I was reading the news this morning, and I think the military has finally reached peak irony. We are now delivering the most advanced fighter jet in human history with a literal block of concrete in the nose where the radar should be. It is like buying a Ferrari but the dealership tells you the engine is on backorder, so they just filled the hood with bricks to keep the weight distribution right. It is March twenty-fifth, twenty-twenty-six, and we are officially in the era of the ballast-weighted stealth fighter.
It is a fascinating bit of industrial reality catching up with high-tech ambition, Corn. Herman Poppleberry here, and I have been digging into this all morning. Today's prompt from Daniel is about how F-thirty-five pilots actually learn to fly these things, especially now that the training pipeline is being fed these radar-less jets. Daniel wants to know if these pilots need to be radar physicists on top of being top-tier aviators, given how heavy the electronic warfare side of the job has become.
It is a fair question. If I am flying a hundred-million-dollar jet into a zone where everyone is trying to jam my signal, I would want to know how the microwave oven in the nose actually works. But from what I am seeing, the military is moving in the opposite direction. They do not want you to be a mechanic; they want you to be a manager. They want a quarterback, not a driver.
That is exactly the terminology they are using. The shift from "stick-and-rudder" flying to "mission command" represents the biggest change in aviation since we moved from propellers to jets. But before we get into the cockpit, we have to look at the tarmac. Between March nineteenth and March twenty-fourth, twenty-twenty-six, reports from Breaking Defense and Air and Space Forces Magazine confirmed that the U.S. Marine Corps has started accepting Lot seventeen F-thirty-five-B variants that are essentially incomplete. They have physical ballast in the nose instead of the new A-N-A-P-G-eighty-five radar.
Just to be clear, when we say ballast, we are talking about a weight that mimics the mass of the radar so the plane doesn't flip over or fly weird, right? We are literally flying around with high-tech paperweights. How do you even begin to train a pilot for a fifth-generation mission when the primary sensor is a lump of material?
Well, that is the crux of the crisis. These jets are restricted to pilot training only. They are not "combat-coded," meaning they will never see a front line in their current state. But here is the thing about F-thirty-five training that most people do not realize: it is already incredibly virtual. The Air Force has moved nearly fifty percent of the initial qualifying curriculum into simulators. We are talking about the Full Mission Simulator, or F-M-S. It is an eleven-million-dollar human capital investment just to get one pilot through the pipeline.
Eleven million dollars per pilot. I feel guilty when I leave the lights on in the living room for twenty minutes, and here we are spending the cost of a Malibu mansion on a single person's education. Why is it so expensive?
It is the complexity of the systems and the lack of a safety net. Unlike almost every other fighter in history, there is no two-seater trainer version of the F-thirty-five. There is no "student" seat and "instructor" seat. That pilot’s very first flight in the actual aircraft is a solo mission. There is no instructor behind you to grab the stick if you panic. You spend fifty to a hundred hours in a dark room wearing a four-hundred-thousand-dollar helmet, and then one day they just point at the runway and say, "okay, off you go."
That is terrifying. Your first time actually feeling the G-forces and the real-world physics of a hundred-million-dollar machine, and you are totally alone. No wonder they spend so much time in the virtual world. But Daniel’s question hits on something important: the "radar physicist" part. In the old days, what we call legacy platforms like the F-sixteen or the F-fifteen, the pilot was a driver. You were manually managing the radar tilt, you were tweaking frequencies, and you were trying to keep the plane in the air while simultaneously squinting at a tiny green screen to see if that blip was a bird or a MIG-twenty-nine.
In a legacy jet, you are the processor. You take the raw data and you turn it into a tactical decision. In the F-thirty-five, the aircraft does that for you through what they call "Sensor Fusion." The aircraft has the A-S-Q-two-thirty-nine electronic warfare suite, built by B-A-E Systems, and the Distributed Aperture System, or D-A-S. These systems are constantly "talking" to each other. The sensor fusion architecture takes all that raw data from the radar, the electronic warfare suite, and the cameras, and it just hands the pilot a finished map. It says, "here is the bad guy, here is his missile range, and here is your best path to stay invisible."
It sounds like the plane is doing all the homework and the pilot just gets to sign the top of the test. But that homework is getting harder because the software is failing. We have to talk about the T-R-three software stalls. There was a leaked Pentagon report reviewed by Bloomberg on March sixteenth, twenty-twenty-six, that was pretty damning. It said the Technology Refresh three software—the "backbone" for all these new Block four upgrades—was "predominantly unusable" throughout twenty-twenty-five.
That is the heart of the "radar-less" jet problem. You cannot plug a next-generation A-N-A-P-G-eighty-five radar—which is an A-Y-suh radar, or Active Electronically Scanned Array—into a plane running old software. It is like trying to run the latest high-end video game on a computer from two thousand and ten. The hardware exists, but the operating system just crashes. This instability is why the jets are arriving with ballast. They can fly, they can land, they can do basic maneuvers, but they can't "think" yet.
