In the first filmed interview with the Pentagon's new head man on the USA's JSF project, his candid assessment of the new fighter is alarming: "Well let's make no mistake about it. This program still has risks, technical risks, it has cost issues, it has problems we'll have to fix in the future". A former Pentagon analyst, Pierre Sprey, puts it more bluntly: "Every aspect of that airplane is a failure waiting to happen".

So why are nations around the world signing up to buy these faulty flyers? The concept of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is nothing short of breathtaking - a plane that's designed to strike first with an armoury of missiles and bombs and most importantly, never be seen - a deadly combination of stealth and firepower. Its sensors give the pilot all-round vision of enemy activity on the ground and in the air, both day and night, sharing that picture with every other F-35 in the sky. Test pilot Lt Col Lee Kloos simply describes it as, "a thrill a minute".

Ten years ago, Australian PM John Howard signed up to the F-35 development program in a secret deal with the American manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Since then cost and delivery have blown out dramatically. According to US government figures, over the past decade the estimated cost of developing the Joint Strike Fighter rocketed from US$34.4 billion to US$55.2 billion - a jump of more than 60 per cent. And the aircraft is still not fit to fight a war. Meanwhile the Canadian government has been forced to reassess their inclusion in the program through an open tender process.

Surprisingly for a project of this global scale, it has attracted little public scrutiny to date. Yet as Washington begins to sound the alarm bells, this doc offers a rare insight into a very expensive maelstrom.

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