Free Republic

An internal Navy briefing obtained by CongressDaily suggests, without saying it right out, that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ballyhooed by Defense Secretary Gates will cost so much to buy and fly that the service might have to find a cheaper plane to fill up its carrier decks. For those of us who watched the reputation of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as a manager nose dive in the 1960s when he could not produce a carrier plane the Navy would accept, these newly expressed Navy doubts about the F-35 have a familiar ring that challenges Gates. The F-35, the Pentagon’s...

The skies over Fort Worth, Texas, hosted a historic aviation milestone today when the most expensive plane on Earth—a modded version of the F-35 Lightning II that lands vertically like a helicopter—made its first flight. Its pilot certainly had the chops to do the job: He learned to fly short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) airplanes when Jimmy Carter was president. Retired Royal Air Force squadron leader Graham Tomlinson, now employed by BAE Flight Systems, flew AV-8 Harriers (the first STOVL warplanes to see action) for 28 years, including time in the late 1980s as a test pilot qualifying the FA-2 Sea...

Three generations of Lightnings compared Today's christening of the Lockheed Martin F-35 as the Lightning II marks a perfect opportunity to compare three generations of fighters bearing that illustrious name - the first two with distinguished in-service records behind them. The table below clearly shows the advances that have taken place in technology and capability since World War II, but also illustrates how differing threats breed their own solutions. In particular, the UK's Lightning - designed as the purest of pure air defence fighters to tackle the Soviet threat during the Cold War - stands out for its afterburner-assisted maximum...

Pictures: Exclusive first photos of Lockheed Martin F-35 JSF ahead of official roll-out flightglobal.com has obtained exclusive photographs of Lockheed Martin's first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as it emerged from the paint shop at Fort Worth, Texas ready for its formal roll-out and naming on 7 July. Aircraft AA-1 (pictured below), an F-35A conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) variant of the JSF, is expected to fly by late October. As a result of a redesign to reduce the weight of the F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant, AA-1 is a one-off and not fully representive of the...