Author: trameditor

The stealth fighter program is expensive, but there is no doubt it is the most advanced plane ever made.

Here’s What You Need to Know: Developing a “one-size-fits-all” aircraft didn’t come cheap.

With a total cost as high as $1.508 trillion dollars, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program would be the largest single military contract in history. However, a few things need to be put in perspective—and the truth is this fifth-generation fighter offers a lot of bang for the buck and will be flying for decades to come.

First, the total cost has been estimated in 2070 dollars, when the lifecycle of the F-35 will likely come to an end. That means those fighters rolling off the assembly line could be flying when today’s toddlers are middle aged.

Second, and more importantly, three variants of the F-35 have been developed and produced, and the platform was meant to replace the United States Air Force’s A-10 and F-16, the United States Navy’s F/A-18, and the United States Marine Corps F/A-18 and AV-8B Harrier.

Developing a “one-size-fits-all” aircraft didn’t come cheap. Each F-35A variant, including aircraft and engine, cost around $89.2 million; while other variations of the fifth-generation fighter were even more expensive—the F-35B reportedly cost $115.5 million. However, Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots who have flown a variety of fighter/strike aircraft in combat including the F-35 have reported that it is simply the best platform to date.

Ready for a Changing World

While the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was developed during an emphasis on the Global War on Terror, the aircraft could be seen as well-suited to address the looming threats from near-peer adversaries including Russia and China.

As a fifth-generation fighter, the F-35 Lightning II could offer advanced stealth along with improved agility and maneuverability, as well as better sensor and information fusion, network-enabled operations and advanced sustainment. This has made the Lockheed Martin-produced aircraft among the world’s most advanced multi-role fighters flying today.

The stealth, multirole fighter’s armament includes a 25mm GAU-22/A 4-barrel rotary cannon with 180 rounds of ammunition. There are four internal and six external stations on the wings. It can carry a variety of air-to-air missiles, air-to-surface missiles, anti-ship missiles and bombs. In a “stealth mode” it can infiltrate enemy territory and carry 5,700 pounds of internal ordnance, and in its “beast mode” it can carry up to 22,000 pounds of combined internal and external weapons.

The Lightning II was also developed with advanced electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that allow the pilots to locate and track enemy forces. In addition, the pilots have the ability to jam radars and disrupt threats, while the advanced avionics give the pilot real-time access to battle space information. The F-35’s warfare and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) capabilities were made possible by the integration of a core processor that can perform more than 400 billion operations per second. It could collect data from the classified electronic warfare suite, developed by BAE Systems, and then identify enemy radar and electronic warfare emissions via an eight sensor Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS). In turn, the EOTS could provide the pilot 360-degree coverage, recommending which target to attack and whether he/she should use either kinetic or electronic means to counter or negate the threat.

Moreover, data collected by the fighter’s sensors will be shared with commanders at sea, in the air or on the ground. This provides real-time data on the combat situation, which has made the F-35 a true force multiplier during collation operations.

The F-35 has a range of 1,200 nautical miles and can reach speeds of upwards of Mach 1.6 (1,200 mph). It is powered by F135-PW-100 engines that provide 40,000lb. maximum propulsion.

In addition to the U.S. military, the F-35 has been adopted by many allied partners, and the aircraft serves as the backbone of allied airpower for thirteen nations and counting. It has played a critical role in joint domain operations, where the fighter has brought unprecedented situational awareness, information sharing and connectivity to the coalition.

Is it America’s most capable fighter, or America’s most expensive headache? Why not both?

Refueling under cover of darkness, a massive formation of U.S. Air Force, Royal Air Force, and Australian Air Force aircraft prepared for combat.

Fourth-generation fighters hailing from all three nations—including F-16 Fighting Falcons, F-15 Eagles, and Eurofighter Typhoons—coordinated with E-8 Joint STARS command-and-control aircraft. As their stealthy escorts, both F-22 Raptors and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters surveyed the battle space.

Soon, cockpit displays in each aircraft began to light up and alarms sounded, indicating that the formation was being painted by multiple radar arrays tied to surface-to-air missiles and inbound fighters. Enemy fighters sporting the color schemes of Russian Su-30s began to close in.

“On the last week of a Red Flag exercise we really throw everything we have at the Blue Force and replicate the toughest adversary possible,” says Travolis “Jaws” Simmons, commander of the 57th Adversary Tactics Group.

Ultimately, the F-35 fighter jet won the day, breaking down one of the world’s most advanced air defense networks and relaying the data to missile-packed fighters like the F-16.

The F-35 can fly at speeds as high as Mach 1.6 and can carry an internal payload of four weapons without compromising its stealth. But it’s not the F-35’s firepower that really makes the difference, it’s the computing power. It’s why F-35s have come to be known as “quarterbacks in the sky” or “a computer that happens to fly.”

“There has never been an aircraft that provides as much situational awareness as the F-35,” Major Justin “Hasard” Lee, an Air Force F-35 pilot instructor, tells Popular Mechanics. “In combat, situational awareness is worth its weight in gold.”

But for nearly its entire life, many have debated whether the F-35 is a game-changing platform or a case study in the excesses of the Pentagon’s weapon-acquisition process.

It turns out it’s both.

A 21st-Century Fighter Jet

The Boeing X-32, left, and the X-35 from Lockheed Martin.Joe McNally//Getty Images

The aircraft we know today as the F-35 was built to meet the demands of multiple fighting forces with a single, highly capable aircraft.

This new “Joint Strike Fighter,” Pentagon officials believed, would allow for streamlined logistical supply lines, maintenance, and training. It would also leverage the same stealth technologies found in the F-22.

