full air-group of 36 F-35 on a carrier. But equally we might order those 25 F-35B in the budget at some point in order to get a favour out of Trump - even without the integration of weapons we want.

Remind me again which fixed-wing AWACS assets we can operate from QE/PoW, because as good as we are at shoehorning at least the bare bones capabilities into rotary wing airframes, if you're serious about operating a carrier group in areas where you can't rely on either land-based AWACS support, or carrier-based support from an ally, then being able to operate your own fixed-wing assets gives you more flexibility as to when and where you're able to operate without increasing the risks to both your airframes *and* ships.

So comparing the cost of a few Hawkeyes to the cost of an entire carrier is slightly meaningless *unless* said carrier could operate said aircraft. We can't, so it wouldn't matter if the US were paying us to take Hawkeyes off their hands, we still wouldn't be able to put them to use on the carriers we did spend our money on...

And yes, there are some advantages to STOVL, but they don't require that you design your entire carrier strategy around operating *only* STOVL. We did it in the past because prior short-sighted governments decided that having proper carriers wasn't something the UK should be doing any more, and we were fortunate enough to have people in positions of sufficient power to get away with development of the "through deck cruisers" (because under NO circumstances should we be even so much as hinting at the fact that we were still trying to maintain any level of carrier capability) without which events in the South Atlantic would have gone very differently, but that doesn't mean STOVL is always the better choice, nor that it's the choice we ought to be making just because of how successfully we made it work when we needed to do so - remember that we used to have some fairly decent capabilities here, and were responsible for having come up with some of the fundamental concepts of modern carrier ops, so it's not as if we've always been firmly and uniquely wedded to STOVL.

As for the possibility that one or both of the carriers will be rebuilt for CATOBAR... I mean, sure, it *could* happen, I just don't see it actually happening, at least not within the 30-odd years I still hope and expect to have ahead of me.

Well as the RAF have repeatedly demonstrated, it’s the plane and pilot who make the difference between success and failure…much to the astonishment of our web footed friends across the pond…

Noting of course that the Gripen- as manufactured by Saab- still uses an American engine and they've said they're not changing that.

However nobody seems to have picked up the fact that Saab's commitment to supply full technical information to Canada would obviously include the details of the engine interfaces, with the Gripen using the Ada programming language with which Bombardier is apparently familiar.

And that Bombardier already uses Rolls Royce engines.

And that the GlobalEye aircraft being offered to Canada as part of the package are based on a Bombardier airframe with Rolls Royce engines.

I don't think that there's been anything definitive yet saying that Canada will buy Gripens, but TBH I'd be surprised if they didn't. And in that context the money that they've just put on the table to allow Lockheed to buy long-leadtime parts for another batch of F-35s does not necessarily mean that those F-35s will be purchased by Canada.

The best alternative IMHO was the Harrier, but the UK sold them off to the US Marines!

Lightening, Concord, Harrier, Vulcan ... the list continues of UK innovation (sometimes with partners) that were well ahead of the curve, but the UK decided to either drop or not continue to develop.

Caver_Dave,

We sold our Harriers to the US marines for spares. The US Marines are withdrawing them from service in June this year.

The Navy wanted to upgrade to fleet carriers from the small ASW-focused carriers that were the Invincibles.

That meant a much larger aircraft and the capability to go supersonic - so a totally new aircraft. As Harrier was so successful, we started a project, to partner with the US Marines. But when their needs got folded into F-35 we either had to join or go it alone. Nobody else was interested in a new STOVL aircraft. It would obviously have been cheaper if we'd avoided stealth, but stealth is a really useful force-multiplier for a relatively small carrier air-group that has to fight away from home, and against an enemy fighting with home (and probably numbers) advantage.

To put this in context, I think we've spent somewhere around £5 billion on Tempest so far. That's probably including Taranis (a stealth drone and test-bed from ten years ago) - and includes the cost of the prototype they're building now, but there's more in the budget for next few years). When Japan joined the Tempest program in 2023, they allocated about $9 billion, to be spent by 2030 - just on the R&D and ramping up industry to start building them in the 2030s. So between us, Japan and Italy that's something like £20 billion to be spent before receiving anything but the test aircraft. Our R&D contribution to F-35 was only £2 billion, from memory. Double that, to account for inflation over 25 years.

Tempest is also using some of the kit from Eurofighter, like the ECRS2 radar - which cost another few billion to develop, and is only coming into service now. But I doubt we'd have got much change from £10 billion in R&D for a super-Harrier, which maybe Italy and Japan might have bought. BAE wouldn't have got the stealth experience from participating in the F-35 program, and we'd only be buying maybe 50 of the aircraft at £150m-£200m each. Build 100 of a type that cost £10bn to develop and the R&D cost of each is £100m before you've bought your first wheel...

If we can sell Tempest to a couple of buyers, and we buy 400 aircraft between the 3 partners - we've at least got the R&D costs down below £40m per aircraft. Although the aircraft itself will be more expensive than a non stealthy super-harrier would.

Tempest is an air superiority fighter, so expect it to cost around £300m. Compared to current air superiority fighters like the Eurofighter at €250m or the F-22 at $350m.

Prices listed as total price rather than unit price since unit price can be misleading.

For example F-35 unit price is ~$40m but the total price is ~$100m, so if you are buying a new F-35 you are paying ~$100m but if you are replacing one that your crashed you only pay ~$40m since you can transfer the $60m maintenance contract and R&D licencing fees from the crashed one.

