You can say what you like about the looks of Boeing's Joint Strike Fighter design -- most people already have -- but you can't fault it for lack of originality.

Boeing's new full-scale mockup of its JSF, on show here for the first time, is closely representative of the design the company will submit to the Pentagon at the end of October, according to JSF director of business development Mike Foley. The mockup dramatically depicts the compact, blended, almost organic contours of the Boeing fighter.

The right side of the mockup represents the short take-off, vertical landing (STOVL) version. Yes, the wing really is that short and the tip is that thick. Most of the fighter's 15,000-plus pounds of internal fuel is carried in the wing, which has composite skins and largely titanium structure, but it spans only 30 feet-eight feet less than the similarly sized F/A-18 -- it will fit on the elevator of the Royal Navy's Invincible-class carriers without folding.

Along the lower edge of the body are three sets of doors. The fore and aft doors cover nozzles that are linked by ducts to the fan of the engine-which is located in the front of the airplane, right behind the cockpit. The nozzles provide pitch and yaw trim and control. The center doors cover the Rolls-Royce-developed lift nozzles, which swing from 10 degrees forward to 45 degrees aft. The engine thrust can switch between the pitch-vectoring aft nozzle and the lift nozzles in as little as two seconds.

The left side of the mockup represents the conventional take-off and landing, or CTOL variant. An extra three feet of wing on each side includes a deeply conical-cambered tip. The outboard leading edge is fitted with a flap: the thick inner leading edge contains antennas for communications and electronic warfare system. The JSF is "an antenna farm," says Foley, although all the apertures are concealed for stealth.

The left-hand weapon bay door on the mockup is open, showing the swing arms, pivoted at the lower edge of the bay, which rotate outwards and down to release the 2,000-pound JDAM guided bombs and to load weapons. AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles are launched without extending the swing arms, through the lower halves of the weapon bay doors.

Inside the cockpit, the instrument panel is dominated by two screens that look like laptop computer displays, because that's what they are. Produced by Harris, they use commercially available glass, protected by rugged bezels against the fighter environment. The pilot can divide each screen into as many as four windows, using voice commands, so that high-resolution IR, synthetic aperture radar and map data can be displayed simultaneously. One innovation is a perspective map display: instead of a vertical "God's eye view" of the tactical situation, the pilot can see a three-dimensional view that shows, for example, that the aircraft is flying above the effective altitude of a ground threat.
Although the system uses larger displays than the F-22, the look and feel is similar-many of the Boeing engineers who put the JSF system together did the same for the F-22.

There is no head-up display: the BAE Systems helmet-mounted display (HMD) is used instead. It's accurate enough to aim the 27 mm Mauser cannon selected for the U.S. Air Force version.
Raytheon is Boeing's mission systems partner, providing the multipurpose nose radar array, the targeting FLIR-mounted in a retractable housing beneath the fuselage-and the distributed aperture IR system, comprising six staring sensors arrayed around the aircraft. DAIRS acts as a missile warning system, but also feeds IR imagery to the HMD in any direction the pilot looks.

By Bill Sweetman