So, if I am a pilot at the thirty-third Fighter Wing at Eglin Air Force Base right now, and I am getting into one of these Lot seventeen jets, I am basically flying a lobotomized bird. But Daniel asked about the physics. If the plane is supposed to handle the jamming and the frequencies, do I still need to understand the science of the electromagnetic spectrum?
You don't need to be a physicist, but you do need to be a "tactical manager" of that spectrum. Think of it like this: a driver needs to know how to change a tire, but a Formula One driver needs to understand aerodynamics even if they aren't the ones designing the wing. The F-thirty-five pilot has to manage their "signature." If I turn on my radar, I am a giant flashlight in a dark room. I can see everything, but everyone can also see me. The training now focuses on "emissions control." They might use the passive sensors—like the D-A-S or the infrared tracking—to find the enemy without ever turning the radar on.
And that brings us to that four-hundred-thousand-dollar hat. I heard pilots have to spend forty hours in the simulator just to stop feeling sick because of the helmet. Can you explain why looking through the floor of a plane makes your brain want to quit?
It is the Distributed Aperture System. There are six infrared cameras mounted around the fuselage. The helmet projects that video feed directly onto the pilot's visor. When you look down between your boots, the software "stitches" the camera feeds together so you see the ground screaming past at six hundred knots. It is a total sensory disconnect. Your inner ear says you are sitting in a chair, but your eyes say you are floating in mid-air above a battlefield. It takes about forty hours of "sim time" for the human brain to rewire itself to accept that X-ray vision as reality.
It is a high-tech sensory deprivation tank that also gives you god-like powers. But while the U.S. is struggling with software stability and concrete noses, someone else is actually using this thing in combat. We have to talk about the Israeli F-thirty-five-I "Adir." On March fourth, twenty-twenty-six, we saw the first-ever manned air-to-air kill for the platform.
This was a massive milestone. An Israeli Adir—which means "Mighty One" in Hebrew—downed an Iranian Yak-one-thirty over Tehran. We actually touched on the context of this in Episode nine hundred and forty-two, "Stealth Over Tehran," but the technical takeaway here is the "first look, first kill" dominance. The Yak-one-thirty is a capable trainer-combat aircraft, but against an F-thirty-five-I, it might as well have been a kite. The Israeli pilot was able to manage the entire engagement from a distance where the Iranian pilot likely didn't even know he was being tracked until the missile was already off the rail.
That is the "Quarterback" model in action. You see the whole field, you pick your target, and you execute before the defense even knows the play has started. But it highlights a weird gap. You have the Israelis proving the jet is a world-beater in actual combat, while back in the States, Representative Rob Wittman is going public with concerns that we are paying full price for "expensive paperweights."
Wittman is the chairman of the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee, and his critique is centered on "concurrency." This is a term the Pentagon uses for building the airframe while you are still designing the parts that go inside it. The new A-N-A-P-G-eighty-five radar requires a completely redesigned internal bulkhead. This means the older F-thirty-five models cannot be easily retrofitted with the new radar. We are creating a "fragmented fleet" where some jets have the old eyes, some have the new eyes, and some—right now—have no eyes at all.
It sounds like a maintenance nightmare for the year twenty-forty. If you have three hundred jets that all have slightly different internal skeletons and incompatible wiring harnesses, how do you keep them all flying? It feels like we are sacrificing long-term stability for the sake of keeping the production lines moving.
That is exactly what Wittman is worried about. He argues that we are hurting the training pipeline. If a pilot spends a hundred hours in a simulator practicing with a high-end radar, and then he gets into a physical jet that has a concrete block in the nose, he is not getting a representative experience. He is practicing "stick-and-rudder" flying in a jet that was designed to move away from "stick-and-rudder" flying. It creates a paradox: we are training pilots for a mission they cannot actually perform in the aircraft they are currently flying.
Does it really matter, though? If the goal is mission command, and the simulator is ninety-nine percent accurate, isn't the physical jet just there to prove they can land without bouncing? We talked about the "Invisible Battlefield" back in Episode six hundred and twenty-five, about how electronic warfare is the real decider now. If the pilot is just a manager of the electromagnetic spectrum, maybe the concrete nose is fine for a while?
The problem is the "muscle memory" of the brain. In a high-threat environment, you need to trust your sensors implicitly. If you spend your entire training phase knowing that your nose is empty, you are not developing that intuitive sense of what a real radar lock looks like or how to react when the A-S-Q-two-thirty-nine starts fighting back against a jammer. The F-thirty-five is a sensor fusion platform first and a stealth plane second. If you take away the sensors, you have a very expensive, very loud glider that is slightly harder to see on radar.