With a laundry list of requirements from the U.S. Navy, Air Force, DARPA, and soon, the U.K. and Canada, the Joint Strike Fighter program quickly moved from its official proposal in 1995 to two competitive prototypes in 1997: Lockheed Martin’s X-35 and Boeing’s X-32. And the new fighter had its work cut out for it—the Joint Strike Fighter needed to replace at least five different aircraft across all the different services, including the high-speed interceptor F-14 Tomcat and the tank-killing close air support A-10 Thunderbolt II.

While replacing all these aircraft with one plane would (theoretically) save money, the long list of requirements led to a landslide of expensive complications. In fact, while the X-35 was still competing for the contract, many weren’t sure such an aircraft could even be built in significant numbers.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35: The Specs

A cross-section of the F-35 from the May 2002 issue of Popular Mechanics. Necessary design changes over the years likely altered these original design plans. Popular Mechanics / John Batchelor

Designed from the ground up to prioritize low-observability, the F-35 may be the stealthiest fighter in operation today. It uses a single F135 engine that produces 40,000 pounds of thrust with the afterburner engaged, capable of pushing the sleek but husky fighter to speeds as high as Mach 1.6. The aircraft can carry four weapons internally while flying in contested airspace, or can be outfitted with six additional weapons mounted on external hardpoints when flying in low-risk environments. The F-35A also comes equipped with an internal 4-barrel 25mm rotary cannon hidden behind a small door to minimize radar returns.

The standard weapons payload of all three F-35 variants includes two AIM-120C/D air-to-air missiles and two 1,000-pound GBU-32 JDAM guided bombs, allowing the F-35 to engage both airborne and ground-based targets. Lockheed Martin has developed a new internal weapons carriage that will eventually allow it to carry an additional two missiles internally.

The cockpit of the F-35 forgoes the litany of gauges and screens found in previous generations of fighter in favor of large touchscreens and a helmet mounted display system that allows the pilot to see real-time information. This helmet also allows the pilot to look directly through the aircraft, thanks to the F-35’s Distributed Aperture System (DAS) and suite of six infrared cameras mounted strategically around the aircraft.

“If you were to go back to the year 2000 and somebody said, ‘I can build an airplane that is stealthy and has vertical takeoff and landing capabilities and can go supersonic,’ most people in the industry would have said that’s impossible,” Tom Burbage, Lockheed’s general manager for the program from 2000 to 2013 told the New York Times. “The technology to bring all of that together into a single platform was beyond the reach of industry at that time.”

While both the X-32 and X-35 prototypes performed well, the deciding factor in the competition may have been the F-35’s complicated Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) flight. Because the U.S. Marine Corps intended to use this new plane as a replacement for the AV-8B Harrier Jump Jets, America’s new stealth fighter had to be able to fill the same vertical landing, short take off role.

The Boeing X-32 prototypes were more unusual looking than its X-35 competition and in many ways, were less advanced. Boeing saw this as a selling point because the legacy systems leveraged in its design were cheaper to maintain. The aircraft used a direct-lift thrust vectoring system for vertical landings that was similar to that of the Harrier. It effectively just re-oriented the aircraft’s engine downward to lift the airframe, making it less stable than the X-35 in testing. But Boeing’s biggest mistake may have been the decision to field two prototypes: One that was capable of supersonic flight, and another that was capable of vertical landings. This decision left Pentagon officials worried about Boeing’s ability to field a single aircraft with all of those capabilities crammed inside a single fuselage. USAF//Wikimedia Commons

The lift fan design used in the X-35 connected the engine at the back of the aircraft to a drive shaft that would power a large fan installed in the aircraft’s fuselage behind the pilot. When hovering, the F-35 would orient its engine downward, not unlike the X-32, but it would also pull air from above the aircraft and force it down through the fan and out the bottom, creating two balanced sources of thrust that made the aircraft far more stable.

It also helped the F-35 notch a win in the looks category.

“You can look at the Lockheed Martin airplane and say, that looks like what I would expect a modern, high performance, high capable jet fighter to look like,” Lockheed Martin engineer Rick Rezebek says in a PBS Nova episode. “You look at the Boeing airplane and the general reaction is, ‘I don’t get it.’”

Ultimately, Lockheed Martin won out over Boeing’s unusual looking X-32 prototype in October of 2001. The future looked bright for the newly named F-35.

Complications and Headaches

The F-35 receives a robotic spray of radar-baffling coating along the leading edge of its wing and air intake.Popular Mechanics / Randy A. Crites

While Lockheed’s lift fan approach to STOVL flight might’ve nabbed the contract, the hard part was just beginning.

Choosing to begin with the least complex iteration of the new fighter, Lockheed’s Skunk Works started designing the F-35A, intended for use in the U.S. Air Force as a traditional runway fighter like the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Once the F-35A was complete, the engineering team would then move on to the more complex STOVL F-35B for use by the U.S. Marine Corps, and then, finally, the F-35C meant for carrier duty.

There was just one problem—jamming all the necessary hardware for the different variants into a single fuselage proved extremely difficult. By the time Lockheed Martin wrapped up design work on the F-35A and got to work on the B, they realized the weight estimates they had established while designing the Air Force variant would lead to an aircraft that was 3,000 pounds too heavy. This miscalculation created a significant setback—the first of many.

Meet the F-35 Variants

To the outside observer, the differences between each F-35 variant can be difficult to detect— and for good reason. The only real differences among each iteration of the jet are related to basing requirements. In other words, the most noticeable differences are in how the fighter takes off and lands.

F-35A

Intended for use by the U.S. Air Force and many allied nations, the F-35A is the conventional take off and landing (CTOL) variant. This aircraft is intended to operate out of traditional airstrips and is the only version of the F-35 to come equipped with a 25mm internal cannon, allowing it to step in for both the F-16 multirole fighter and the flying cannon A-10 Thunderbolt II, among many others.

F-35B

The F-35B was purpose-built for short take off and vertical landing operations (STOVL) and was designed with the needs of the U.S. Marine Corps in mind. While still able to operate off of traditional runways, the STOVL capability offered by the F-35B allows Marines to operate these jets from austere runways or off the decks of amphibious assault ships, often referred to as “Lightning Carriers.”

