"Charles Talleyrand" wrote
"Gene Storey" wrote
The F-16 was built as an international fighter, and those countries that do
their own development and depot work, would have an interest in all
aspects of the flight computers. The radar and various other computer
code would also be available. I know the radar software was available
to our university, as many of us wrote algorithms against it for our Masters.
My groups project was to better track turbine velocities of targets, as a
possible enhancement to cruise missile detection. One would hope that
today the missiles would be designed to hide the turbine :-)

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote
The F-16 is a very popular airplane. I'm just curious who has copies of
the source code to the plane and it's radar, etc. Obviously the USAF does,
but do the Israeli, the Belgians, or anyone else?


What!! I thought that the radar was the most top-secret portion of the
plane, and that the radar algorithms were a military secret. They hand it
out to graduate students??

Could you have gotten access to the flight control software? Could
the Belgian government?

Yes, the Belgium depot at Gosselies was heavily involved with the F-16
MLU (Mid-Life Upgrade).

Yes, all software that was meant to be changed over time is available to
several universities in their engineering schools. The highest classification
I saw was For Official Use Only, and not releasable to the public :-)
That included flight, engine and radar software.

The government doesn't provide F-16 radars to just any school that asks
for them, and very few students are interested in radar unless they are going
to become government contractors, or government employees. So it's not
like these things are all over and kids are dinking with them. These things
cost millions, and are expensive to power-up and run for several hours, so
you spend hours on simulators before ever getting allowed to run your code
live out the antenna. It's very tedious and I have to say, very glad it was
over. I didn't want to be the one that blew-up the radar and had to fill out
all the reports to get replacement parts.