I took a tour of one of the factories where the F-35 is built (or one of the components of the airframe). It is the one located in Atlanta, Georgia. The scale of the place is just mind-numbing. There was a row of C-130 in different stages of assembly and next to them the production line for the their wings.

On the F-35 side, there was this huge robot that looked like a flat toolbox. It moved the airframe part from one station to the next. Just amazing. The whole assembly line looks like something out of a movie.

I was told that the F-35 had a lot of C++ code, and that is the reason it was not meeting deadlines. It was an interesting bit of gossip to hear, but I'm not entirely sure how that would come into play. I'm also not sure if C++ has been used before in this type of application. Given how ingrained Ada, C, and Fortran are in the industry.