The Washington Post, the International Information Program (IIP) of the US State Department, announced on October 7th that the US Air Force has updated the software code of one of its aircraft for the first time during one of its flights.

There is also a surprising twist: the aircraft involved is not the "flight computer" F-35, the mysterious B-21 bomber is still under development, and it is not the Air Force's latest and most advanced jet aircraft. On the contrary, the military in U-2Reconnaissance aircraftTested this technology, U-2Reconnaissance aircraftIt is one of the oldest and most iconic aircraft in the US Air Force inventory.

The US Air Force announced at a press conference that on September 22, the U-2 Federal Laboratory successfully updated the software of a U-2 aircraft from the 9th Reconnaissance Squadron, which is currently in Biele, Californiaair forceTraining flights will be conducted near the base.

In order to push software code from ground developers to the U-2 in flight, the Air Force used Kubernetes, a containerized system that allows users to automatically deploy and manage software applications. This technology was originally created by Google and is currently maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The service stated that in this demonstration, the U-2 laboratory hired Kubernetes to "run advanced machine learning algorithms" on the four flight certified computers on the U-2, modifying the software without negatively affecting the aircraft's flight or mission systems.

The successful integration of the traditional computer system of U-2 with modern Kubernetes software is an important milestone in the development of software containerization on existing Air Force weapon systems, "said Nicholas Charan, Chief Software Officer of the United States Air Force.

In an interview with C4ISRNET on September 15th, Chaillan hinted that the service will soon update its flightsaircraftThe software is referred to as a 'game rule changer' and describes the challenges faced in ensuring that aircraft updates do not pose a safety risk.

We need to separate all airworthiness parts of flight control, open mission systems, and software from the functionality of other missions (and) software, so that when it comes to aircraft flight components or systems, we can update these functions more frequently without interruption or endangering life safety, "Chaillan said at the time.