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?

- Kevin Gray, photo by Spencer Lowell

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 stealth, 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.

Stenger explains it like this: In older jets, he has to manually operate things like radar (pointing it at the ground to search for missiles shot at him, or at the sky, to look for enemy planes). He has to monitor a high-speed data link for plane-to-plane communications and texts from ground troops. He or his back-seat weapons guy must pick through data before locking on a target and firing. “You can imagine that’s pretty time consuming and requires a lot of cognitive processing,” Stenger says.