Damn it he's right, there are no F-35 buy it now listings on ebay.nl at the moment. Maybe I'll set a search trigger for ebay.ru .

Have you tried Temu?

Complete with fake CE markings?...

It's not uncommon for them to briefly available on the seabed if you're willing to front salvage costs. Just keep eyes on the mainstream press for good deals.

Suggest putting a Request for Quotation on Alibaba…

Username: pilot

Password: TopGun26

?

Username: password

Password: password

What not:

Username: guest

Password: guest

Now I need to change my wi-fi set up. Thanks.

Username: admin

No password.

Please remember to change it on first login.

"According to a video published by Lockheed Martin in 2017, the F-35 Lightning II is updated through the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS)."

AIUI the ALIS servers were replaced by ODIN about four years ago.

However it's important to note that this is reportedly just the server at the base, which still needs a Lockheed backend: I note the reports that the UK has a logistics centre at Sealand and don't know the extent to which there is a *single* Lockheed backend and the extent to which this is penetrated by the Pentagon.

AIUI the actual computer which attaches to the F-35 is a Panasonic Toughbook, with an (optical?) FireWire interface implemented as a PCMCIA card.

> is a Panasonic Toughbook, with an (optical?) FireWire interface [...]

had the (Boeing) X-32 won the contract, the interface would have been FireBall

Surely it (the F35) has n OBD-II port?

Does that mean Rafale uses SCART?

you forgot the last part...

FIREBALL XL5

Yes, it shows my age but I don't care.

The US, UK and Israel all operate there own backends and can generate new keys for signing mission data files. The UK gets this because it is the only Tier 1 partner, and Israel gets it because they own enough congressmen.

Who the fsck is ALIS? - KBW

Won't be long until someone drops a ROM on XDA

Since there is no Apple-Store or Google Store which needs such protection for their money, there is no need for such extreme measures. Encryption, maybe with TPM, should be enough for such cases. Maybe a dongle, which you can add after delivery. But once the OS is running, just plug in your keyboard, and log on to the console? No reason to prevent that.

It's almost like each country should build their own military aircraft domestically and share nothing about them with the rest of the world.

What's that, they can't? Oh ok we'll have to rely on America then.

Before you downvote this 1. I'm British (minus the "we're the best at everything" false pride bullshit) and 2. We haven't come up with anything better than an F-22 and neither has anyone else really.

Some F35 have been assembled outside the US. But there's a difference between building a knock down kit of somebody else's plane to designing and making it yourself. But that's difficult, designing a modern jet engine from scratch is very difficult, as is the research on stealth, avionics, weapons systems for the plane itself. Making turbine blades alone is nigh on rocket science, then there's unsexy areas that need deep expertise like undercarriage, fuel systems and the rest.

France has long had a "F*** off the rest of you" approach to defence procurement. It has worked up to a point, but they've got neither F35s they've bought, nor a credible local alternative, as their defence budget only goes so far. The Rafale is a very good aircraft, but it isn't as modern or as capable as the F35. The Typhoon is at least a tri-nation project, but still ain't an F35. I can't see Europe managing to build their next attack aircraft as a true European project, because there's no cure for the French Bloody Mindedness (FBM) problem.

@Like a badger, I feel like we're making the same point in a round about way.

My main point was that it's somewhat ironic talking about whether a plane can be jailbroken. Whilst simultaneously acknowledging that reliance on other countries is almost a pre-requisite to being able to produce such machines.

Whatever your view of America they are almost always going to be involved in one capacity or another, which IMO is a bigger weakness than just whether its software can be jailbroken (which in itself is hypothetical, for all of the reasons given in the article and more besides!).

af101,

Not everyone can indigenously produce a top line aircraft. But you can partner up. France has decided to go it alone with Rafale. The UK chose to partner up for Eurofighter and F-35. There are pros and cons to both options. But even the French decided that a 6th gen aircraft needed partners, for the development money, if nothing else. And yet they've still not got a single stealth aircraft, and FCAS isn't likely to be in service until the 2040s (if the program can survive that long), while Tempest is on course to have a flying demonstrator next year, and hopefully go into low-rate production in the early 2030s. So actually operational by 2035.

France were part of Eurofighter at the beginning, but they then decided to France their way out of the project, much like what is happening with FCAS.

If this is true then where is the SPEAR3 integration and the rest of Block 4?

The reality is that only LM can work on the software.

The Dutch defence minister is talking about the nuclear option. If you need it, and the US screw around, then break glass to jailbreak aircraft. At which point you're in breach of contract and on your own. Of course, so are they - the relationship is dead and everything goes to court. You fight this immediate war then buy new, non-US, aircraft.

Hence Meteor, Spear 3, plus Norway's NSM and the US JASSM, LRASM, small-diameter bomb, JAGM and AARGM are all in integration hell as well.

Ah great. Now I have root on my F35. And what's next? Let's see. ps -ef ? dir/w? or 2nk3kewf 990? And what happens then? What about the fail-safes in the different subsystems? The simplistic view of a rooted phone is totally inadequate for a fighter.

Anyway, even without rooting the plane, we'll still be able to shoot-down a $250 drone with a 10 million dollar rocket.

And then the pilot seat ejects...

Nobody's allowed access, lest they discover F-35 actually runs on Systemd OS.

Locked down IP is a problem all across military systems.

For example, the Pentagon had to reverse engineer the GBU-57 bunker buster bomb to make more, because they never got design info because it was proprietary.

See https://www.twz.com/air/new-gbu-57-massive-ordnance-penetrator-parts-reverse-engineered-from-atacms-ballistic-missile-tech