F-35 Lightning II

Overview

Establishing air superiority in today’s complex global security climate requires the unprecedented capabilities and versatility that only the F-35 Lightning II can offer.

Conceived in the mid 1990s, the tri-variant F-35 represents the pinnacle of more than 50 years of fighter development technology. Designed to dominate the skies, the F-35 combines the 5^th Generation characteristics of radar evading stealth, supersonic speed and extreme agility with the most powerful and comprehensive integrated sensor package of any fighter aircraft in history.

Advanced avionics give the pilot real-time access to battle space information with spherical coverage and an unparalleled ability to dominate the tactical environment. Data collected by F-35 sensors can be immediately shared with commanders at sea, in the air or on the ground, providing an instantaneous, high-fidelity view of ongoing operations – making the Lightning II a formidable force multiplier. 

The F-35’s built-in sustainment establishes new levels of operational readiness. Aircraft share common parts, support equipment and technical data, yielding greater reliability and long-term cost savings. And the F-35’s strong global partnership and broad industrial base ensures affordability through economies of scale while delivering thousands of technology sector jobs around the world. 

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II – the world’s only international 5^thGeneration multirole fighter.

Inside the F-35, the world's most futuristic fighter jet

An aviation fantasy from the realms of Star Wars, the F-35 is the most sophisticated, expensive and controversial jet fighter ever produced. 

One of the first of these £100 million supersonic aircraft, a Lockheed Martin F-35B, hot from trials and shimmering in the 80-degree heat, is perched over a 'hover-pit’, a deep concrete well absorbing the fierce downward blast of the STOVL (short take-off and vertical landing) jet. The F-35B is tethered like some momentarily quietened bucking bronco.

This is not only an American beast. There is a strong likelihood that from 2030 the F-35 will be the only high-speed fighter in service with the RAF and the Royal Navy.

The much-loved Harrier was retired two years ago; the Tornado follows between now and March 2019. This will leave us with the Typhoon Eurofighter (introduced in 2003, and made in Britain and Europe), yet when that is scheduled to fly into the sunset a decade or so later, and with no Typhoon Mk2 in the wings to replace it, the Lockheed Martin F-35 may well be the one front-line jet able to defend British airspace and coalition interests.

By then, the nation that created the Spitfire and the Harrier will have long stopped making fighter aircraft of its own. Airfix, yes; Supermarine, Hawker and their successor BAE Systems, no.

Even if we had the will, we are unlikely to have the money. We will depend on our special relationship with the United States more than ever before. These are weighty matters that have drawn critics and supporters into a frenzied debate over the virtues of the F-35.

Just as I near the restrained grey jet at Fort Worth to talk to its test pilot, a bright orange butterfly catches my eye. A Gulf fritillary, it flutters innocently within feet of the supersonic warbird. It makes me think of the need we feel to protect the simplest freedoms with the most complex and terrifying weaponry, machines that, like the proverbial wheel, can break a butterfly.

We need the assurance of jet-powered, digitally guided, mechanical windhovers – fabricated from the most advanced materials and loaded with the latest digital sorcery and Star Wars weaponry – to assure a future in which we, or a young girl on her way to school in Afghanistan, can stop and stare at a fleeting fritillary.

'Darth Vader never had a helmet like this,’ says Billy Flynn, a senior Lockheed Martin test pilot with combat experience flying Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18s in Serbia and Bosnia, showing me his Vision Systems International 'bone-dome’. Made of carbon-fibre, the Israeli-US-designed augmented-reality helmet is packed with hi-tech gadgetry, and displays all the data the pilot needs inside its visor.

                                           ^{The F-35 pilot's augmented-reality helmet (Reuters)}

'This is an essential part of the F-35. It’s what makes such a difference,’ Flynn says. 'It’s been laser-scanned to fit my head, bumps and all. Through it, I can see 360 degrees all around the airplane. It’s wild seeing the undulations of the Red River along the Texas border beneath your feet. It’s virtual reality! Strange? Different, sure, but there’s not a pilot who would trade it for anything else. It needs refining, but it’ll make pilot and airplane an integral, all-seeing weapon.’

Everyone I meet involved in the F-35 project talks lyrically about the computer wizardry of this digital-era aircraft. I ask the same analogue question, over and again, of the test pilots: so what’s it like to fly?

'A no-brainer,’ they chorus.

They talk so fervently about the Star Wars aspects of the F-35 partly because it is the easiest aircraft any of them has ever flown: pilots are free to manage the weaponry while the F-35, more or less, flies itself. 