So, for Daniel's question: no, they don't need to be physicists, but they need to be "data-literate" in a way that would make an I-T administrator sweat. They are managing a firehose of information. Herman, walk me through a "mission command" scenario. If an F-thirty-five pilot is flying into a contested zone, what are they actually doing with their hands and eyes?
Their hands are on the throttle and stick, but they aren't "flying" in the traditional sense. The plane is fly-by-wire; it maintains its own stability. The pilot is using the touchscreens and the helmet interface to prioritize targets. The A-S-Q-two-thirty-nine is scanning the spectrum. If it detects an enemy radar, it doesn't just give a "beep" like an old F-sixteen. It identifies the specific model of the radar, calculates its lethal range, and displays a red ring on the pilot's visor. The pilot then decides: do I jam it, do I fly around it, or do I hand that target data off to a nearby ship or another jet to take the shot?
It is like playing a real-time strategy game while traveling at Mach one point six. But that brings us back to the software. If the T-R-three software is "unusable," then that red ring might not show up, or it might show up in the wrong place. That Bloomberg report from mid-March said the stability issues were so bad that the software was essentially crashing the system.
And that is why the move to virtual training is not just about saving money. A live flight hour costs between thirty-four thousand and forty-two thousand dollars. A simulator session costs about one to two thousand. But more importantly, you cannot actually practice high-end electronic warfare in the open air without everyone in the world listening in. If the Air Force runs a full-scale exercise with all the bells and whistles, Russian and Chinese spy ships and satellites are sucking up every bit of that data. They are learning our frequencies and our jamming patterns.
So the simulator is the only place where you can actually "go loud" without giving away the farm. It is the only place where the "Quarterback" can practice the secret plays.
The simulator is the primary classroom, and the physical jet is becoming the "field trip." But the field trip is currently missing the most important piece of equipment. The Pentagon expects the T-R-three software stability issues to be largely resolved by the fourth quarter of twenty-twenty-six. Once that happens, the plan is to pull out those ballast blocks and slot the A-N-A-P-G-eighty-five radars in.
"Largely resolved" is a very "military-speak" way of saying "we hope it works by Christmas." It feels like a massive gamble. We have this fleet fragmentation where the older jets can't even be retrofitted because of that bulkhead redesign we mentioned. If you didn't build the plane for the new radar from day one, you are stuck with the old one forever.
That is the danger of concurrency. We saw it with the F-twenty-two, and we are seeing it again. But the scale here is different. We are planning to build thousands of these. If we end up with a "lost generation" of training jets that can never be combat-coded because their internal structure is incompatible with the Block four upgrades, that is a multi-billion dollar oversight.
So, the takeaways for Daniel. One: F-thirty-five pilots are cognitive managers, not just pilots. They are prioritizing data over "stick-and-rudder" skills. Two: The training is moving virtual because of cost, but also because of "operational security"—you can't practice the real stuff in public. And three: The "radar-less" jets are a symptom of a procurement system that is building hardware faster than the software can keep up.
And don't forget the "Quarterback" model. The Israeli success with the Adir proved that when the system works, it is untouchable. The "first look, first kill" philosophy is real. The problem is that the gap between that success in Israel and the training jets at Eglin Air Force Base is widening. We are in this awkward "teenage phase" of the program where the body has grown faster than the brain.
It is a weird spot to be in, March twenty-twenty-six. We have the best pilots in the world training on the best software in the world, but they're waiting for the hardware to catch up to the code. Or rather, they're waiting for the code to stop crashing so the hardware can be installed. I still can't get over the concrete nose. It’s the ultimate "fake it till you make it" strategy.
It is the reality of modern military industrialism. Northrop Grumman is working as fast as they can on the A-N-A-P-G-eighty-five, but when you are dealing with the kind of precision required for an AESA radar, you cannot just "move fast and break things." Unless you are breaking the budget, as you like to say.
Well, I think we've painted a pretty clear picture for Daniel. If you want to fly an F-thirty-five, start practicing your data management and get used to looking through your own feet. And maybe bring a book for the simulator, because you're going to be spending a lot of time in that dark room.
It is a wild time to be watching the skies. Big thanks to Daniel for the prompt—this was a great excuse to dive into the technical weeds of the Block four upgrades and the reality of the Lot seventeen deliveries.
As always, thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the show running smoothly while we go off on these tangents. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power the backend of this show. We literally couldn't do the processing required for this collaboration without them.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this dive into military tech, go ahead and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really does help people find the show.
We will be back soon with more of Daniel's weird prompts. Until then, keep an eye on the horizon. Or just look through the floor if you have the right helmet. Catch you later.
Goodbye.