F-35C

The F-35C is the first stealth fighter ever designed for carrier operations with the U.S. Navy. It boasts larger wings than its peers, to allow for slower approach speeds when landing on a carrier. More robust landing gear aids in tough carrier landings, and it harbors a larger fuel supply (20,000 pounds’ worth) internally to support longer range missions. The C is also the only F-35 equipped with folding wings, allowing for easier storage in the hull of ships.

“It turns out when you combine the requirements of the three services, what you end up with is the F-35, which is an aircraft that is in many ways suboptimal for what each of the services really want,” Todd Harrison, an aerospace expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the New York Times in 2019.

Lockheed Martin’s team would eventually work out the finer points of each different platform, leaving as much of the aircraft consistent across branches as possible. But pulling off this engineering magic trick led to a series of delays and cost overruns.

Lockheed Martin’s bad arithmetic in the weight category stretched early development by 18 months and cost a daunting $6.2 billion to correct, but it was just the first of many issues to plague the new Joint Strike Fighter. It wouldn’t be until February of 2006, five years after Lockheed won the contract, that the first F-35A would roll off the assembly line. But these early F-35s weren’t even ready to fight because the Pentagon had chosen to begin production before they had completed testing.

Lockheed Martin chose Pratt & Whitney to power their new stealth fighter, using an F135 engine derived from the F119 used in the F-22 Raptor. The powerful engine produces 40,000 pounds of thrust, just less than the F-15 pulls out of two Pratt & Whitney F-100-PW-220 engines.DAVID MCNEW//Getty Images

This approach, called “concurrency,” was meant to ship out F-35s sooner with plans to go back and correct identified issues later. Unfortunately, a long list of problems meant each of these early fighters needed massive overhauls that were often too pricey to pursue.

By 2010, nine years after Lockheed Martin was awarded the JSF contract, the cost per F-35 had ballooned to over 89 percent higher than initial estimates. It would still be another eight years before the first operational F-35s would get into the fight. To this day, the aircraft still hasn’t been approved for full-rate production, largely due to ongoing software issues.

Knowing Is Half the Battle

Cockpit instrumentation of the F-35 Lightning II.Richard Baker//Getty ImagesSo what really separates the pricey F-35 from the fighter jets that’ve come before it? Two words: data management.

Today’s pilots have to manage a huge amount of information while flying, and doing so means splitting your time between traveling the speed of sound and a collage of screens, gauges, and sensor readouts screaming for your attention. Unlike previous fighter jets, the F-35 uses a combination of a heads-up display and helmet-based augmented reality to keep vital information directly in the pilot’s field of view.

Inside the F-35 Helmet

Nick Nacca

Every Gen III is customized to its owner’s head to prevent slippage during flight and to ensure that the displays appear in the correct locations. To do this, technicians scan each pilot’s head, mapping every feature and translating it into the helmet’s inner lining.
Pilots used to have to switch over to a mounted night-vision attachment when flying in the dark. The Gen III projects a night-vision reading of the surrounding environment directly onto the visor when the pilot switches the system on.
The shell is made of carbon fiber, which is what gives it a characteristic checkered pattern.
A tight coil of bound cables comes out of the back of the helmet to connect it to the plane, Matrix-style. When the wearer turns his head in a specific direction, the wires feed the helmet the proper camera footage.
The communications system has active noise cancellation. Speakers produce a sound that opposes wind noise and the low-frequency hum of the jet engines so pilots can hear clearly.

“In the F-16, each sensor was tied to a different screen… often the sensors would show contradictory information,” Lee tells Popular Mechanics. “The F-35 fuses everything into a green dot if it’s a good guy and a red dot if it’s a bad guy— it’s very pilot-friendly. All the information is shown on a panoramic cockpit display that is essentially two giant iPads.”

It’s not just how the information reaches the pilot, but also how it’s collected. The F-35 is capable of gathering information from a wide variety of sensors located on the aircraft and from information sourced from ground vehicles, drones, other aircraft, and nearby ships. It collects all of that information—as well as network-driven data about targets and nearby threats—and spits it all out into a single interface the pilot can easily manage while flying.

With a god’s eye view of the area, F-35 pilots can coordinate efforts with fourth-generation aircraft, making them deadlier in the process.

“In the F-35, we’re the quarterback of the battlefield—our job is to make everyone around us better,” says Lee. “Fourth-gen fighters like the F-16 and F-15 will be with us until at least the late 2040s. Because there are so many more of them than us, our job is to use our unique assets to shape the battlefield and make it more survivable for them.”

All of that information may sound daunting, but for fighter pilots who’ve experienced the demanding task of compiling information from a dozen different screens and gauges, the F-35’s user interface is nothing short of miraculous.

Tony “Brick” Wilson, who served in the U.S. Navy for 25 years prior to joining Lockheed Martin as a test pilot, has flown over 20 different aircraft, from helicopters to the U-2 spy plane and even a Russian MiG-15. According to him, the F-35 is—by far—the easiest aircraft to fly that he’s come across.

“As we moved into fourth-generation fighters like the F-16, we moved from being pilots to being sensor managers,” Wilson says. “Now, with the F-35, sensor fusion allows us to take some of that sensor management responsibility off the pilot’s hands, allowing us to be true tacticians.”

The Fighter of the Future

Matt Cardy//Getty Images

In May of 2018, the Israeli Defense Force became the first nation to send F-35s into combat, conducting two airstrikes with F-35As in the Middle East. By September of the same year, the U.S. Marine Corps sent their first F-35Bs into the fight, engaging ground targets in Afghanistan, followed by the U.S. Air Force using their F-35A’s for airstrikes in Iraq in April 2019.

