[ZS-VAN]

Wicked! I almost can't believe that a $120 million dollar aircraft can be that vulnerable.

I also often wonder whether one day the secure data links used in modern combat systems/vehicles will be broken and then have mayhem follow.

[FormerViperDriver]

Everybody's making way too much out of this incident. The F-22s turned around as a simple precaution, not because they absolutely had to. This was a minor software glitch (division by zero in a line of code upon crossing the international date line. F-22 software has something like 3 million lines of code).

When the F-16 came out, it suffered far more debilitating problems, some of which cost pilot's lives. It turned out to be a superb aircraft anyway. The glitches had to be fixed one by one as they were discovered. I won't even get into how many pilots we lost in the 50s and 60s due to design defects in aircraft already introduced in service...

Anybody who's been following the initial service performance of the F-22 should be in awe of what American aeronautical engineering can still do (and this will be confirmed by the F-35). I don't believe there was ever a time when a fighter plane was so much ahead of its contemporaries, and that includes the Me-262 in 1944/45.

FVD