The Pentagon’s F-35 Office Has No Idea What an F-35 Looks Like
Military.com | By Jared Keller
Published November 11, 2024
You might think that, given the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office’s singular responsibility of ensuring the U.S. military’s F-35 fleet is ready to fight tonight, the service members working for that office would be intimately familiar with at least a handful of the passing details of the aircraft, no matter how far from an engineering bay their job may take them. Sadly, that is not the case.
On Veterans Day, the F-35 JPO posted a seemingly-innocuous (and since-deleted) image of an F-35 to X, formerly known as Twitter, in a tribute to the service and sacrifice of American veterans – except that the aircraft featured does not look like an F-35.
Here’s the JPO image in a screenshot for posterity:
F-35 tweet
And here is a photo of an Air Force F-35 from the Wisconsin Air National Guard’s 115th Fighter Wing published by the U.S. military in 2023:
F-35 in flight
We have many questions. Mainly: Where did those twin engines on the JPO image come from? The F-35 uses a single Pratt & Whitney F135 turbofan engine (in two different variants, depending on the aircraft), whereas the fighter in the JPO tweet appears to resemble the twin-enginer Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) J-35 fighter jet more than anything else
https://www.military.com/off-duty/pentagons-f-35-office-has-no-idea-what-f-35-looks.html
