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?
By Kevin Gray Posted December 22, 2015
Spencer Lowell
On 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 stealthy, 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.
Spencer Lowell
The single-seat F-35 does much of this for him, by fusing and automating dozens of sensors. So, for instance, if his heat sensor picks up an enemy missile headed his way, a chime will sound, “like a doorbell” he says, and a computer voice will say, “Missile left, nine o’clock.” When Stenger looks there, a green circle pops up on his helmet’s face shield, pinpointing the missile’s site, along with its speed and time to impact. Just by looking at the circle Stenger can aim his weapon and fire at the enemy, then outrun the missile. Six external cameras also capture a 360-degree view outside the jet and feed it to his face shield. If Stenger looks down he can see through the cockpit floor to the ground.
Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that makes the F-35, will deliver thousands of these jets over the next few decades to the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The USAF will take 1,763, and Stenger will help train the aspiring F-35 pilots set to come through Luke’s sand-colored gates. With more than 200 flight hours in the F-35 so far, he knows it as well as any Air Force pilot here. When he’s not on the flight line, he spends days in classified briefing rooms, reading tactical manuals on the F-35’s capabilities. He can tick off the jet’s attributes like a new crush.
Stenger and most others in the military see the plane as the key to America’s continued air superiority, and yet it could also spell the beginning of the end for an iconic American profession. The F-35 is so high-tech, so automated, so smart, so connected, that in May, the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, declared: The F-35 “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”
“If another manned fighter comes up, great. If not, that stinks for the next generation."
To Mabus and others, the job of a fighter pilot has changed over the years. No longer do pilots sneak up on each other’s tails, train their crosshairs, and fire. They glean information from screens that look like iPads or from helmet displays. Electronic sensors, networked warfare, and air-to-air radar-guided missiles can take down enemy fighters from 100 miles away. Most of the time, pilots in a conflict never see one another at all. If that’s the case, many argue, why not have pilots on the ground—scanning the same screens and pushing the same buttons—out of harm’s way?
Stenger has considered this question before. As a pilot in Afghanistan, he flew more than 330 combat hours, doing things like blowing up Taliban fighters and safe houses, taking out missiles launchers, and providing cover for coalition forces. And yet, in his nine years in the Air Force, he’s never been in a dogfight or even encountered an enemy fighter—or any sort of enemy aircraft. When faced with the argument for unmanned fighter jets, he takes a philosophical line. “I wouldn’t offer up a conjecture because I’m a captain, and my job is to fly the F-35,” he says. “And that’s what I’m going to do. If another manned fighter comes up, great. If not, well that kind of stinks for the next generation because they’ll never get to know what being a fighter pilot is like.”
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Luke is typically a busy Air Force base. Every 15 minutes, the desert air rumbles with the sound of jets taking off and landing. For the past 32 years, it has served as a major training base for the F-16 Fighting Falcons that sit in endless rows beneath sun canopies on the flight line. Those planes will be phased out as the F-35s arrive and squeeze them for space.
During flight training, Stenger’s students learn many skills, and dogfighting is still among them. With 1.7 million acres of Sonoran Desert and 57,000 cubic miles of airspace at his disposal, Stenger can orchestrate the kind of tactical dogfight scenarios seen in Top Gun. “We can set up 100 miles apart for air-to-air combat training,” says Stenger, seated in a bare second-floor office, which he moved into in July. In training, Stenger would pit two of his F-35 students against four F-16s fighter pilots. (This is the same class of fighter jet that Russia and China possess, and the type that could face off against the F-35.) “You employ the tactics you were taught, and you will kill them before they ever see you,” Stenger says, “well beyond visual range.”
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