What‘s good and bad about the F-35 cockpit: A ‘Panther’ pilot’s guide to moderncockpits Part 1

My background – Current F-35 pilot and Weapons School graduate. I Have flown the Harrier II and F/A-18 Hornet operationally as well as instructing Tactics and Weapons training squadrons.

I can’t speak with much first-hand credibility about the fighters of the 50s-70s, nor can I tell you much about any twin-seat fighter aircraft. Probably the oldest cockpit I have flown in as captain was the BAe Hawk T1A in the RAF. It was totally ‘steam driven’ with no digital instrumentation, but as an advanced trainer of its generation it had everything you needed. Someone once told me that the gun/bombsight was the same as used in the Hawker Hurricane – whilst that may not actually be true it was certainly of a similar vintage! By the ’90s it was definitely showing its age and the jump from Hawk T1 to any of the RAF’s frontline aircraft was (avionics wise) too much.

The T2 (Hawk Mk 128) was introduced sometime in the 00’s and was designed to mirror the Typhoon more or less exactly. It had three MFDs and a HUD and the radar simulator was pretty much an unclassified version of the Typhoon’s radar. We found that students stepping from the T2 to Typhoon were coping so much better than those who had flown just the T1.

I loved this cockpit, and to this day it remains my favourite ‘office’ of all I’ve flown. Plenty of space, a huge canopy with excellent visibility and reasonably well laid out instruments. It was a bit of a crossover between analogue and digital; it had a good HUD and two MFDs with the classic 20 pushbuttons around the outside. The Up Front Controller (UFC) was easy to use and well located, it made entering co-ordinates during CAS easy. Something that has been lost in all glass cockpits is the tactile feel of pressing buttons and knowing you got a response – I found you could enter Lat/Longs by feel whilst looking out the window. This is something you definitely can’t do ‘on the glass’ on current jets.

There was a lot of space taken up by the old analogue weapons control panel on the lower left, I’ve got to say I never used it other than to flick switches when I was bored on a long transit. The 6-pack of analogue flight instruments were purely there as a failsafe, although I have to say I loved the standby Attitude Indicator. It didn’t just tell you your attitude, but it also rotated and gave you a heading readout too – great for practice partial-panel approaches on your annual instrument rating checkride!

As for what made the jet unique, the nozzle lever. It was situated beside the throttle but was much smaller and of a different shape. We had it drilled into us during training that we had to be very sure which lever we were pulling in case we moved the wrong one. There was one crash during my time at an airshow on the South coast of England where the pilot moved the nozzles aft inadvertently when he should have moved the throttle to max. I will always remember the advice I was given by one of my instructors during the VSTOL phase of the Operational Conversion Unit – “if you move something in the cockpit and the jet does something scary – move it back!”