F-35 test pilot shares what it’s like to jump from flying an old F-16 to Lockheed Martin’s newest 5th-gen stealth fighter

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F-35 test pilot shares what it’s like to jump from flying an old F-16 to Lockheed Martin’s newest 5th-gen stealth fighter

Business Insider recently sat down with a test pilot for the F-35 stealth fighter jet.

She explained what it was like to jump from flying the older F-16 to the fifth-generation aircraft.

The biggest transition in the F-35 was the amount of information presented to the pilot.

A test pilot who made the jump from the now fifty-year-old F-16 to the new F-35 stealth fighter told Business Insider that it is a wildly different experience.

Think about the informational overload you would get from swapping out a decades-old pickup truck for a modern Tesla. There’s a lot of extra information pilots get from the F-35, which is equipped with a suite of new technologies compared to legacy aircraft.

Monessa Balzhiser, call sign “Siren,” is a pilot who has had the opportunity to move over to the new jet, working as an F-35 test pilot at Lockheed Martin’s production facility in Forth Worth, Texas, following years flying the F-16 for the US Air Force.

The

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, a Lockheed Martin airframe originally manufactured by General Dynamics, is a single-engine, multi-role aircraft that took its first flight over 50 years ago. The fourth-generation fighter jet was developed for the US Air Force but is now in service with more than two dozen militaries around the world, including — as of last year — the Ukrainian armed forces.

The F-16 was revolutionary from an

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perspective, emerging as the first fly-by-wire fighter for improved air-to-air combat capabilities. But in the age of stealth aircraft and higher-end surface-to-air threats, the F-16, even with the upgrades the fighter has gotten over the years to ensure it still packs a punch, is losing its once formidable edge.

A US Air Force F-16 fighter jet takes off from an airbase in Germany.Photo by Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images

The much-newer

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Joint Strike Fighter is a supersonic stealth aircraft that took its first flight nearly 20 years ago. The platform has evolved tremendously over the years.

The aircraft has faced criticism amid developmental setbacks,

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, and rising costs (the expected lifetime cost of the program is now over $2 trillion), but the jet is constantly being upgraded and reworked for improved capability. Right now,

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compares, but new jets are coming out in rival nations. China, for instance, unveiled a number of new aircraft designs late last year, including what some suspect was a sixth-gen fighter prototype.

“The F-35 — we’re continuing to develop it,” Siren said.

“You’re going to see threats — adversaries — evolving,” so the priority is maintaining the advantage “to ensure we can come home safe,” she added.

The F-35 is the second fifth-generation fighter jet operated by the US after the F-22 Raptor and comes in three variants flown by the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. Developed and produced as part of a multinational partnership, many American allies operate the jet, with more looking to do so in the future.

Siren flew the F-16 in the Air Force for 13 years, a tenure that included several combat tours. At Lockheed Martin, she works as the chief production pilot for the F-35.

Test pilots are the first people to actually fly the F-35 off the factory floor. The fighter will get airborne several times — the first two or three flights are with the company — before the US government goes through all its checks to make sure the jet is all good and ready to be sold.

For Siren, the biggest difference when she made the transition from the F-16 to the new F-35 was the sheer amount of information being presented to the pilot.

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A US Marine Corps F-35 is seen in San Diego, California.Kevin Carter/Getty Images

Siren said that in the F-16, “we had some of that information, but it was all shown on multiple different displays or formats.”

In the past, the pilot had to calculate how to use certain tactics or interpret the presented battlespace in their heads, but the F-35 does all of that for the pilot, allowing them to focus their efforts more on the ******* mission picture. Another F-35 test pilot previously told *** that it can be difficult to get good at

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, comparing the jet to a sophisticated video game.

Siren said the biggest surprise of the F-35 was its flight controls in low-speed scenarios. The fifth-generation fighter jet is equipped with a better sensor suite, situational awareness, and data fusion capabilities than the F-16. Those advanced capabilities allow it to perform as more than a fighter jet.

The advantage of the F-16 has always been in its speed and turn rate, she told ***. “However, all the flight controls and the computer that runs the flight controls on the F-35 allows me to intercept — on the same mission — a slow, low Cessna going 80 knots to a high, fast flyer going Mach 1.2,” which is over 900 mph.

That helpful ability and “the high angle of attack that the F-35 can perform was what caught me off guard coming from the F-16,” she said.

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