Alenia Aeronautica, a Finmeccanica company, and Lockheed Martin have displayed today the Cockpit Demonstrator of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter to civil and military authorities, representatives of the academic and entrepreneurial world and a wide public of university and technical schools students, during a ceremony held at the Ground Test Centre of Alenia Aeronautica, in Turin-Caselle.

The F-35 Cockpit Demonstrator is the first fully representative, highly technological part of the new stealth aircraft - currently in the Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) phase at Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, Texas - to be displayed in Piedmont. The demonstrator has been hosted inside the new Sky Light Simulator, Alenia Aeronautica’s laboratory designed to provide the most representative artificial reproduction of natural ambient light conditions and test aircraft cockpit’s configurations.

The Sky Light Simulator is one of the facilities within Alenia Aeronautica’s Ground Test Centre, a recently inaugurated testing and simulation facility, which also comprises the largest-in-Europe anechoic chamber.

The event has underlined the close industrial and technological collaboration between Lockheed Martin and Alenia Aeronautica, key industrial partner of the JSF programme.


About the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
The F-35 Lightning II is a supersonic stealth fighter. The F-35 will be manufactured in three versions: a conventional-take off-and-landing (CTOL), a short-takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) and the carrier variant (CV). The three F-35 variants are derived from a common design and they will use the same support platform world-wide. The fighter will initially replace at least 13 types of aircraft for 11 nations.
Lockheed Martin is developing the F-35 with its main industrial partners, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, and with other partners, among which, in Italy, Alenia Aeronautica and some Finmeccanica companies, such as SELEX Communications and SELEX Galileo.
Two F-35s have entered flight test, two are in the ground test phase and 19 are in various assembly stages, including the first two production-model jets scheduled for delivery to the U.S. Air Force in 2010.