Today, over 500 F-35 Lighting IIs have been delivered to nine nations and are operating out of 23 air bases around the world. That’s more than Russia’s fleet of fifth-generation Su-57s and China’s fleet of J-20s combined. With literally thousands more on order, the F-35 promises to be the backbone of U.S. air power.

And unlike previous fighter generations, the F-35’s capabilities are expected to keep up with the times. Thanks to software architecture designed to allow the F-35 to receive frequent updates, the aircraft’s form has stayed the same, but its function has already changed radically.

“The airplane that took that first flight back in 2006 may have looked identical on the outside, but it was a very different aircraft than the one we’re flying today,” Wilson says. “And the F-35 flying ten years from now is going to be very different from the one that we’re flying today.”

The F-35 will also serve as a test bed for technologies that will become commonplace in the next generation of jets. Flying in coordination with AI-enabled drones will become a staple of any sixth-generation fighter, and those new fighter tricks will likely first arrive in the form of the F-35.

“I look at the most capable, most connected, most survivable aircraft on the face of the planet and what we’re able to achieve with it today,” Wilson says. “I can only imagine what tomorrow’s F-35 is going to be capable of.”

Is it America’s most capable fighter, or America’s most expensive headache? Why not both?

Refueling under cover of darkness, a massive formation of U.S. Air Force, Royal Air Force, and Australian Air Force aircraft prepared for combat.

Fourth-generation fighters hailing from all three nations—including F-16 Fighting Falcons, F-15 Eagles, and Eurofighter Typhoons—coordinated with E-8 Joint STARS command-and-control aircraft. As their stealthy escorts, both F-22 Raptors and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters surveyed the battle space.

Soon, cockpit displays in each aircraft began to light up and alarms sounded, indicating that the formation was being painted by multiple radar arrays tied to surface-to-air missiles and inbound fighters. Enemy fighters sporting the color schemes of Russian Su-30s began to close in.

“On the last week of a Red Flag exercise we really throw everything we have at the Blue Force and replicate the toughest adversary possible,” says Travolis “Jaws” Simmons, commander of the 57th Adversary Tactics Group.

Ultimately, the F-35 fighter jet won the day, breaking down one of the world’s most advanced air defense networks and relaying the data to missile-packed fighters like the F-16.

The F-35 can fly at speeds as high as Mach 1.6 and can carry an internal payload of four weapons without compromising its stealth. But it’s not the F-35’s firepower that really makes the difference, it’s the computing power. It’s why F-35s have come to be known as “quarterbacks in the sky” or “a computer that happens to fly.”

“There has never been an aircraft that provides as much situational awareness as the F-35,” Major Justin “Hasard” Lee, an Air Force F-35 pilot instructor, tells Popular Mechanics. “In combat, situational awareness is worth its weight in gold.”

But for nearly its entire life, many have debated whether the F-35 is a game-changing platform or a case study in the excesses of the Pentagon’s weapon-acquisition process.

It turns out it’s both.

A 21st-Century Fighter Jet

The Boeing X-32, left, and the X-35 from Lockheed Martin.Joe McNally//Getty Images

The aircraft we know today as the F-35 was built to meet the demands of multiple fighting forces with a single, highly capable aircraft.

This new “Joint Strike Fighter,” Pentagon officials believed, would allow for streamlined logistical supply lines, maintenance, and training. It would also leverage the same stealth technologies found in the F-22.

With a laundry list of requirements from the U.S. Navy, Air Force, DARPA, and soon, the U.K. and Canada, the Joint Strike Fighter program quickly moved from its official proposal in 1995 to two competitive prototypes in 1997: Lockheed Martin’s X-35 and Boeing’s X-32. And the new fighter had its work cut out for it—the Joint Strike Fighter needed to replace at least five different aircraft across all the different services, including the high-speed interceptor F-14 Tomcat and the tank-killing close air support A-10 Thunderbolt II.

While replacing all these aircraft with one plane would (theoretically) save money, the long list of requirements led to a landslide of expensive complications. In fact, while the X-35 was still competing for the contract, many weren’t sure such an aircraft could even be built in significant numbers.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35: The Specs

A cross-section of the F-35 from the May 2002 issue of Popular Mechanics. Necessary design changes over the years likely altered these original design plans. Popular Mechanics / John Batchelor

Designed from the ground up to prioritize low-observability, the F-35 may be the stealthiest fighter in operation today. It uses a single F135 engine that produces 40,000 pounds of thrust with the afterburner engaged, capable of pushing the sleek but husky fighter to speeds as high as Mach 1.6. The aircraft can carry four weapons internally while flying in contested airspace, or can be outfitted with six additional weapons mounted on external hardpoints when flying in low-risk environments. The F-35A also comes equipped with an internal 4-barrel 25mm rotary cannon hidden behind a small door to minimize radar returns.

The standard weapons payload of all three F-35 variants includes two AIM-120C/D air-to-air missiles and two 1,000-pound GBU-32 JDAM guided bombs, allowing the F-35 to engage both airborne and ground-based targets. Lockheed Martin has developed a new internal weapons carriage that will eventually allow it to carry an additional two missiles internally.

The cockpit of the F-35 forgoes the litany of gauges and screens found in previous generations of fighter in favor of large touchscreens and a helmet mounted display system that allows the pilot to see real-time information. This helmet also allows the pilot to look directly through the aircraft, thanks to the F-35’s Distributed Aperture System (DAS) and suite of six infrared cameras mounted strategically around the aircraft.

“If you were to go back to the year 2000 and somebody said, ‘I can build an airplane that is stealthy and has vertical takeoff and landing capabilities and can go supersonic,’ most people in the industry would have said that’s impossible,” Tom Burbage, Lockheed’s general manager for the program from 2000 to 2013 told the New York Times. “The technology to bring all of that together into a single platform was beyond the reach of industry at that time.”

