The Daily Beast’s Dave Majumdar is out with another excellent story about how the gun on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon’s newest and most expensive fighter jet, won’t work for another four years — at the earliest.
That’s because the software that lets pilots shoot the Gatling gun, which is critical for the aircraft to provide close-air support to ground troops, isn’t expected to ship until 2019, according to the article.
As Majumdar writes:
“There will be no gun until [the Joint Strike Fighter’s Block] 3F [software], there is no software to support it now or for the next four-ish years,” said one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program. “Block 3F is slated for release in 2019, but who knows how much that will slip?”
What’s also interesting to note is how few rounds the General Dynamics Corp.-made weapon actually holds compared to the 1970s-era A-10 Thunderbolt II.
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