December 15, 2006: The F-35 Lightning II lifts into the skies for the first time. Chief Test Pilot Jon Beesley returns from the flight with a thumbs up and a big grin, exclaiming praise for an aircraft that flew “beautifully.” A new era in military aviation begins. Today, the first F-35 continues to validate the aircraft’s design while demonstrating uncommon reliability.

As the F-35 was beginning flight tests, another aircraft took to the air. The Cooperative Avionics Test Bed (CATBird), a highly modified 737, was developed to validate the Lightning II’s powerful avionics suite. The CATBird demonstrates the fighter’s ability to collect data from multiple sensors and fuse it into a coherent situational awareness display in a dynamic airborne environment.

Defining the 5TH Generation Fighter

The F-35 calls for an entirely new way of thinking about fighter capabilities. By integrating a wealth of different capabilities, the fighter brings a quantum leap in lethality and survivability. It offers sharply enhanced expeditionary capability through a more reliable, highly maintainable aircraft and robust airframe design. These attributes can be realized only through a design created from the ground up to develop the world’s most capable multirole fighter.

Advanced Stealth
With embedded antennas, aligned edges, internal weapons and fuel, and special coatings and materials, the F-35 uses stealth to pick and choose engagements while remaining virtually undetected by enemy defense systems.

Information Fusion
Advanced integrated avionics processing data from a variety of onboard and net-enabled, off-board sensors provide the F-35 with true 5TH generation fighter capabilities. The most powerful sensor suite ever to fly on a fighter aircraft brings a seamless real-world, real-time, 360-degree display of the battlespace, with detailed information prioritized to the situation at hand, and allows the F-35 pilot to be a tactician rather than a technician.

Joint Force Enabler
The F-35 enables air dominance around the clock in any threat environment. Joint and coalition forces can attack any target, any time, with the freedom to operate anywhere on Day One of a conflict – even amid the most sophisticated and numerically superior threats.

Download F-35 Lightning II: The Future Is Flying

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A New Paradigm. A New Way of Thinking. A New Era.

Every generation of fighter aircraft brings greater strengths and performance improvements. But the F-35 goes far beyond that – so far that it will redefine tactical air concepts. These are some responses inevitably expressed by those who have closely followed the development of the F-35 and its global support structure:

• A 5TH generation fighter for the world’s air forces
• Quantum leap in combat capability
• Speed, precision and stealth
• Revolutionizing coalition warfare

The F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) variant allows operations from amphibious ships and shore-based expeditionary sites as it deploys close to the battle.

The F-35A conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) variant is a multirole, supersonic, stealth fighter that has extraordinary acceleration and 9-g maneuverability with F-16-like agility.

The F-35C carrier variant (CV) offers first-day-of-the-war capability for the U.S. Navy. It is an all-weather, long-range, supersonic fighter that strikes from the sea with stealth. Commonality with the F-35A and F-35B equals affordability

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