                             Interactive graphic: explore the F-35 fighter jet in more detail

Tucked away inside the Lockheed Martin complex, Dr Mike Skaff, the chief engineer of pilot/vehicle interface for the F-35 programme, and a former USAF F-16 pilot, guides me through the simulator.

The seat is comfortable, the view commanding, the controls minimal. Turn on the battery. Press the starter. In 90 seconds, the virtual F-35B is ready to fly just as the real aircraft would be: unlike most aircraft, the F-35 performs all necessary safety checks automatically and extremely quickly. The instrument panel is a glass screen measuring 20x8in. As with an iPad, you touch it to bring up the information you need. Pilots can also talk to the aircraft; it talks back.

Pushing the left-hand throttle forward and pulling ever so gently on the stubby right-hand control stick, take-off is smooth, almost imperceptible, and the climb rapid. Up we go, above what I take to be a 3D map of Afghanistan.

The aircraft rolls, loops and darts about with minimal input from the pilot. You might expect this of any existing 'fourth generation’ fighter jet, such as a USAF F-16 Fighting Falcon or RAF Typhoon, but it is a revelation to someone like me, a qualified pilot with experience of piston engines and no more than a 'second generation’ Hawker Hunter jet.

The F-35B, however, is 'fifth generation’. Not only is it stealthy in the military sense – all but undetectable by radar because of its origami form, its special coating, its hidden engine and low heat emission – but it can also perform truly extraordinary tricks through its continuously upgradeable computer software and complex engineering. What sort of tricks? Well, here I am turning towards the airfield. Not only will the F-35B land itself, but it will also hover at the touch of a button. Where hovering a Harrier is not unlike spinning plates on a pole on the tip of your nose while riding a trick bicycle on a circus high-wire – and no mistakes are affordable – the F-35 stops in the air, just like that, the pilot’s hands off the controls.

With a second push of the button and a touch of throttle and stick, the F-35 soars back into the sky. Skaff suggests I might like to take out a 'bad guy’.

I don’t play computer games, but surely none could be as easy as this? With its complex radar, stealth capability, sensors and lasers, the F-35 finds enemy aircraft invisible to the eye. I trace my finger across a matrix on the glass screen and lock on to the enemy. I am not even pointing the aircraft in their direction. I don’t need to. The F-35 can see and sense across huge distances in all directions. I select a missile from the store of weapons concealed in the fuselage, squeeze the trigger and, pulling away, watch a digital countdown. Zero: enemy destroyed.

My simulated flight may have been a little all-over-the-sky, yet given a couple of hours I’m sure I could be a Top Gun, ready to climb into the cockpit of the real thing and, armed with that Darth-Vader-eat-your-heart-out helmet and a stiff dose of the Right Stuff, ready to take on the enemy wherever they may be threatening freedom on land, sea or air.

It seems all so simple, so certain and seductive. Who wouldn’t want this all-but-invisible, all-but-invincible sky warrior on their side? There is no other military aircraft like it in the pipeline, much less in production; Russian and Chinese 'rivals’ are still essentially fourth generation. So why is the F-35 controversial? Why is Canada threatening to cancel its order? Why have there been so many spats between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin?

Because the F-35 programme is at least five years behind schedule. Because costs have risen by more than 90 per cent. Because design, development and testing have thrown up many problems that insiders view as teething problems – the helmet needs further work; early tailhooks failed to catch the wire when planes landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Wasp; computer software is not all it should be, or not yet – and outsiders are determined to see as fundamental flaws.

Earlier this year, Winslow T Wheeler of the US Center of Defense Information called the F-35 a 'gigantic performance disappointment’, adding, 'It’s the problem of paying a huge amount of money thinking you’re getting a Ferrari; you’re not, you’re getting a Yugo.’ While this is hardly true, it shows how high passions have run as the F-35 has been delayed.

The F-35 emerged from the US Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter Project, a strictly American venture, announced in 1993, that metamorphosed in 1996 into the US Joint Strike Fighter Program (JSF), in collaboration with Britain and other international partners. The purpose of the project was to develop a stealth fighter to replace several frontline aircraft including the F-16 Fighting Falcon (a design from the mid-1970s still in production at Fort Worth, with more than 4,500 built), the F/A-18 Hornet and the AV-8B Harrier II.

