‘Frankenjet': This F-35A Lightning II made from two damaged aircraft just returned to Utah's Air Force base
Frankenjet is one of its kind — piecing together an AF-211 that was damaged in a nose-gear collapse at Hill AFB in 2020 and an AF-27 that was damaged in an engine fire at Florida's Eglin AFB in 2014.
And the Frankenjet is fully operational, now back at the Air Force's largest combat-coded F-35A wing at Hill Air Force Base.
'The Frankenjet is back,' Hill Air Force Base's 388th Fighter Wing posted on Instagram. 'After completing final maintenance in Fort Worth, Texas, this one-of-a-kind jet is now back where it belongs.'
Minecraft 'Chicken Jockey' trend hits Utah theaters, movie-goer kicked out after bringing live chicken
The project was a joint effort by the F-35 Joint Program Office, Ogden Air Logistics Complex, and 388th Fighter Wing and Lockheed Martin, requiring unique tooling and equipment to merge the two aircraft. The construction was originally done at Ogden Air Logistics before it was brought back to Hill AFB.
Their work is considered to be pioneering for potential aircraft battle damage repair. The assigned team rebuilt the cockpit, rewired the aircraft, re-installed landing gear with the proper center of gravity, among other tasks that aren't typically seen in flight line maintenance shops, according to the 388th Fighter Wing Public Affairs office.
'When we received the aircraft, it was pretty much a shell,' said Senior Airman Jaguar Arnold, the aircraft's crew chief from the 4th Fighter Generation Squadron, where the aircraft was hangared in 2024. 'There were a lot of tasks to complete that we hadn't done before at the unit level.'
'When we took responsibility for this project, we were taking on something unprecedented at the field level and it wasn't easy. That can't be overstated.' said 1st Lt. Ryan Bare, Sortie Generation Flight commander for the 4th FGS. 'But, we were also taking on an opportunity for our maintainers to gain proficiency in this type of work and build experience at the unit level. As a program, and as a unit, we've benefited greatly from this.'
The Airmen involved worked on so many first-time tasks that the information will be used to update data used by all F-35 maintainers for installing and inspecting new components. As for this project, the effort saved a reported $63 million, with the project costing $11.7 million — while a new F-35A costs more than $80 million.
Now operational with combat status, the Frankenjet will be flown by Utah's 4th Fighter Squadron.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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The Hill
5 days ago
- The Hill
They came here to bomb. They returned here to live.
Da Nang, Vietnam — Richard Brown hadn't planned on crying by the side of a Vietnamese road. He had come back to Da Nang, where he had once loaded bombs bound for targets across Vietnam, expecting anger, hatred, maybe even violence. Instead, during his first week back, a local motorbike driver grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye and said: 'I want to thank you and your country for sending so many boys here to come and die and help my country be free.' Then the man walked away, leaving Richard alone on the roadside to weep. 'I had one experience like this after another,' Richard told me, sitting near the old Chu Lai airbase where he had spent a year as a kid from Boston — 5'4″, 115 pounds, a former Hells Angels drug-runner trying to dodge jail by signing up with the Marines. On his first day in Vietnam during the war, he went drinking with some new friends. 'Then on the way back, someone pulls out a joint,' he said. 'And that's the last thing I remember until I got on the plane to come home.' He spent his tour as a 'bomb humper,' loading F-4s with napalm and rockets. 'We were more dangerous to ourselves than anything the Vietnamese could throw at us.' When the war ended, Richard went home, but nobody asked him about it. 'Nobody wanted to know what it was like.' He became an aircraft mechanic, an FAA supervisor, and then, decades later, found himself standing at the Vietnamese consulate window in California 'with fear in my heart,' he said. 'I figured I'd be rejected or yelled at… but I filled out the visa application with my shaky hand and stuck it through the window. For 25 bucks, I got it a week later.' My trip to Hanoi came just after Reunification Day, Vietnam's victory celebration in what is sometimes referred to as the American war of aggression. The red flags and old slogans were everywhere. A few people spoke of it almost apologetically, as if they pitied me for being reminded of my country's catastrophic defeat. Americans prefer our victories — Normandy, Desert Storm. The wars we lose, we bury. But for a few hundred men scattered from Hanoi to Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City, burying it was not enough. So they came back. Da Nang makes sense for many of these men. It was often their first and last stop in Vietnam — the place they landed and flew out from. Tens of thousands of U.S. veterans have returned since the 1990s, mostly for short visits to see the places where they once fought. A few hundred stayed. Da Nang — once a major airbase, now a coastal city with condos, coffee shops, and pristine beaches — is consistently ranked among Vietnam's most livable cities. It holds symbolic weight: a hub for Agent Orange, for bombs and final goodbyes. Richard says he feels more at home here than he ever did in Boston. Over the years, he worked in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), where South Vietnamese treated him as a hero, but in Hanoi — consulting for Vietnam Airlines — his Marine past earned him some cold stares. 