Computer games

So when I climbed aboard the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter demonstrator during its visit to Lockheed Martin’s swish new Canberra offices in May, I felt instantly at home.

But once I pushed the throttle forward and tilted the plane skyward, it quickly became clear that this notional fighter was far easier to fly than anything I’d piloted before.

Point the little circle in the middle of the HUD where you wanted to go, and you could take your hands off the controls and have a cup of tea – the F-35s ingenious computer will keep the plane flying straight and true.

Head for those two unsuspecting bogies wheeling over the desert mountains, wait until they came in range and unleash a couple of missiles. Since you were stealthy and they were not, the game is over almost before it begins.

If I were to offer a comparison, the F-35 reminded me of F-117 Stealth Fighter I bought from Microprose around 1992. To be honest, Stealth Fighter was one of the most boring flight simulators I ever played.

Since none of your enemies could really see you, all you did was fly from A to B, drop some bombs and fly back.

The only hard part was landing. But on the F-35, even that isn’t much of a problem – the fighter’s computers will automatically adjust your flight speed as you angle down – all you have to do is keep yourself on course.

This relative ease of flying is, of course, one of the F-35’s main selling points. Sadly, the idea is not to make it possible for average blokes to fly the free world’s most expensiveever weapon system at the weekend.

Rather, it’s to allow highly trained fighter pilots to pay less attention to keeping the plane in the air and put more focus on that holy grail of contemporary warfighting, “battlefield management” – sifting, sorting and making best use of the vast amounts of information running through the F-35’s computer brain.

After I had nonchalantly ruined the day of those two enemy fighters over the notional Nevada desert, Lockheed Martin’s chief test pilot for the F-35 program Al Norman told me: “Even a new guy can be King Kong right off the bat in this airplane because it’s so easy to fly. ” “This allows you to think differently, to do things we’ve never done before. It allows you to become a tactician rather than a technician. ” With F-16s, F/A-18s and other fourthgeneration fighters the F-35 is due to replace, reaching that Zen point where pilot and aircraft become one took thousands of hours behind the controls. Now, according to Al, it’s almost the starting point.

“I’m not going to say that you become the borg but you’re working within the system, you’re part of the system. The real training comes in the art of assimilation, understanding what these sensors are doing and what they’re telling you. ” Before coming to the F-35 program, Al spent 12 years with Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor.

Before that, he flew F-16s and F-4s for the US Air Force.

So I wondered whether this new breed of fighter, which seems so obviously geared toward the Xbox generation, didn’t strike him as something of a diminution of the role of the fighter pilot. So I began to ask a question about a paradigm shift in the relationship of man and machine.

But he cut me off, laughing: “You’re asking me if it’s a manly fighter?” Of course, being a modern fellow, I wouldn’t have put it that way, but sure.

“I love flying and I love flying this airplane.

It’s an extremely responsive airplane.

It can do all the things those other fighters can do. But the tendency for experienced pilots is to come in and say: ‘Oh good, here’s a new toy. Now let me do what I’m used to doing with it’.

“So at first they fly it like their old airplane.

There’s an adjustment, it takes a little time. It’s just a matter of them accepting it and learning what it can do. ” But for Al, at least, the conversion seemed complete. “I feel more a part of this airplane than I ever did before,” he said. “I become one with the airplane. I become one of the computers in the airplane. I can do things I could never do before. ” Listening to him speak, as I sat at the controls and the F-35 piloted itself above the make-believe desert, it was hard not to be struck by what he was saying – how little space seemed to remain between video game and reality.

And by how the F-35 seems likely to be the last warplane with room for a pilot in the cockpit.