"I can tell you that it is by far the best platform I've ever flown in my entire life, and at that you would have to take me on my word."

In August 2016, Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, declared initial operational capability (IOC) for a squadron of F-35A's — a significant breakthrough for the weapons program, which has been beset by design flaws, cost overruns, and technical challenges.

"Initial operating capability is a huge milestone because what you're saying is this is not necessarily just a developmental airplane anymore. This is a real thing. We could on that day have sent those airplanes into combat the next day," Pleus said.

Since IOC, the US Air Force has trained more than 120 pilots in 100 F-35As, accruing a combined total of 75,000 hours of flight time.

'One our adversaries should fear'

(On February 16, 2012, the first external-weapons-test mission was flown by an F-35A at Edwards Air Force Base.Lockheed Martin)

In preparing to sit down with Pleus, I recalled comments he made at the Air Force Association's annual conference in September. "In terms of lethality and survivability, the aircraft is absolutely head and shoulders above our legacy fleet of fighters currently fielded," he said at the time. "This is an absolutely formidable airplane, and one our adversaries should fear."

So I followed up, asking him, as one of the few people who have flown both an F-16 and an F-35, what's it like to engage an F-35?

"You never knew I was there," he said with a smile. "You literally would never know I'm there. I flew the F-35 against other fourth-generation platforms and we killed them and they never even saw us."

"If you were to engage an F-35 in say, a visual dogfight capability," he added, "the capabilities of the F-35 are absolutely eye-watering compared to a fourth-generation fighter."

"The airplane has unbelievable maneuvering characteristics that make it completely undefeatable in an air-to-air environment. So if it's a long-range contact, you'll never see me and you'll die, and if it's within visual-range contact you'll see me and you're gonna die and you're gonna die very quickly," said Pleus, who has 153 flight hours in the F-35.

(An F-35B from Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501, flies near its base a MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina.Lockheed Martin)

To date, the US is slated to buy 2,443 F-35s at an acquisition cost of $379 billion. In December, the Joint Program Office released the finalized price for the most recent production contract for the fifth-generation jet.

After a little more than 14 months of negotiations between the Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin, the ninth Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP-9) contract for 57 F-35 jets was valued at $6.1 billion. The LRIP-9, which is essentially the ninth batch of jets, includes 34 jets for the US and 23 for five other countries.

Here’s the price tag for the latest batch of F35s »

The US Air Force, getting the lion's share of F-35s, bought 42 planes in LRIP-9 and paid $102.1 million a jet, which includes aircraft, engine, and fee.

By comparison, that $102.1 million is down from the previous contract by 5.5%, which equates to $5.9 million.

(Six F-35As at Edwards Air Force Base are seen before a flight test on May 27, 2011.Lockheed Martin)

The first step on the F-35's journey to becoming the centerpiece of fusion warfare began on October 26, 2001, when the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth more than $200 billion to build the next-generation stealth strike-fighter.

The Pentagon's request was colossal: Develop a supersonic fifth-generation aircraft with the capability to replace four existing kinds of US military aircraft but also to be used by multiple international partners.

What's more, design three variants of the fighter in order to accommodate the unique needs of each sister-service branch: the F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the amphibious Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy.

Having already engineered stealth aircraft — F-117A Nighthawk and F-22 Raptor — Lockheed Martin was playing on their home court.

(A view of the F-35 production line at Lockheed Martin's facility in Fort Worth, Texas.Courtesy of Lockheed Martin)

The cradle of the F-35, with its slick floors, high ceilings, brightly painted assembly areas, and machinery hum, is where I saw the Joint Strike Fighter for the first time.

Riding in a golf cart through Lockheed Martin's mile-long production facility in Fort Worth, Texas, I watched the neatly organized bins of nuts and bolts, jet wings, and sophisticated electronics evolve into a seafoam green airframe.

Once assembled, the planes roll into a windowless complex devoted to draping the F-35 in its invisibility cloak. "This room is the most advanced painting facility in the world," retired US Air Force pilot and F-35 simulation instructor Rick Royer told me as we entered the Aircraft Final Finishes bay.

It's here where the jet receives its highly classified stealth technology that makes it almost invisible to enemy radar. It's here where the US military leaps ahead of emerging threats. It's here where the most expensive weapons system in American history is crafted.

And whatever its shortcomings, developing a platform of this magnitude is undoubtedly impressive.

'The only experts in the F-35 business, are those that fix, maintain, and fly the F-35'

(Maj. Gen. Jay Silveria, US Air Force Warfare Center commander, walks out to an F-35A with Lt. Col. Matt Renbarger, 58th Fighter Squadron commander, on September 26, 2014, at Eglin Air Force Base.US Air Force photo)
At the aforementioned Air Force Association's annual conference, Pleus sat on a panel alongside

commander of Air Combat Command, Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, F-35A Joint Strike Fighter Program executive officer Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, and commander of the 388th Fighter Wing Col. David Lyons.

Pleus began his remarks, his delivery blunt and confident, "I'm hopeful that as we continue to grow this fleet, we all take the opportunity to form opinions on this airplane from experts. And the only experts in the F-35 business, are those that fix, maintain, and fly the F-35 on a day-to-day basis."

"Whether they be at Eglin, Luke, Edwards, Nellis, or Hill, if you go and talk to them they will give you the ground truth. If you are forming your opinions by somebody that has not fixed or flown the airplane I would tell you you're wrong."

The room couldn't have been more quiet.