'When they found out I was a veteran, bombing the f— out of these people — needless to say, I got some cold receptions,' he said. It was a former North Vietnamese Air Force pilot who broke down those barriers. 'We weren't adversaries. We were just wearing different uniforms, taking orders from different a–holes,' he said. Gordy Thomas came back too. When he got home from the war in 1972, America was done with people like him. 'We learned not to talk about it,' he said. 'I got cancelled from everything because I'd fought in Vietnam. It's the same way people get cancelled now for supporting Trump. … It's that sense that you have no moral justification.' Decades later, long after getting his veteran's disability rating, he sold his house outside Nashville, cashed in his Delta miles and flew first class back to Da Nang — chasing cheap living, sunshine, and My Khe Beach (China Beach), where Marines once landed. Gordy says living here forced him to confront the 'moral injury' of war — the belief that an American life was worth more than a Vietnamese one. 'Coming here was the final healing point of my PTSD,' he told me. He now gives part of his pension to schools and poor families in his wife's hometown. 'So what it comes down to is the United States government, who sent me down here in the first place…now gives me enough money tax-free each month that I can take a very small amount and give it to the people here,' he said. 'It's very helpful to them and is appreciated.' Like Richard, Gordy never really knew the Vietnamese during the war — and like Richard, he met and married his Vietnamese wife here, only decades later. Matt Keenan's story is about unfinished business. He came to Vietnam in 1971 to help 'Vietnamize' the war. In 2014, back in New York, he got a cancer diagnosis tied to Agent Orange. 'I wasn't surprised,' he said. 'But I wanted to come back and see how the people who were exposed are living.' He found his purpose at the Da Nang Association for Victims of Agent Orange. He volunteers with disabled children, some born decades after the spraying stopped. 'They've become like my extended family,' he said. 'The beach is nice, but that's not my priority. I have a whole life in Vietnam.' He has attended solemn repatriation ceremonies for soldiers' remains. He even stood alongside President Biden during one, handing a former Vietnamese soldier back the diary he had lost 50 years before. Keenan, too, met and married his wife here. Before I left Hanoi, I visited the old Hoa Lo Prison — the 'Hanoi Hilton.' Its yellow walls once held Vietnamese revolutionaries under the French. The Vietnam War wing presents its own tidy version: photos of American POWs smiling, playing basketball, unwrapping care packages — a careful curation of the story. Not far away, in a modest home in west Hanoi, I met Ngo Ngọc Duong. Through a translator, he told me that he joined the North Vietnamese Army at 18 and fought for 16 years as a reconnaissance soldier — crawling into enemy zones for intelligence, surviving on roasted cassava in bamboo tubes. He described the day American helicopters hunted him through dense forest for miles as he dove into foxholes, crawled forward and ran again. 'They had aircraft, bombs, the most advanced weapons,' he said. 'But in the end … they couldn't kill me.' His daughter was born deaf and with intellectual disabilities, a legacy of Agent Orange. Still, he sees American soldiers, like himself, as victims of war. 'They didn't want to invade another country, but due to circumstances and orders, we ended up on opposite sides,' he said. 'On the battlefield, we were enemies — but outside of war, they are just people like us, with families, dreams, and their own pain.' That's why, even today — after all the loss and suffering — he warmly welcomes American veterans back. He hopes to shake hands with them, to talk, to be friends, and most importantly, to send a message: 'Cherish life. Cherish peace.' All four men grew emotional while telling their stories. The three Americans arrived with bombs overhead and rifles in their hands — or bombs strapped to the wings of jets they loaded. Now, they come back with pension checks, Agent Orange scars, and local wives. They stand barefoot on the same sand they once cratered, in a country that — for reasons they're still figuring out — feels more like home than the one they left behind. Daniel Allott is the former opinion editor of The Hill and the author of 'On the Road in Trump's America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Country.'
