F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

F-35 is a boondoggle.

$200M for one fighter plane is insane.

If the USA ever had to go to war with this weapon, a huge number of them would be offline at any given time, and every single airframe loss would cause a huge dent in overall combat power.

I don’t understand why our military and political leaders keep trying to buy ridiculously overpriced Swiss Army knife weapons (lots of flexibility but great at nothing) instead of mass producing combat knives (only good for one thing but great at it and lots of them).

You sure about that? You should look at the F-35's performance in Israeli hands in their recent strikes on Iran.

For me, that was a moment when I realized that the received wisdom about military things can be just completely wrong.

I had considered myself to be reasonably informed about the F-35, and how "everyone knows" it's a boondoggle. I think this started with a long-form article I read in 2013, "How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane": https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...

Here is the HN discussion at the time, full of confident assertions that the F-35 is useless: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6211029

Fast forward to this year, when Israel's F-35s operated over Iran with total impunity. Not a single plane lost AFAIK.

Do you have any reason to attribute this to the fact they were F-35s? For comparison, how many jets were lost during "shock and awe"? Israel operates with impunity in Iran all the time, often on the ground. I'm not sure the fact they used F-35s is actually relevant here but if you have a source on that it would be interesting to read. Given the state of Iran it is hard to imagine the same could not be achieved with a last generation aircraft... it would not be surprising if by the time a peer power conflict starts manned aircraft like the F-35 will already be obsolete...