The Trump administration's approved sale of F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia now includes a US officer riding along in every cockpit, holding the key to the weapons.
The approved sale of F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia now includes an American officer bolted into a second seat in every cockpit, holding the key to the weapons. The extra seat adds a bulge that makes the stealth fighter visible on radar. Officials call the role the sovereignty co-pilot.
The hump is the problem. Engineers in Fort Worth confirmed on Saturday that the extra seat adds a small blister to the fuselage, which makes the world's most expensive invisible aircraft visible on ordinary radar at about nineteen miles.
The seat is there because Washington approved the sale of F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia while remaining, in its own words, not entirely relaxed about it. The compromise: each Saudi jet flies with an American officer bolted in behind the pilot. He carries the key that arms the weapons and he does not hand it over.
Officials call the role the sovereignty co-pilot. The Pentagon's paperwork calls it Rear Occupant, Assurance.
"The kingdom receives full operational control of the airframe," said Dana Reilly, a deputy undersecretary who briefed reporters on the arrangement. "What it does not receive is the ability to fire anything without a colleague from Ohio agreeing that this is a good idea."
Reilly said the chaperones will rotate every nineteen days and will be forbidden from learning Arabic, to preserve what she described as productive ambiguity in the cockpit.
Riyadh has accepted the terms with visible patience. Colonel Faisal al-Mutrafi, speaking for the Royal Saudi Air Force, said the second seat would be treated as a guest facility.
"We have purchased a stealth fighter that can be seen from space because a man behind us must remain comfortable. This is what friendship costs."
Everyone has done this before
Washington once sold its finest fighter to Iran and spent the following decades regretting the paperwork. Nobody in the current process has mentioned 1976 out loud, which is its own kind of tribute.
Analysts note the aircraft cannot be delivered for years, by which point the intelligence concerns will either have evaporated or become the official reason for the sale. Priya Venkataraman of the Institute for Deterrence Studies said the chaperone scheme solved nothing and solved it beautifully.
"You have built a trust problem into the airframe," she said. "Every flight now contains a small diplomatic summit travelling at supersonic speed, and one of the delegates is sitting on a parachute."
Israel, currently the only country in the region flying the jet, has asked whether its own aircraft will be fitted with anything. It has been told no, warmly and at length.
The first airframes are expected around 2045. By then the chaperones will have unionised, the radar blister will have its own defence contract, and the alliance will have swapped sides at least twice. History, as ever, declines to take notes.