Miami Herald
6 days ago
- Miami Herald
To fill seats, more colleges offer credit for life experience
PITTSBURGH - Stephen Wells was trained in the Air Force to work on F-16 fighter jets, including critical radar, navigation and weapons systems whose proper functioning meant life or death for pilots. Yet when he left the service and tried to apply that expertise toward an education at Pittsburgh's Community College of Allegheny County, or CCAC, he was given just three credits toward a required class in physical education. Wells moved forward anyway, going on to get his bachelor's and doctoral degrees. Now he's CCAC's provost and involved in a citywide project to help other people transform their military and work experience into academic credit. What's happening in Pittsburgh is part of growing national momentum behind letting students - especially the increasing number who started but never completed a degree - cash in their life skills toward finally getting one, saving them time and money. Colleges and universities have long purported to provide what's known in higher education as credit for prior learning. But they have made the process so complex, slow and expensive that only about 1 in 10 students actually completes it. Many students don't even try, especially low-income learners who could benefit the most, according to a study by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL. "It drives me nuts" that this promise has historically proven so elusive, Wells said, in his college's new Center for Education, Innovation & Training. That appears to be changing. Nearly half of institutions surveyed last year by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, or AACRAO, said they have added more ways for students to receive these credits - electricians, for example, who can apply some of their training toward academic courses in electrical engineering, and daycare workers who can use their experience to earn degrees in teaching. Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. The reason universities and colleges are doing this is simple: Nearly 38 million working-age Americans have spent some time in college but never finished, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Getting at least some of them to come back has become essential to these higher education institutions at a time when changing demographics mean that the number of 18-year-old high school graduates is falling. "When higher education institutions are fat and happy, nobody looks for these things. Only when those traditional pipelines dry up do we start looking for other potential populations," said Jeffrey Harmon, vice provost for strategic initiatives and institutional effectiveness at Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey, which has long given adult learners credit for the skills they bring. Being able to get credit for prior learning is a huge potential recruiting tool. Eighty-four percent of adults who are leaning toward going back to college say it would have "a strong influence" on their decision, according to research by CAEL, the Strada Education Foundation and Hanover Research. (Strada is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) When Melissa DiMatteo, 38, decided to get an associate degree at CCAC to go further in her job, she got six credits for her previous training in Microsoft Office and her work experience as everything from a receptionist to a supervisor. That spared her from having to take two required courses in computer information and technology and - since she's going to school part time and taking one course per semester - saved her a year. "Taking those classes would have been a complete waste of my time," DiMatteo said. "These are things that I do every day. I supervise other people and train them on how to do this work." On average, students who get credit for prior learning save between $1,500 and $10,200 apiece and nearly seven months off the time it takes to earn a bachelor's degree, the nonprofit advocacy group Higher Learning Advocates calculates. The likelihood that they will graduate is 17 percent higher, the organization finds. Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges - and the economy Justin Hand dropped out of college because of the cost, and became a largely self-taught information technology manager before he decided to go back and get an associate and then a bachelor's degree so he could move up in his career. He got 15 credits - a full semester's worth - through a program at the University of Memphis for which he wrote essays to prove he had already mastered software development, database management, computer networking and other skills. "These were all the things I do on a daily basis," said Hand, of Memphis, who is 50 and married, with a teenage son. "And I didn't want to have to prolong college any more than I needed to." Meanwhile, employers and policymakers are pushing colleges to speed up the output of graduates with skills required in the