While both the X-32 and X-35 prototypes performed well, the deciding factor in the competition may have been the F-35’s complicated Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) flight. Because the U.S. Marine Corps intended to use this new plane as a replacement for the AV-8B Harrier Jump Jets, America’s new stealth fighter had to be able to fill the same vertical landing, short take off role.

The Boeing X-32 prototypes were more unusual looking than its X-35 competition and in many ways, were less advanced. Boeing saw this as a selling point because the legacy systems leveraged in its design were cheaper to maintain. The aircraft used a direct-lift thrust vectoring system for vertical landings that was similar to that of the Harrier. It effectively just re-oriented the aircraft’s engine downward to lift the airframe, making it less stable than the X-35 in testing. But Boeing’s biggest mistake may have been the decision to field two prototypes: One that was capable of supersonic flight, and another that was capable of vertical landings. This decision left Pentagon officials worried about Boeing’s ability to field a single aircraft with all of those capabilities crammed inside a single fuselage. USAF//Wikimedia Commons

The lift fan design used in the X-35 connected the engine at the back of the aircraft to a drive shaft that would power a large fan installed in the aircraft’s fuselage behind the pilot. When hovering, the F-35 would orient its engine downward, not unlike the X-32, but it would also pull air from above the aircraft and force it down through the fan and out the bottom, creating two balanced sources of thrust that made the aircraft far more stable.

It also helped the F-35 notch a win in the looks category.

“You can look at the Lockheed Martin airplane and say, that looks like what I would expect a modern, high performance, high capable jet fighter to look like,” Lockheed Martin engineer Rick Rezebek says in a PBS Nova episode. “You look at the Boeing airplane and the general reaction is, ‘I don’t get it.’”

Ultimately, Lockheed Martin won out over Boeing’s unusual looking X-32 prototype in October of 2001. The future looked bright for the newly named F-35.

Complications and Headaches

The F-35 receives a robotic spray of radar-baffling coating along the leading edge of its wing and air intake.Popular Mechanics / Randy A. Crites

While Lockheed’s lift fan approach to STOVL flight might’ve nabbed the contract, the hard part was just beginning.

Choosing to begin with the least complex iteration of the new fighter, Lockheed’s Skunk Works started designing the F-35A, intended for use in the U.S. Air Force as a traditional runway fighter like the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Once the F-35A was complete, the engineering team would then move on to the more complex STOVL F-35B for use by the U.S. Marine Corps, and then, finally, the F-35C meant for carrier duty.

There was just one problem—jamming all the necessary hardware for the different variants into a single fuselage proved extremely difficult. By the time Lockheed Martin wrapped up design work on the F-35A and got to work on the B, they realized the weight estimates they had established while designing the Air Force variant would lead to an aircraft that was 3,000 pounds too heavy. This miscalculation created a significant setback—the first of many.

Meet the F-35 Variants

To the outside observer, the differences between each F-35 variant can be difficult to detect— and for good reason. The only real differences among each iteration of the jet are related to basing requirements. In other words, the most noticeable differences are in how the fighter takes off and lands.

F-35A

Intended for use by the U.S. Air Force and many allied nations, the F-35A is the conventional take off and landing (CTOL) variant. This aircraft is intended to operate out of traditional airstrips and is the only version of the F-35 to come equipped with a 25mm internal cannon, allowing it to step in for both the F-16 multirole fighter and the flying cannon A-10 Thunderbolt II, among many others.

F-35B

The F-35B was purpose-built for short take off and vertical landing operations (STOVL) and was designed with the needs of the U.S. Marine Corps in mind. While still able to operate off of traditional runways, the STOVL capability offered by the F-35B allows Marines to operate these jets from austere runways or off the decks of amphibious assault ships, often referred to as “Lightning Carriers.”

F-35C

The F-35C is the first stealth fighter ever designed for carrier operations with the U.S. Navy. It boasts larger wings than its peers, to allow for slower approach speeds when landing on a carrier. More robust landing gear aids in tough carrier landings, and it harbors a larger fuel supply (20,000 pounds’ worth) internally to support longer range missions. The C is also the only F-35 equipped with folding wings, allowing for easier storage in the hull of ships.

“It turns out when you combine the requirements of the three services, what you end up with is the F-35, which is an aircraft that is in many ways suboptimal for what each of the services really want,” Todd Harrison, an aerospace expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the New York Times in 2019.

Lockheed Martin’s team would eventually work out the finer points of each different platform, leaving as much of the aircraft consistent across branches as possible. But pulling off this engineering magic trick led to a series of delays and cost overruns.

Lockheed Martin’s bad arithmetic in the weight category stretched early development by 18 months and cost a daunting $6.2 billion to correct, but it was just the first of many issues to plague the new Joint Strike Fighter. It wouldn’t be until February of 2006, five years after Lockheed won the contract, that the first F-35A would roll off the assembly line. But these early F-35s weren’t even ready to fight because the Pentagon had chosen to begin production before they had completed testing.

Lockheed Martin chose Pratt & Whitney to power their new stealth fighter, using an F135 engine derived from the F119 used in the F-22 Raptor. The powerful engine produces 40,000 pounds of thrust, just less than the F-15 pulls out of two Pratt & Whitney F-100-PW-220 engines.DAVID MCNEW//Getty Images

This approach, called “concurrency,” was meant to ship out F-35s sooner with plans to go back and correct identified issues later. Unfortunately, a long list of problems meant each of these early fighters needed massive overhauls that were often too pricey to pursue.

By 2010, nine years after Lockheed Martin was awarded the JSF contract, the cost per F-35 had ballooned to over 89 percent higher than initial estimates. It would still be another eight years before the first operational F-35s would get into the fight. To this day, the aircraft still hasn’t been approved for full-rate production, largely due to ongoing software issues.