'It’s what we call a South West policy,’ says Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed Martin’s fast-talking vice-president for F-35 business development, referring to America’s most popular budget airline, the inspiration behind EasyJet and Ryanair. A former F/A-18 US Navy pilot – O’Bryan flew the first 'shock and awe’ missions to Baghdad in 2003 – he cites the efficiency and profitability of the Texas-based airline, which operates a single type of aircraft, the Boeing 737. 'Like South West, everything’s the same,’ says O’Bryan, predicting sales of 3,100 F-35s between now and 2037 when production is scheduled to end, 'so everything’s easier and cheaper, too.’

                                           ^{The top of the F35, showing its lift fan (Lockheed Martin)}

The US government plans to buy 2,443 F-35s in three variants: the F-35A is a 'conventional’ Air Force fighter; the F-35B is the STOVL version for the Marines, and the variant Britain has pledged to buy (it can operate from more or less anywhere); the F-35C is the Navy version with folding wings, designed for carriers, launched by steam-catapults and fitted with arrester hooks to catch the wires that stop the aircraft on deck. The remaining 500-600 F-35s are to be bought, incrementally, by JSF partner nations.

Along with the US, Britain is the only 'level one partner’. We’ve stumped up $2 billion to date, or four per cent of the costs, yet, as O’Bryan says, we 'get 25 per cent of the say in the project and 100 per cent of the benefits. Also, the first operational F-35s will be in 2015 with US Marines, while the RAF airplanes won’t be in service till 2018, so you’ll get the results of three years of testing and training.’

The enthusiasm of partner countries – the 'junior’ partners are Italy, Holland, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Israel and Japan – has ebbed and flowed since 1996, and has notably waned since 2007, when the global economy stalled. Governments have come and gone, with long-term defence projects unsettled by political turbulence and indecision.

In December 2006 the Labour government announced it was keen to buy 138 F-35s, but the current coalition government figure is only 48 F-35Bs, with future orders dependent on the findings of the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review.

At the moment, no one is fully certain that Britain will hang on to its new F-35-equipped aircraft carriers – HMS Queen Elizabeth II and HMS Prince of Wales – currently under construction, nor whether future orders for F-35s may be cancelled in favour of pilotless drones. And who knows how big the British Armed Forces will be by the time the Queen Elizabeth II is ready for action in 2020?

'The RAF is down to 33,000,’ Group Capt Harv Smyth tells me. A Harrier veteran, in combat from 1996 to 2010, Smyth is Britain’s JSF National Deputy, and my guide on this trip. 'The Navy is 30,000; you could seat the two forces comfortably inside Old Trafford. But because we’re asked to do a lot, around the world, and because over the past 20 years every major mission we’ve undertaken has been a surprise, we really do need to be prepared. We need the tactical and strategic advantage F-35 offers. Even with the Harrier, we cut down the number of ground troops needed in Afghanistan by huge numbers. Stealth fighters are expensive to buy, but they’ll save governments and taxpayers a lot of money in the long run, and save the lives of troops, airmen and innocent civilians, too.’

The F-35A first flew in December 2006. The F-35B followed in June 2008, with the British test pilot Graham Tomlinson making the first full-stop in mid-air in March 2010 and the first vertical landing the following day. The Navy’s F-35C took to the air that June. A symbolic handover of the first F-35B to the British government, represented by the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, was made at a ceremony at Forth Worth in July last year, and in November US Marines took delivery of three F-35Bs at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona. To date there have been just over 2,500 F-35 test flights, as programme and production – running concurrently – have come up to speed. No one doubts that there are development problems to overcome, yet even the most vociferous naysayers have tended to go to ground as F-35s have taken, increasingly confidently, to the air.

                       ^{An F-35 lands on the aircraft carrier USS Wasp (US Navy/DoD/Crown Copyright)}

Money, though, remains the aircraft’s Achilles’ heel. Delays have caused serious friction between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin. The total cost to the USA for development and procurement has been estimated at $323 billion, with a total lifecycle cost of $618 million per aircraft. The life expectancy of an F-35 is 30 years. Meanwhile, according to a 2012 US government accountability report, F-35 costs have increased 93 per cent, in real terms, over the 2001 estimate.

But unlike other military aircraft the F-35 can be reprogrammed and updated throughout its life. As the aircraft will be flying into the late 2060s, perhaps this is just as well. The Lockheed Martin F-16 has been in service since 1978. By chance, four of these nimble fighters barrel low over the company’s Fort Worth offices as I leave the lobby after my four-mile walk through the complex. As Steve O’Bryan says of the very able F-16, 'It has the computing power of a Commodore 64 in comparison to an F-35.’