workforce, including by giving more students credit for their prior learning. And online behemoths Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University, with which brick-and-mortar colleges compete, are way ahead of them in conferring credit for past experience. "They've mastered this and used it as a marketing tool," said Kristen Vanselow, assistant vice president of innovative education and partnerships at Florida Gulf Coast University, which has expanded its awarding of credit for prior learning. "More traditional higher education institutions have been slower to adapt." It's also gotten easier to evaluate how skills that someone learns in life equate to academic courses or programs. This has traditionally required students to submit portfolios, take tests or write essays, as Hand did, and faculty to subjectively and individually assess them. Related: As colleges lose enrollment, some turn to one market that's growing: Hispanic students Now some institutions, states, systems and independent companies are standardizing this work or using artificial intelligence to do it. The growth of certifications from professional organizations such as Amazon Web Services and the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, has helped, too. "You literally punch [an industry certification] into our database and it tells you what credit you can get," said Philip Giarraffa, executive director of articulation and academic pathways at Miami Dade College. "When I started here, that could take anywhere from two weeks to three months." Data provided by Miami Dade shows it has septupled the number of credits for prior learning awarded since 2020, from 1,197 then to 7,805 last year. "These are students that most likely would have looked elsewhere, whether to the [online] University of Phoenix or University of Maryland Global [Campus]" or other big competitors, Giarraffa said. Fifteen percent of undergraduates enrolled in higher education full time and 40 percent enrolled part time are 25 or older, federal data show - including people who delayed college to serve in the military, volunteer or do other work that could translate into academic credit. "Nobody wants to sit in a class where they already have all this knowledge," Giarraffa said. At Thomas Edison, police academy graduates qualify for up to 30 credits toward associate degrees. Carpenters who have completed apprenticeships can get as many as 74 credits in subjects including math, management and safety training. Bachelor's degrees are often a prerequisite for promotion for people in professions such as these, or who hope to start their own companies. Related:To fill 'education deserts,' more states want community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees The University of Memphis works with FedEx, headquartered nearby, to give employees with supervisory training academic credit they can use toward a degree in organizational leadership, helping them move up in the company. The University of North Carolina System last year launched its Military Equivalency System, which lets active-duty and former military service members find out almost instantly, before applying for admission, if their training could be used for academic credit. That had previously required contacting admissions offices, registrars or department chairs. Among the reasons for this reform was that so many of these prospective students - and the federal education benefits they get - were ending up at out-of-state universities, the UNC System's strategic plan notes. "We're trying to change that," said Kathie Sidner, the system's director of workforce and partnerships. It's not only for the sake of enrollment and revenue, Sidner said. "From a workforce standpoint, these individuals have tremendous skill sets and we want to retain them as opposed to them moving somewhere else." Related: A new way to help some college students: Zero percent, no-fee loans California's community colleges are also expanding their credit for prior learning programs as part of a plan to increase the proportion of the population with educations beyond high school. "How many people do you know who say, 'College isn't for me?' " asked Sam Lee, senior advisor to the system's chancellor for credit for prior learning. "It makes a huge difference when you say to them that what they've been doing is equivalent to college coursework already." In Pittsburgh, the Regional Upskilling Alliance - of which CCAC is a part - is connecting job centers, community groups, businesses and educational institutions to create comprehensive education and employment records so more workers can get credit for skills they already have. That can provide a big push, "especially if you're talking about parents who think, 'I'll never be able to go to school,' " said Sabrina Saunders Mosby, president and CEO of the nonprofit Vibrant Pittsburgh, a coalition of business and civic leaders involved in the effort. Pennsylvania is facing among the nation's