Knowing Is Half the Battle

Cockpit instrumentation of the F-35 Lightning II.Richard Baker//Getty ImagesSo what really separates the pricey F-35 from the fighter jets that’ve come before it? Two words: data management.

Today’s pilots have to manage a huge amount of information while flying, and doing so means splitting your time between traveling the speed of sound and a collage of screens, gauges, and sensor readouts screaming for your attention. Unlike previous fighter jets, the F-35 uses a combination of a heads-up display and helmet-based augmented reality to keep vital information directly in the pilot’s field of view.

Inside the F-35 Helmet

Nick Nacca

Every Gen III is customized to its owner’s head to prevent slippage during flight and to ensure that the displays appear in the correct locations. To do this, technicians scan each pilot’s head, mapping every feature and translating it into the helmet’s inner lining.
Pilots used to have to switch over to a mounted night-vision attachment when flying in the dark. The Gen III projects a night-vision reading of the surrounding environment directly onto the visor when the pilot switches the system on.
The shell is made of carbon fiber, which is what gives it a characteristic checkered pattern.
A tight coil of bound cables comes out of the back of the helmet to connect it to the plane, Matrix-style. When the wearer turns his head in a specific direction, the wires feed the helmet the proper camera footage.
The communications system has active noise cancellation. Speakers produce a sound that opposes wind noise and the low-frequency hum of the jet engines so pilots can hear clearly.

“In the F-16, each sensor was tied to a different screen… often the sensors would show contradictory information,” Lee tells Popular Mechanics. “The F-35 fuses everything into a green dot if it’s a good guy and a red dot if it’s a bad guy— it’s very pilot-friendly. All the information is shown on a panoramic cockpit display that is essentially two giant iPads.”

It’s not just how the information reaches the pilot, but also how it’s collected. The F-35 is capable of gathering information from a wide variety of sensors located on the aircraft and from information sourced from ground vehicles, drones, other aircraft, and nearby ships. It collects all of that information—as well as network-driven data about targets and nearby threats—and spits it all out into a single interface the pilot can easily manage while flying.

With a god’s eye view of the area, F-35 pilots can coordinate efforts with fourth-generation aircraft, making them deadlier in the process.

“In the F-35, we’re the quarterback of the battlefield—our job is to make everyone around us better,” says Lee. “Fourth-gen fighters like the F-16 and F-15 will be with us until at least the late 2040s. Because there are so many more of them than us, our job is to use our unique assets to shape the battlefield and make it more survivable for them.”

All of that information may sound daunting, but for fighter pilots who’ve experienced the demanding task of compiling information from a dozen different screens and gauges, the F-35’s user interface is nothing short of miraculous.

Tony “Brick” Wilson, who served in the U.S. Navy for 25 years prior to joining Lockheed Martin as a test pilot, has flown over 20 different aircraft, from helicopters to the U-2 spy plane and even a Russian MiG-15. According to him, the F-35 is—by far—the easiest aircraft to fly that he’s come across.

“As we moved into fourth-generation fighters like the F-16, we moved from being pilots to being sensor managers,” Wilson says. “Now, with the F-35, sensor fusion allows us to take some of that sensor management responsibility off the pilot’s hands, allowing us to be true tacticians.”

The Fighter of the Future

Matt Cardy//Getty Images

In May of 2018, the Israeli Defense Force became the first nation to send F-35s into combat, conducting two airstrikes with F-35As in the Middle East. By September of the same year, the U.S. Marine Corps sent their first F-35Bs into the fight, engaging ground targets in Afghanistan, followed by the U.S. Air Force using their F-35A’s for airstrikes in Iraq in April 2019.

Today, over 500 F-35 Lighting IIs have been delivered to nine nations and are operating out of 23 air bases around the world. That’s more than Russia’s fleet of fifth-generation Su-57s and China’s fleet of J-20s combined. With literally thousands more on order, the F-35 promises to be the backbone of U.S. air power.

And unlike previous fighter generations, the F-35’s capabilities are expected to keep up with the times. Thanks to software architecture designed to allow the F-35 to receive frequent updates, the aircraft’s form has stayed the same, but its function has already changed radically.

“The airplane that took that first flight back in 2006 may have looked identical on the outside, but it was a very different aircraft than the one we’re flying today,” Wilson says. “And the F-35 flying ten years from now is going to be very different from the one that we’re flying today.”

The F-35 will also serve as a test bed for technologies that will become commonplace in the next generation of jets. Flying in coordination with AI-enabled drones will become a staple of any sixth-generation fighter, and those new fighter tricks will likely first arrive in the form of the F-35.

“I look at the most capable, most connected, most survivable aircraft on the face of the planet and what we’re able to achieve with it today,” Wilson says. “I can only imagine what tomorrow’s F-35 is going to be capable of.”

The B-52 is a symbol of Americanism as profound as baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet, but is it cut out for the battlefield of the future?

There are few things in this world quite as satisfying as a good old-fashioned American success story, the story of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress definitely fits that description. After almost six decades as the primary front-line strategic bomber for the US military, the Stratofortress shows no signs of retirement anytime in the near future.

But is this a good thing? Is the B-52 still as fit to serve the military as it was in the days of the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf? If the top brass at the pentagon is to be believed, it’s looking like that question was never in doubt at all. Some even argue that the bombers lifecycle could extend as far as a century, something practically unheard of

So, just for the sake of debate, let’s take a deep dive into how the B-52 became the icon it is today, but also the pros and cons of what the US plans to do with it going forward.

The B-52 is a symbol of Americanism as profound as baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet, but is it cut out for the battlefield of the future? Let’s discuss.

A Dependable And Versatile Aircraft, But Slow And Vulnerable

We all know the B-52 as the go-to strategic bomber of the US military, being capable of dropping several tonnes of high explosive munitions across a vast area, or dropping nuclear payloads if called upon to do so. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what this plane was capable of in its heyday. It was also a brilliant and very adaptable research testbed. In its day, both the US Air Force and NASA used the B-52 for a wide array of missions ranging from launching Scramjet and rocket-powered payloads like the X-15 rocket plane and the Lockheed D-21 hypersonic drone in preparation for use on the A-12 interceptor.