Turkey vultures wing low over the magnificent wooded estate of the US Naval Air Station Patuxent River – Pax River – on the fringes of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, as I drive in with Harv Smyth. It’s winter here, breezy and close to freezing. In warmer times of the year, ospreys and bald eagles circle the 14,500-acre base and the 22,000 personnel who live and work here, including 22 British pilots, engineers and commanders lodged with the F-35 team who are carrying out extensive tests on the aircraft. They include the RAF’s quietly spoken Sqd Ldr Jim Schofield, who flew 70 hours in Harriers in combat in Iraq in 2003. He learnt to fly, on a Piper Super Cub, before he could drive.

'I’ve flown 10 frontline fighters,’ Schofield says. 'The F-35 is by far and away the easiest. I’ve flown the aircraft up to Mach 1.6 and pulled up to 7g. The helmet gives me a God’s-eye view. And when you press that hover button it’s as if engineering and electronics have overcome the laws of physics.’

Peter 'Wizzer’ Wilson flew Sea Harriers with the Royal Navy from 1990 to 2000. 'The new technology takes workload and risk away from the pilot. It’s amazing how one press of a button will set in motion so much magic around you. The one time you get to hear something mechanical working hard is when the big [vertical lift-off] fan behind you spools up; it sounds like an angry mosquito. The [Rolls-Royce] fan is also very smooth in motion, which has really helped as we’ve practised precision deck landings at sea on USS Wasp; it’s a quantum step in every way from the Harrier.’

Flying the F-35 is neither as 'visceral’ nor as 'thrilling’, to use Schofield’s word, as the old British Harrier, yet it is clearly more comfortable and far less demanding on the pilot than its Anglo-American successor, the AV-8B Harrier II. The F-35 has an Anglo-American pedigree, too. As everyone I talk to at Forth Worth and Pax is keen to stress, 15 per cent of each F-35 put into service over the next 25 years will be made in Britain. From Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems to Martin-Baker, the family-run manufacturer of the world’s finest ejector seats, and a further 130 companies spread, serendipitously – not by political design – the length and breadth of the country, British industry will continue to take part in the design and manufacture of military aircraft, their weapons, equipment and software.

'It’s impossible for Britain to go it alone,’ says Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, the head of RAF Strike Command, 2003-6, Commander in Chief of British forces in Iraq in 2003 and, today, very much involved with Italian-built I F-35s – the only aircraft to be built outside Texas – as the vice-president of strategic marketing for Finmeccanica UK. A highly experienced pilot with a first-class Cambridge degree in physics, Burridge is also a member of the council of the Defence Manufacturers Association.

'The MoD has to think very hard in its 2015 review whether it wishes to develop the Typhoon, or to buy further F-35s and nothing else,’ he says. 'This would have quite profound consequences for European industry. Not to develop the Typhoon, which still has potential sales in Oman, UAE, Saudi and Malaysia, would mean that British expertise would wither on the vine.’

Burridge, like others concerned for British and European industry, would like to see F-35s operating alongside upgraded Typhoons. But economic conditions, the ways of warfare and the public’s diminishing appetite for deaths of soldiers and civilians are having an effect on the very nature of fighter aircraft. 'We could go 100 per cent unmanned after F-35,’ Burridge says. 'It’s a plausible position; but there’s a limit, politically and morally, to robotic warfare, and a lot of questions concerning the ethics of extra-territorial attacks and extra-judicial killings.’

Shortly before Christmas Air Chief Marshall Sir Stephen Dalton, Chief of the Air Staff, announced the formation of a new grouping known as Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS) pilots. Because they will have to gain basic flying qualifications, this new generation of pilots will wear the same 'wings’ RAF pilots have cherished for generations. The 'lethal precision of their weapons’, Sir Stephen told the Royal United Services Institute, means that RPAS pilots will be seen increasingly as 'a cost-effective way to conduct warfare’. They will not be chasing the shouting wind alone in the cockpits of Typhoons, nor flying F-35s through footless halls of air; instead, they will be flying computer screens in remote underground bunkers.

'We’re making these [F-35s] for our kids to fly,’ Steve O’Bryan says, meaning future generations. Military pilots such as Jim Schofield, Harv Smyth, 'Wizzer’ Wilson, Billy Flynn and Brian Burridge will always want to fly in real airspace, and yet it is chastening to learn that the X-35B, the prototype F-35B, is already perched silently in the Boeing Aviation Hangar of the Smithsonian Institution in Virginia – a museum piece. Today’s fifth-generation fighter, hugely impressive, deeply seductive, upgradable and so very important and perhaps necessary to so many people’s security, jobs and freedom, is, oddly, already beginning to seem a part of military aviation history.