Lockheed Martin says the plane was “fully capable” right up to the moment it wasn’t.
You ever notice how the most advanced piece of machinery in the history of aviation—an F-35 stealth fighter, capable of outmaneuvering missiles and vaporizing enemies halfway across the globe—can still be grounded by the same problem that kills Buicks in Buffalo?
Frozen hydraulic fluid.
That’s right, the world’s most expensive lawn dart gets taken out by Jack Frost.
And what’s the pilot doing while this marvel of military engineering wheezes and sputters? He’s on a 50-minute conference call. In the cockpit. At 30,000 feet.
I mean, really—what is this, a jet fighter or a WeWork office with wings? You picture the guy juggling throttle controls in one hand and muting himself with the other because some Lockheed engineer is saying, “If you could just circle back to slide 12, we’ll optimize your landing gear experience.”
Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn’t like. Well, I’ll say this: I’ve never met a conference call I didn’t hate.
Fifty minutes of five engineers and one pilot trying to solve a crisis that should’ve been fixed before takeoff.
And meanwhile the plane’s worth more than the GDP of a small Caribbean island, slowly transforming into a very expensive bonfire on the Alaskan tundra.
This bird isn’t just pricey—it’s a Pentagon pet project, a flying cash register for Lockheed Martin.
The F-35 accounts for 30% of Lockheed’s revenue, which means that when it crashes, half of Wall Street catches a cold. It’s the only plane in history where the smoke plume spells out “shareholder value.”
And let’s not forget our friends across the pond. Britain spent £11 billion on their F-35 program and got back a third of a working fleet. Imagine buying three Rolls-Royces and finding out only one of them has wheels.
But let’s circle back—because I feel like I’m on that conference call now. The sensors froze, the hydraulics froze, the pilot tried two “touch and go” landings—touch, go, boom.
And the plane’s own computer decides, “Oh, we’re on the ground now, guess I’ll shut down the controls.”
It’s like your iPhone autocorrecting your text into gibberish, except instead of sending “ducking” to your mother, you’re ejecting from a $200 million fireball.
And what did the Air Force conclude? “Inadequate oversight of hydraulic fluid distribution.”
That’s not a cause, that’s a government haiku. Translation: nobody checked the antifreeze.
Why in God’s name are we paying billions for aircraft that can’t survive winter in Alaska? Did nobody think it might get cold up there?
It’s Alaska!
If Eskimos can keep a dogsled running, maybe we don’t need stealth jets that collapse like a cheap tent at the first frost.
Well, we’ve finally proven it—our wars are run by the same people who schedule your Zoom calls.
The only difference is that when your meeting crashes, you don’t need a parachute.
