At 12:44 p.m. CST on 15 December 2006, an angular grey shape lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant and climbed to 15,000 feet over Texas. Chief test pilot Jon Beesley, who had once chased the F-22’s first flight in an F-16, was at the controls of the F-35 Lightning II—an aircraft destined to replace the F-16, A-10, AV-8B Harrier, and F/A-18 across three U.S. services and numerous allies. The F-35’s story began with the X-35 demonstrators: the X-35A first flew on 24 October 2000, and the X-35B made history on 23 June 2001 with the first shaft-driven lift-fan vertical landing. The Joint Strike Fighter program, launched in 1996, demanded that a single airframe serve as a conventional fighter (F-35A), a short-takeoff/vertical-landing strike platform (F-35B), and a carrier-based jet (F-35C). Powered by the Pratt & Whitney F135—the most powerful fighter engine ever built—the F-35 fuses stealth, sensor integration, and data-linking into a single cockpit. The aircraft’s 12,000-hour flight-test program was billed as the most comprehensive in military aviation history. By the time the first operational squadron stood up, the Lightning II had already rewritten the economics of allied air power.