(Gen. Hawk Carlisle, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus and Col. David Lyons, speak during a panel at the Air Force Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference on September 20, 2016.Tech. Sgt. Anthony Nelson Jr./US Air Force)

Sitting at the head of a conference table in his office, Pleus had the same intensity I remember from the panel discussion at AFA.

(An F-35A performs a test flight on March 28, 2013.Lockheed Martin)

"This airplane is out there."

"We got real pilots flying it, real maintenance guys working on it, and if you ask the experts — and my definition of an expert is you either flew it, fought against it, or you fixed it — if one of those three things you are now considered an expert on the F-35," Pleus said.

We spent a day with the people who fly and fix the F-35. Here's what they have to say about the most expensive weapons project in history »

"If you haven't done any of those things, go find one of those people and ask them what they think about the airplane, and they'll tell you the truth."

At first blush, the F-35 is easy to criticize, with its much chronicled cost overruns, faulty ejection seats, and helmet-display issues, among other problems.

While I won't rehash, Pleus noted that the F-35A's 75,000 flying hours didn't go off without a hitch and addressed some of the program's more substantial setbacks in 2016.

Successes and setbacks

(Airmen from the 33rd Maintenance Group perform checks on an F-35A Lightning II prior to a hot pit refueling session at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.US Air Force Photo)

"The biggest setback was an instability issue on 3i software," Pleus said thoughtfully.

"The instability was not found out until we released the software to our test community, and they found that the fusion system onboard the airplane with the sensors was having trouble talking to each other."

(An F-35A test flight at Edwards Air Force Base on May 15, 2012.Lockheed Martin)

"So one computer is trying to talk and the other computer is trying to talk at the same time and they basically shut themselves down," Pleus explained.

The 3i software hang-up, which took about four months to solve, caused a delay that will impact the installment of the 3F software, which delivers the plane's full warfare capability.

Another setback, which Pleus labeled a "success," was the polyalphaolefin insulation issue discovered during an inspection at Nellis Air Force Base.

"Polyalphaolefin is kind of a coolant that runs through a system of pipes throughout the entire airplane to cool off the computers and some of the hardware onboard the plane. There was a vendor that produced the wrong insulation on one of the pipes and that insulation swole up and cracked and came apart from the pipes," Pleus said.

The problem came less than two months after the Air Force declared IOC and resulted in the temporary grounding of 15 jets.

"I think personally that that is a pretty big success story for two reasons, the first one was that we caught it very early in the process. So through very rigorous inspections that we have on the airplanes from a mechanical standpoint, it was noted very early."

"The second thing — because the way the program is built we knew exactly what airplanes by tail number by exact location, cause it was actually two manufacturers — so we knew which manufacturer had the good pipe and which manufacturer had the bad pipe and we knew exactly where it was."

"You say that is a success but what would you say to people who call that a significant setback?" I asked.

"My counter to that would be that there was absolutely no setback. The airplanes that we had that were operational and flying. We had a total of 13 of them that were United States Air Force airplanes and two of them were Norwegian airplanes and they were scattered at Hill Air Force Base, Nellis Air Force Base, and Luke Air Force Base. Those airplanes, once the insulation fault was discovered, while they didn't fly for a period of time there was no operational impact from a training perspective or a combat-capability perspective."

"There was also additional airplanes that Lockheed Martin had in the assembly line process that had these insulation issues associated with it and the assembly line never stopped. That would be in my mind a huge setback to the program, what they did was continued those airplanes and fixed them as they came out."

"So those airplanes will all be delivered a few months late but still on schedule for the release of the airplanes. So from my standpoint, that bore no cost to the program. The United States Air Force, Department of the Navy and the Joint Programming Office did not pay a single penny for that."

(A F-35B aircraft approaches a KC-130J Super Hercules aircraft to refuel as it flies over the North Sea, having taken off from RAF Fairford on July 1, 2016.Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Since speaking with Pleus, the F-35's saga continues.

On December 22, President-elect Donald Trump announced via tweet that he asked Boeing to "price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet." Trump's request came a day after meeting separately with the CEOs from Lockheed Martin and Boeing to discuss bringing the "costs down" on the F-35 and the next fleet of presidential aircraft.

Boeing's response — also announced via tweet — said it accepted the invitation to work with the Trump administration to "affordably meet US military requirements."

F-35 chief: 'This program is not out of control' »

Pleus noted a few upcoming events for the F-35A in 2017. The Air Force plans to debut the F-35A at Red Flag, the pinnacle of combat training, later this month and lasting until February. Following the training at Red Flag, the F-35A will participate in a theater security package, which is a small deployment to what Pleus called an "austere-type location."

"One of the good examples you can think of is we send F-22s to Kadena Air Force Base, and they'll be there a couple of months," he said. "They go to a base that's not necessarily use to having F-22s on it, and they train, they practice, they do all the things that they would normally do and then they'll redeploy back to their home. We do that with almost all of our fighter aircraft in the United States ... and we send them to both the Pacific theater as well as the European theater."

A third highlight this year will be when the 34th Fighter Squadron at Hill Air Force Base reaches its full capacity of airplanes in the fall.

"That means that not only will they have their 24 primary assigned aircraft but they will also have the right contingent of properly trained pilots and properly trained maintenance as well as their intelligence folks. At that point, you have a full squadron that a combatant commander would be looking for for a true combat role."

NOW WATCH: This is how pilots train to fly the F-35 — America’s most expensive fighter jet

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