F-35 fighter jets

Budget hawks deride the fighter jet, built largely in Fort Worth, as a costly boondoggle. But with war in Ukraine, the F-35's presence is being felt across ...

The racket above is known colloquially as “the sound of freedom.” Now in Congress himself, he oversees the F-35 also as a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “The F-35 program and cost is out of control,” Trump tweeted that month. In the lead-up to the 2016 bowl game, locals waited in long lines in downtown Fort Worth for a chance to climb into the cockpit of an F-35 model. As a Congressional staffer in 1996, he attended the announcement that Lockheed Martin would compete for the government contract. Since then, other countries have earned approval to buy the plane through a government program called Foreign Military Sales. There are three different versions of the plane, to accommodate the different types of landings and take offs: land-based runways, aircraft carriers and vertical hovering. Local pride in the aircraft abounds, so much so that it is beginning to compete with the steer and the oil derrick as a civic symbol. There is almost no conceivable scenario in which the United States would give the Ukrainian military an F-35, according to interviews with several defense policymakers and observers. American leaders decided to replace various models of planes with a single plane that functioned almost like a Swiss Army knife. Just prior to the invasion, Finland formalized the purchase of 64 F-35s on Feb. 4, that country’s largest military procurement ever. Fort Worth lawmakers have steadfastly defended it, touting its value both to the military and the local economy.