Superman Reboot Will Be Pentagon Stealth Jet’s Silver Screen Debut [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/superman-f35-man-of-steel/



The Pentagon has picked next summer’s Man of Steel film to be the cinematic debut of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, shown here in a 2011 ceremony at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.


Superman Reboot Will Be Pentagon Stealth Jet’s Silver Screen Debut
By Spencer AckermanEmail Author
October 16, 2012 | 6:30 am

Faster than a sluggish bureaucracy. More powerful than enemy radar. Able to scale tall buildings with a single engine. Up on the screen in the forthcoming Superman reboot, it’s — it’s — it’s the debut of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons program in human history.

Long before the family of stealth jets known as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will ever fly a combat mission, the F-35 will appear in theaters for the first time next summer in Man of Steel, Zach Snyder’s anticipated re-imagining of the Superman franchise. It’s perhaps the best cinematic debut possible for an aircraft program that’s suffered numerous budgetary and engineering woes.

“It was a target of opportunity,” Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. When the filmmakers visited California’s Edwards Air Force Base in January to get shots of military aircraft for a scene, they were excited to learn that the base hosted a complement of F-35s for flight testing. The base arranged for two of them to be towed into the shot.

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Offscreen, the F-35 is in about as much trouble as a superhero in the third act of an action movie. The advanced stealth fighter — intended to be the backbone of the Air Force, Navy and Marines’ future combat air fleets — is estimated to cost as much as $1.5 trillion over its half-century lifespan. It’s several years late and several hundred million dollars over budget. Its software is complicated, its engineering flaws are numerous, and the Pentagon no longer predicts when it will enter service. The Navy appears to be hedging its bets against the program ultimately collapsing under the weight of its costs — and inside the Pentagon, there’s concern over whether the F-35 remains, as Sen. Claire McCaskill once called it, “too big to fail.”



unhappycamper comment: Towing two of these pigs into a movie scene does not a fighter make. On the plus side we get to see half a billion dollars of military holeware being towed to.... ? to.... ? Bueller?


on edit to change paragraph #4