most severe declines in the number of 18-year-old high school graduates. "Our members are companies that need talent," Mosby said. There's one group that has historically pushed back against awarding credit for prior learning: university and college faculty concerned it might affect enrollment in their courses or unconvinced that training provided elsewhere is of comparable quality. Institutions have worried about the loss of revenue from awarding credits for which students would otherwise have had to pay. That also appears to be changing, as universities leverage credit for prior learning to recruit more students and keep them enrolled for longer, resulting in more revenue - not less. "That monetary factor was something of a myth," said Beth Doyle, chief of strategy at CAEL. Faculty have increasingly come around, too. That's sometimes because they like having experienced students in their classrooms, Florida Gulf Coast's Vanselow said. Related: States want adults to return to college. Many roadblocks stand in the way Still, while many recognize it as a recruiting incentive, most public universities and colleges have had to be ordered to confer more credits for prior learning by legislatures or governing boards. Private, nonprofit colleges remain stubbornly less likely to give it. More than two-thirds charge a fee for evaluating whether other kinds of learning can be transformed into academic credit, an expense that isn't covered by financial aid. Roughly one in 12 charge the same as it would cost to take the course for which the credits are awarded. Seventy percent of institutions require that students apply for admission and be accepted before learning whether credits for prior learning will be awarded. Eighty-five percent limit how many credits for prior learning a student can receive. There are other confounding roadblocks and seemingly self-defeating policies. CCAC runs a noncredit program to train paramedics, for example, but won't give people who complete it credits toward its for-credit nursing degree. Many leave and go across town to a private university that will. The college is working on fixing this, said Debra Roach, its vice president of workforce development. It's important to see this from the students' point of view, said Tracy Robinson, executive director of the University of Memphis Center for Regional Economic Enrichment. "Credit for prior learning is a way for us to say, 'We want you back. We value what you've been doing since you've been gone,' " Robinson said. "And that is a total game changer." Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@ on Signal. This story about credit for prior learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast. The post To fill seats, more colleges offer credit for life experience appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
A British F35 fighter jet stranded in India may finally fly back home after inspiring memes
NEW DELHI (AP) — A British F-35B fighter jet stranded at an Indian airport for nearly a month, sparking memes and cartoons on social media, is expected to fly back home as early as next week, Indian officials said. The stealth fighter, one of the world's most advanced and costing around $115 million, is stranded at Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in the southern state of Kerala due to a technical snag and is being repaired by U.K. engineers, officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to speak to media. The jet was on a regular sortie in the Arabian Sea last month when it ran into bad weather and couldn't return to the Royal Navy's flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, officials said. The aircraft was then diverted to Thiruvananthapuram, where it landed safely on June 14. Officials said engineers hope to repair the plane in the next few days before it could fly back to U.K. sometime next week. The stranded military aircraft, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, has triggered A.I.-generated memes in India. In a social media post, the tourism department of Kerala showed the aircraft on the tarmac surrounded by coconut trees and posting a fictitious five-star review. 'Kerala is such an amazing place, I don't want to leave. Definitely recommend," it said. The state's top official at the tourism department, K. Biju, said the post was put out in 'good humor.' 'It was our way to appreciate and thank the Brits who are the biggest inbound visitors to Kerala for tourism,' said Biju. Another cartoon posted on X showed the plane enjoying snacks with a group of locals against a scenic background. The British High Commission confirmed to the The Associated Press that a U.K. engineering team has been deployed to 'assess and repair' the aircraft. There has been speculation in India that if the engineers fail to rectify the aircraft, it could be partially dismantled and transported in a cargo plane. The U.K.'s Ministry of Defense dismissed the speculation in an emailed statement.
