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April 11, 2025
A new stealth fighter has been stitched together from the parts of two wrecked planes. Frankenjet has joined the US Air Force and is now fully operational.
The plane was made from the parts of two NZ$130 million F-35s that were damaged in accidents.
The US Air Force has launched a stealth fighter stitched together from the parts of two wrecked planes.
The plane, dubbed ‘Frankenjet’ in the US, was made from the parts of two F-35s that were damaged in accidents, and is now fully operational, CNN reported on Thursday.
The first plane suffered “catastrophic engine failure” which resulted in a fire that burned the rear two thirds of its body in 2014.
The second plane was “severely damaged” after its nose landing gear failed.
“Rather than writing off both jets as a loss… teams made a bold decision in 2022 to remove the nose from AF-27 and put it onto AF-211 to maximise savings and add back an operational aircraft to the fleet,” a report said, according to reporting by CNN.
Lockheed Martin engineer Scott Taylor said aircraft sections can be de-mated and re-mated theoretically, but it had never been done before.
“This is the first F-35 Frankin-bird to date. This is history,” he told CNN.
The repair took two and a half years and Frankenjet took off for its first flight in January.
“The rebuilt aircraft’s first flight was flown to the edges of the performance envelope, and it performed like it was fresh from the initial production line,” lead engineer Jeffrey Jensen told CNN.
The US military told CNN that the Frankenjet project saved the Pentagon NZ$109 million over the cost of a new replacement aircraft, valued at NZ$130m.
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