I tested the game-changing F-35 stealth fighter, an incredible jet that demands more than just great flying skills from its pilots

• Billie Flynn spent years as a pilot in the testing program for the F-35 stealth fighter jet.
• He said the aircraft was very easy to fly and compared operating it to playing a video game.
• The fighter jet, he said, is incredibly capable and changed the understanding of what's possible in aerial warfare.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Billie Flynn, a former Royal Canadian Air Force combat commander and Lockheed Martin employee who was involved with the F-35 stealth fighter program for around 20 years. It's been edited for length and clarity.

Getting to fly the F-35, for me, involved years, years of anticipation to get to that point. 

There was a significant level of excitement to finally get into the aircraft after all the years of preparation and also hundreds upon hundreds of hours of simulation that I had been a part of as the aircraft was being developed. I was involved with the F-35 program for essentially 20 years after coming over to Lockheed Martin from the Eurofighter Typhoon program. To finally get in the airplane was enormously exciting.

Compared to all the many aircraft that I have flown, there were very few surprises when I finally got to fly the F-35 because our simulators were so realistic that other than the actual feeling of the thrust of the F-35, everything else about the aircraft I had already experienced. And I knew it so much better than any other aircraft in history.

Lucky enough to join the program early

The F-35, from the beginning, promised to be a franchise program with enormous potential to change everything that we know of about aerial combat, and really take the lead in fifth-generation warfare started by the F-22.

And what was intriguing about F-35 was really the three variants and the different capabilities of each of the airframes, but the commonality for the three variants is that the F-35 is such a game-changer as a fighting vehicle and so transformative in what it would expect from the pilot and what the aircraft would do in the air. I was lucky enough to join the program really early in its development and play a significant role in the formal testing of F-35.

In every airplane in the world, you have to be able to get up and safely fly the aircraft and maneuver it with the capabilities you expect. You need to go as fast as you promised, to pull as many Gs as you promised, to be as easy and safe to fly as you promised when you designed it. And that's the part of testing that I was involved in, because then after that, we have to do the real mission of a fighter pilot.

Formal testing lasted 10 years. And on any given day, test pilots would go out and brief with a team of 30 to 40 engineers who would be in a control room, much like you think of when you think of a space shuttle mission, engineers in a control room monitoring screens that looked at all the intricate parts of the airplane while we, the test pilots, were in the air, pushing the envelope of what the aircraft was supposed to do — to make it go faster, to make it be more maneuverable, to make it pull more Gs.

Meanwhile, a team of engineers would be in a control room monitoring the aircraft to make sure that it was behaving like we expected to and that the aircraft was staying together in one piece. While that seems pretty matter of fact and pretty simple now that this aircraft has been flying for a long time, it was certainly new territory in the early days of testing the F-35.

Remarkably easy to fly

A pilot's flying skills — the actual ability to fly an aircraft — has always been so incredibly important. And everyone prides themselves in how good they are as pilots. And by the way, not everyone's the same. So there really are pilots who are better than others, but as a test pilot, that flying skill is what keeps us alive. We need to be good at it. 

Yet in the F-35, after so many years of development, it is a remarkably easy aircraft to fly. And flying skills are much less important in F-35 than in any airplane ever before.

The massive contrast with previous aircraft is that a pilot has such a significant cognitive workload to manage everything that is displayed on the screens in front of him or her, that the real trick for the F-35 is managing all of the information that is presented, not actually flying the F-35 airframe.

Most sophisticated video game ever

It's easy to fly the airplane. It's incredibly difficult to be good, to be great, at managing all the information that's presented. And that's the real job when it comes to operating the F-35.

By an order of magnitude, it is the most sophisticated video game that anyone has ever been exposed to. So you can be a great plot pilot, but that's not what's going to make you amazing in an F-35. It's how well you can manage incredible systems and information that's given to the pilot, how well you can manage the "video games."

One of the reasons we still need test pilots and test engineers and we still need to go out and do test flying is because despite having the best simulators in history and the most amazing analytical tools ever, we never know for sure what's going to happen until we fly up in what I call 'God's wind tunnel.'

I had a number of real close calls in the F-35 where, in spite of the best of predictions, the aircraft did not do what we expected and nearly killed us or nearly killed me.

Greatest surprise

One surprise for everyone was the first ever F-35 air show. I demonstrated the aircraft in 2017 at the Paris Air Show, the most important air show in the world. And I say this because everyone had low expectations for the kind of air show the F-35 could fly because they had such low expectations for its power and its maneuverability. 

For the Paris Air Show, I developed a routine that lasted essentially six minutes and universally for everyone, whether they were fighter pilots, test pilots, company executives, competitors, or our enemies, everyone was astonished and completely blown away by the maneuverability and the capabilities of the F-35. And to me, that was the greatest surprise of any time in my program was the air show, because there is not a soul that actually imagined that the F-35 could be as spectacular as what was shown in Paris.

What is most interesting now is, as the thousandth F-35 flies, just how the aircraft has proven to be so incredibly capable and how it has changed everything that any of us knows about aerial warfare. It has proven to be more effective, more lethal, more survivable than any of us ever imagined would be the case. And I think that's thanks to incredible engineers, incredible designers and incredible military fighter pilots who were instrumental in developing the airplane.