One of the OT's favorite thing to hate - the F-35 - is actually doing quite well

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Media coverage of new weapons being developed for America’s military is almost always negative. If a program is behind schedule, or over budget, or exhibiting shortfalls in performance, you’re sure to hear about it. If everything is going fine, there’s no coverage — at least, not in the national media.

Which is why you never hear much anymore about the F-35 fighter. The F-35 program will replace the Cold War tactical aircraft of three U.S. military services and a dozen allies with a family of multi-role fighters designed to be at least five times better than legacy planes at defeating threats in the air and on the ground. It’s a really ambitious program — in fact, one of the greatest engineering challenges of this generation.

And it is doing fine. The cost of both the airframe and the engine is declining in each successive production lot, with the most common variant — the Air Force version — likely to cost no more than the legacy planes it replaces. Each of the fighter’s three variants is delivering all of its promised performance gains in flight testing and operations at eight bases (soon to be 25 bases). Nearly 200 planes have been delivered. 300 pilots and 3,000 maintainers have been trained. To quote Pentagon managers in March testimony before Congress,

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The F-35 program is executing well across the entire spectrum of acquisition, to include development and design, flight test, production, fielding and base stand-up, sustainment of fielded aircraft, and building a global sustainment enterprise…Our overall assessment is that the program is making solid progress across the board and shows improvement each day while continuing to manage emerging issues and mitigate programmatic risks.”

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And it isn’t just the managers who are singing F-35's praises. The pilots are impressed. I heard a senior Marine officer say this summer that his service doesn’t like to make pilots in older fighters fly exercises against the F-35 because it’s too demoralizing — the F-35s always win. Navy pilots say landing the highly automated F-35 on a carrier deck is much easier and safer than it was with Cold War planes.

An Air Force pilot quoted in one of the service’s local outlets at Eglin Air Force Base reported that flying against the F-35 in training exercises is like being blindfolded because the plane is invisible to radar: “We turned hot, drove for about 30 seconds and we were dead, just like that. We never even saw [the F-35].” That’s precisely the kind of performance military planners were looking for 20 years ago when they proposed a family of stealthy fighters with integrated sensors and secure networking that could deliver superior situational awareness to pilots.

So maybe I’m just overly impressed because several of the companies on the F-35 team contribute to my think tank or are consulting clients. But I would think that when the Pentagon’s biggest program is making steady progress and exhibiting breakthrough performance gains, that would be considered newsworthy at places like the New York Times and CNN.

Apparently it isn’t. The national media are ignoring the fact that F-35 is delivering on everything that was promised — just as they ignored when the Navy variant had the most successful initial sea trials ever in 2014, and when the projected life-cycle cost of the program fell by $60 billion in a single year in 2015. I wrote both of those stories up for Forbes when they broke, but if you are a casual consumer of news then you probably still think F-35 is a troubled program that doesn’t work as intended.

I’ve actually heard smart people whom I respect say that recently, even though it’s completely untrue. All three variants of the plane — the Air Force version that many of our allies will buy, the Marine Corps version that can land on a dime, the Navy version that will greatly increase the reach and lethality of carrier air wings — are performing magnificently. So where are the news stories?

I’ve seen this happen before. The revolutionary MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor was dogged by concerns about safety long after it had become the safest rotorcraft in the Marine fleet. To this day, few national media outlets have made the effort to explain how an aircraft that combines the speed and range of a plane with the vertical agility of a helicopter has transformed combat operations. They were never reluctant to report the MV-22's real or imagined faults, but they just don’t seem to care that Osprey is now a smashing success.


So why should the F-35 fighter be any different? Even though it has surmounted its developmental challenges to be praised by pilots and even though its success is pivotal to preserving America’s warfighter edge in future conflicts, it just isn’t news unless something goes wrong. If you want to understand why many voters think America isn’t great anymore even though it is the greatest nation in history, you might begin by contemplating what is considered news in the national media.

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