This jack-of-all-trades aircraft may have been perfect for mid to late 20th-century technology, but decades after its introduction, these airframes are starting to look worse and worse for wear as each year passes. The prospect of keeping these 185 thousand pound six-decade-old warbirds aloft for a further 40 to 50 years would present a daunting range of tasks for engineers to solve. Resources that may be put to better use designing and manufacturing a replacement.

Air Defense Networks Are Better Than Ever

It’s all well and good that the B-52 can fly in large formations and lay waste to whatever is in their path, but what happens when the enemy starts fighting back? In a modern-day scenario, or even one in the near future, the odds look pretty daunting for the B-52, especially against even a moderately equipped nation.

The latest range of Russian and Chinese-built surface-to-air missiles are faster, harder to detect, and deadlier than anything the Stratofortress saw in Vietnam, the Gulf War, or the War on Terror. Envisioning an entire formation of B-52’s being shot out of the sky victims to advanced anti-aircraft defenses is a scenario the Pentagon might do their best to try and ignore, but it’s a scenario that becomes more and more likely as the Stratofortress extends its operational lifespan more and more.

Outside of surface-to-air missiles, there’s a slew of foreign-built fighter aircraft that at least in theory capable of slipping past American defenses and wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting formation of strategic bombers. The unarmed Stratofortress would be a sitting duck up against the Russian Sukhoi SU 57 or the upcoming Chinese J-20 fighters. The U.S Air force might be wise to run a couple more in-depth military simulations before going ahead with extending the B-52’s service life even further than it’s been stretched already.

It’s Time To Let The New Guard Take The Reigns

Make no mistake, the B-52 is one of the most important aircraft not only in US military history but one of the most historically significant airplanes in the 120-year history of aviation. But the notion that it’s capable of extending its service life to a whopping century is one steeped in controversy. Meanwhile, a new generation of strategic stealth bombers is still readying to go into front-line service at this very moment in time.

The Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider is actually meant to supplement and eventually replace the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. But if this program is successful, don’t be surprised if it starts cutting into the B-52’s flight hours sometime in the not-so-distant future. With this in mind, it’d probably be best for the B-52 to be retired sooner rather than later. After all, there’d be no planes left to show off in museums to be preserved forever if most of them were blown out of the sky by a wayward surface-to-air missile.

The US-2 aircraft proves to be highly valuable, especially in гeѕсᴜe operations, showcasing its exceptional capabilities.

A total of 6 aircraft of this type are in operation. The sixth seaplane was purchased for 12 Ƅillion yen in 2013, nearly $156 мillion. At such a price, US-2 can Ƅe classified as the мost expensiʋe seaplane in the world.

The deʋelopмent of the ShinMaywa US-2 took eight years to coмplete. With the Shin Meiwa US-1A fleet introduced in the 1970s Ƅeginning to reach the end of its serʋice life, the Japan Maritiмe Self-defeпѕe foгсe atteмpted to oƄtain funding for a replaceмent in the 1990s, Ƅut could not oƄtain enough to deʋelop an entirely new aircraft.

In OctoƄer 1996, ShinMaywa was noмinated Ƅy the Ministry of defeпсe as a мain contractor to deʋelop adʋanced ʋersion of existing US-1 aircraft. The new aircraft was designated US-1A Kai. This aircraft features nuмerous aerodynaмic refineмents, a pressurised hull, and мore powerful engines. fɩіɡһt tests Ƅegan on DeceмƄer 18, 2003. The US-1A Kai was re-designated the US-2 AмphiƄian, and was forмally inducted to a squadron in March 2007.

As an iмproʋed ʋersion of US-1A, the ShinMaywa US-2 inherits the design lines of its predecessor. The design of the airfraмe deмonstrates ʋersatility, allowing it to switch easily for мissions. It could Ƅe a fігe-fіɡһtіпɡ aмphiƄian, passenger transport aircraft, or a мulti-purpose aмphiƄian.

The appearance of the ShinMaywa US-2 is no different froм a traditional flying Ƅoat: a pair of ѕtгаіɡһt wings on the shoulders with two engines on each wing. The tail is a typical T-type configuration. The wings and fuselage are мade of coмposite мaterials with the standard diмensions of 33.5м in length, 33.2м in wingspan and 9.8м in height.

The cockpit is located just Ƅehind the ѕһагр nose, giʋing great ʋisiƄility forward and the engines on either side. The glass cockpit is equipped with an integrated control panel. A single LCD panel integrates the digitalised мeters.

The ShinMaywa US-2 incorporates fly-Ƅy-wire fɩіɡһt control systeм, the coмputerised fɩіɡһt systeм iмproʋes the safety and controllaƄility of the aircraft. Under each мain wing is arranged a Pontoon float to help the plane Ƅalance on the water. The eмpty weight of the aircraft is 25.6t and the мaxiмuм takeoff weight is 47.7t.

The aircraft can carry up to 20 passengers or 12 stretchers. In addition, the aircraft is also equipped with a tricycle type landing gear to operate on land.

Despite some arguments to the contrary, it seems the Navy may have been well-advised to retire the F-14 and clear the way more fully to where things are now with F-22s and F-35s controlling drones and 6th-generation aircraft already in the air.

Maverick and Goose made the F-14 Tomcat famous as a cultural emblem of US military air power, yet the Pentagon’s decision to ultimately retire the 1980s-era aircraft appears to be sound and well-placed as a way to adapt to a fast-changing air-threat environment.

