Lotta work needed on F35

The F35 is a flying computer.  Software does everything.  And the software is far from ready.  Plus some other problems.  The Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation set forth the "challenges"  (bureaucrat speak for bugs or problems) still to be overcome.  
   First off is the 25mm Gatling cannon won't fire. This used to be a pure software problem and cannon firing software was promised sometime in the future.  Which is a minor scandal.  A gun ought to fire every time the trigger is pulled.  All the software can do is correct the aim, but pilots can get plenty of hits without fancy software driven lead computing gunsights.  But somehow they decided to route the trigger signal thru the computers rather then straight to the gun.  Good design that.  Now they discover that a little door that opens when the gun fires creates enough drag to throw the aim off.  On the old F105, which I worked on for a year in combat, the muzzle of the 20mm Vulcan cannon stuck right out in the airstream, fired every time the trigger was pressed, and no silly little doors to get in the way.  KISS (keep it simple stupid).
   Second the project is running into difficulties getting the system to fire the AIM9L Sidewinder air to air missile and drop the laser guided Small Diameter Bomb.  Sidewinder, an infrared heat seeker,  has been around since the 1950's, and is still very effective, and cheap.  SDB is newer, but it's been around for a while, it's a 250 pound smart bomb that you can put in a guy's bedroom window without leveling the entire apartment building.  Neither require much electronic assistance by the launching aircraft.  Did the F35 people bother to read the Technical Orders on either weapon? 
   Then there is the computer crash problem.  In July the system crashed hard (blue screen of death hard) every five hours on average.  With the last software update, that was improved to 9 hours between crashes.  My Windows XP system does better than that.  Here we are at Top Gun, closing on the enemy, when the system crashes. Instead of pulling some G's and nailing the enemy, we are pushing reset buttons trying to bring the computer back up. 
   And lastly the $400,000 a copy night vision helmet still doesn't work. 
   There is a bunch of other gripes about non essential systems, sensor fusion, date link, and some other stuff that doesn't belong on a fighter plane. 
   The test and evaluation people don't think the F35 program office has the funds to fix all this stuff.