It's a little surprising that an angry rant by someone without any established expertise is given so much credibility here; I think it just echos popular memes.

It's a little surprising that an angry rant by someone without any established expertise is given so much credibility here; I think it just echos popular memes. I don't have any expertise myself, but let me share what I've read from experts providing serious analysis: 1) Every large, complex program has similar technical teething problems. If you look back at the beginnings of today's well-established systems, including other planes, you'll see similar histories and criticism (though it was less magnified by the echo chamber of the Internet). The existence of all these bugs and problems means nothing, good or bad; they are part of every major project. This should not surprise HN readers: Imagine an extraordinarily complex project, filled with newly invented technology, with a 20 year development cycle (and using waterfall methodology AFAIK). Add to that the extraordinary pressure on performance and capbilities (i.e., developers can't be conservative): If the project's perf isn't fast/powerful/etc enough then people die, such as the operator or the thousands to millions of others whom we can't protect, and nations might fall. You would expect a very large number of bugs; it's kind of amazing that such projects ever ship! Perhaps they should use other methodologies to reduce these problems but with fighter planes, due to the cost of building them and of failed experiments (i.e., dead pilots), you can't 'move fast and break things'. Also, you never really can test the system until you fight an actual war against a peer enemy. --- 2) The public's conception of figher planes is very outdated. They imagine dogfights in the sky, which might be as outdated as ships shooting banks of cannons at each other (this is my impression based on limited reading of people who know). For example, a study I read by leading military strategists [1] looked at actual fighter-to-fighter encounters. The last time we saw many of them was in Vietnam (think of it: we haven't had an arial shooting war in 40 years, covering generations of (thankfully) unutilized planes and pilots). In Vietnam 80% of encounters were over before the loser had time to defend themselves, because they were not aware of the attacker. You can see then why the F-35's design might focus on situational awareness, including: Sensors; building a network where each plane is essentially a node, so all planes all see the entire network's sensor data as well as sharing with ground systems (imagine making a data network reliable in that environment); and the pilot's UI: In prior planes pilots had to read and interpret (6? 12? more?) sensors, each on different interfaces, all while flying and fighting. The F-35's IT systems unify the data on one interface, and the computer does much of the analysis (e.g., object A1 moving at X rate with Y vector and Z characteristics is probably a bird, object A2 is a friendly plane, A3 is a civilian plane, ... and object A53 is an enemy missile). Also, electronic warfare has become far more important, with hints of F-35's even hacking into enemy systems. To an extent, warfare has become a battle of networks shooting electronic attacks over an air gap. --- Again, none of this means that the F-35 will work out well, but most of the public discussion is misguided. [1] http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-guided-munitions-and-battle-networks-progress-and-prospects/ http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-gu...