F-14 History and the Future

The concept of a two-man crew is designed to bring several key advantages, such as the simple fact of adding another set of eyes. An aviator can of course help with command and control, targeting, surveillance and even threat identification, with the idea of freeing up the pilot for other pressing, time-sensitive tasks.

Reducing a crew to one or even no pilots reduces weight, drag and the possibility of human error. Of course, human pilots are not likely to disappear soon given those unique, critical faculties particular to the human mind, yet computer advances have arguably outpaced the advantages of using a two-man crew.

Therefore, despite Top Gun fame and an illustrious history, technological progress has arguably rendered the concept of a two-man crew obsolete. The reason is both clear and simple, the advent of AI-enabled, high-speed computers can quickly gather, organize and transmit vast amounts of otherwise disparate pools or streams of data, quickly presenting an integrated picture of pilots.

This means key procedural functions such as altitude, navigation, aircraft maintenance, speed and time-sensitive variables such as targeting data, threat identification and EW systems can to a large extent be completed without a need for human intervention.

Essentially, machines can naturally perform certain critical, time sensitive combat functions exponentially faster than humans.  New incoming sensor data is bounced off a vast database for comparison, reference, organization and analysis and then sent or presented to a human decision maker in position to make quick, time-sensitive decisions in combat.

In fact, advanced AI-enabled algorithms are so sophisticated that they have even out-performed humans in some simulated dogfighting exercises. High-speed computers can instantly assess a large number of key interwoven variables, perform analysis and recommend optimal courses of action for pilots.  The idea is to get inside of or ahead of an enemy’s decision-making process to prevail in any air-combat engagement.

What much of this points to is the growing consensus among military scientists, weapons developers and innovators that the optimal approach to real-time, high-speed combat includes a blending of man and machine. Often referred to as human-machine interface, the idea is to use high-speed computing to ease the cognitive burden upon a pilot while enabling him or her to use those key faculties unique to human cognition and decision-making. Certainly, there are many things specific to human perception, consciousness, intuition, emotion or dynamic decision-making that computers simply cannot replicate. Therefore, combat decision-making is best served through a manned-unmanned teaming approach. This way, the best of each is leveraged to maximize any combat advantage.

With this in mind, the US Air Force is not only networking drones to fighter jets in combat but also testing fighter jet dogfighting ability with a human pilot supported by a machine or AI-enabled co-pilot.

In 2020, an AI-enabled computer algorithm operated on board a military aircraft while in flight, coordinating navigational details, sensor information and reconnaissance missions alongside a human pilot. The AI algorithm, called ARTUu, flew along with a human pilot on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, performing tasks that would “otherwise be done by a pilot,” an Air Force report from 2020 explained.

This experiment proved successful and is something which continues to inform Air Force air-combat technology development. The concept of operations with this is simply that a machine can calculate those things machines do best at unprecedented speeds while humans exercise those elements of judgment and perceptions computers are unable to replicate.

Ultimately, what the rapid maturation of these technologies seems to suggest is that pairing a human pilot and a computer might be much more advantageous than having a two-man crew, particularly given that so many aircraft and fighters can already fly unmanned with growing degrees of autonomy.

Therefore, despite some arguments to the contrary, it seems the Navy may have been well-advised to retire the F-14 and clear the way more fully to where things are now with F-22s and F-35s controlling drones and 6th-generation aircraft already in the air.F-14 Tomcat. Image taken at National Air and Space Museum on October 1, 2022. Image by 19FortyFive.

F-14 Tomcat. Image taken at National Air and Space Museum on October 1, 2022. Image by 19FortyFive.

F-14 Tomcat. Image taken at National Air and Space Museum on October 1, 2022. Image by 19FortyFive.

F-14 Tomcat. Image Taken at U.S. Air and Space Museum outside of Washington, D.C. Image Credit: 19FortyFive.com

Russia could turn its first fifth-generation fighter, the Sukhoi Su-57, into a sixth-generation fighter the former head of the Russian Aerospace Force, chief Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev recently told TASS.

“This is actually a splendid plane and it can embrace both fifth-and sixth-generation features. It has huge modernization potential,” Bondarev, now chairman of the Federation Council Defense and Security Committee, said. “Importantly, it is the best among the existing versions by its stealth characteristics. It incorporates all the best that is available in modern aviation science both in Russia and in the world,” he added.

As reported by Franz-Stefan Gady in an extensive piece for The Diplomat, Russian defense officials have repeatedly claimed that hardware elements designed for a future sixth generation fighter have been tested on the Su-57 prototype, including flight and navigation systems as well as advanced electronic warfare and radar systems.

Noteworthy Russia revealed the design of a new sixth-generation fighter aircraft for the first time in March 2016. According to Russian defense officials, the new aircraft is slated to be available in manned and unmanned configuration and could take to the air for the first time in the late 2020s.

In the meantime, the Su-57 development is continuing, but Bondarev warned that it will take time for the new aircraft to be introduced into service. “In the first year, the Aerospace Force won’t get 20 or 15 planes. It will get only two or three and so on,” he said on Nov. 1. Russian Air and Space Force (RuASF) is currently testing nine Su-57 prototypes with two additional aircraft expected to be delivered to the service by the end of 2017.

However, it is not clear yet if the Su-57 can be deemed as a fifth-generation fighter. The aircraft aimed to replace RuASF’s MiG-29 and Su-27 fourth-generation fighters. The Su-57 is the product of the PAK FA (literally “Prospective Airborne Complex of Frontline Aviation”) program. The Su-57 is a single-seat, twin-engine multirole fifth-generation fighter aircraft designed for air superiority and attack roles and will be the first aircraft in Russian military service to use stealth technology.

As we have already explained the main Su-57 problem is that it still lacks an engine that can meet the specifications Bondarev is claiming.

In fact the Su-57 prototypes are equipped with a derivative of the Saturn AL-41F1S engine, dubbed AL-41F1, which also powers engine the Sukhoi Su-35S Flanker-E.