Popular Science: The last Fighter Pilot
THE NEW F-35 FIGHTER JET IS SO SOPHISTICATED, SO AUTOMATED, SO CONNECTED, IT’S FUELING A DEBATE: DO PILOTS STILL NEED TO FLY?
On a dusty tarmac, about 20 miles from downtown Phoenix, Capt. Joseph Stenger stands in 109-degree heat, barely sweating. A 32-year-old fighter pilot with the slicked-back hair, steady eyes, and ropey forearms you see on movie posters, he is admiring an equally impressive piece of flying machinery: the F-35 Lightning II fighter. In his green flight suit, and standing a little over 6 feet tall, Stenger is nearly face to snout with this menacing jet.
It’s his job to figure out what it can do in combat, and to teach that to hundreds of other fighter pilots.The F-35 started arriving here at Luke Air Force Base this past winter. It is the most sophisticated fighter ever built. It is stealthy, so it can appear the size of a golf ball to enemy radar, if it’s detected at all. It can also jam enemy radar—or make it seem there are 100 golf-ball-size targets in the sky. It can travel at Mach 1.6. It carries a 25 mm cannon, air-to-air missiles, two 2,000-pound guided bombs, and four external laser-guided bombs. But what truly sets it apart is its brain, 8 million lines of software code—more than any fighter in history—fusing navigation, communication, and targeting systems.
WNU Editor: We are still far away from that type of weapons platform.
1 comment:
Actually it hasn't been proven that the F-35 can do any of those things.
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