F-35 Lightining II - feature complete build ready!

AF-01 model has been refined on the basis of the pictures released by Lockheed Martin recently.

This is the clean dark grey livery for repainting. An early warning to the repainters:due to some minor imperfections in the normals of some surfaces (and the resulting smoothing mistakes), repainting the fuselage in very light colors may highlight these minor defects - which are completely invisible with the default liveries or in similar colors. Should not be an issue for the vast majority of the liveries.

This is the latest build of the MFD. Several functions can be controlled by the touch screen, and you can manage its configuration in a much more flexible way than the previous builds. Still, most of the more advanced functions of the F-35 are not emulated.

Cockpit graphics have been kept as close as possible to the real plane, but some artistic licence has been taken. Also, the source material was not homogeneous (most source photos came from the AA-1 cockpit, while others were from BF-1, mock-ups and simulators). For example, the wires nearby the pedals should be covered by panels, and AFAIK the area below the MFD controls will be different in the actual planes - these discrepancies are due to the fact that the best photos I have were taken during the assembly of the AA-1 cockpit.

Yet another picture of the AF-1 over Fort Worth.

And one last for the AF-1. The real AF-1 has been retired to live-fire "slaughter" for battle damage assessment. Note the scorched surface on the left vertical stabilizer, due to the nearby exhaust of the APU. This exhaust has been moved to the lower side, afaik, with the exception of the F-35C's (due to deck crew safety concerns I think).

A very rainy evening has finally given me the time (and will) I needed to complete the remake of the MFD, which was the major oustanding item in my F-35 to-do list. The cockpit now has all the planned functions - while are fewer than the ones of the real F-35, they should be good enough for most users.

So the package is almost complete, meaning it needs some very minor debugging and the external model need to be checked against the recently released pictures of AF-1 and AF-2.

Then I need to write the checklists and the manuals and then it is ready.

The major delay will probably come from the fact that I am moving to a new home during the next couple of weeks... so I really can't tell when I will be able to release it. But I hope that the pictures above show that the project is in a very good shape and VERY close to completition.

PS - The visit of the Garibaldi STOVL carrier to my hometown - and the fact that I'm seeing it every day driving to my workplace, is revamping my intest in making the F-35B, too. The conversion is not easy as it may seem - but I'll probably give it a try.