The US Air Force Jammed Two Broken F-35s Into A Single Working Fighter

In the United States military, it's not uncommon for maintenance crews to use a busted-up vehicle as a donor or cannibalized vehicle. These are aircraft, trucks, tanks, and just about everything else that isn't working, so parts are stripped from that one piece of equipment to keep others in operation. This is done in military operations worldwide, but one thing that's rarely attempted is to take two would-be donor planes and fuse them together into an entirely new "Franken-bird."

The U.S. Air Force completed a project to combine two damaged F-35A Lightning II fifth-generation fighter jets into a new combat-capable bird, which began flight testing in 2025. While it may seem intuitive to combine the pieces of broken fighters into a single aircraft, it's not as easy as one might think. The people working on the project had to develop new tools and specialized key components to marry the pieces into a viable airframe. The F-35 is a highly complex machine that doesn't snap together like Legos.

The F-35 has suffered several crashes and issues throughout its history, providing ruined aircraft to create something new. The two fighters involved included one that had a nose landing-gear collapse in June 2020, while the other suffered a severe engine fire in 2014. It had been serving as an Air Force Air Battle Damage and Repair trainer, and thankfully, its nose was undamaged. They took the nose and other gear from the trainer and replaced the parts in the airframe that had lost its corresponding equipment. It didn't just snap into place, though, and a lot of work had to be done to ensure the operability of the completed Franken-bird.

Airmen didn't decide to throw a couple of damaged aircraft together on a whim — the project was officially run by both Lockheed Martin, which produces the F-35, and the F-35 Joint Program Office, Ogden Air Logistics Complex, 388th Fighter Wing. Those two organizations came together to bring a new aircraft into the fight. Combining two broken birds into a new one makes a lot of financial sense, as a new F-35A costs the Air Force around $82.5 million.

It's estimated that the Franken-bird project cost under $6 million, so the Air Force saved a lot of money by rehabbing the damaged planes. The project took over a year, partly due to the need to engineer new tools and equipment to handle the various pieces that needed to be joined. Senior Airman Jaguar Arnold, the aircraft's dedicated crew chief from the 4th Fighter Generation Squadron, explained, "When we received the aircraft, it was pretty much a shell. There were a lot of tasks to complete that we hadn't done before at the unit level.

The Airmen reinstalled the landing gear while maintaining the aircraft's center of gravity. Additionally, they completely rewired the jet and rebuilt the cockpit and avionics computers. Flightline maintainers don't normally get so deep in the weeds in aircraft maintenance, so there was a learning curve in bringing everyone up to speed. Not only was the crew able to succeed in combining the various pieces into a new fighter, but they did so while providing the maintenance needs of an operational squadron by working nights and weekends to see it to completion.