At around noon on Wednesday, a fighter in full Royal Canadian Air Force markings lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, with an F-35C flying chase. Bilingual RCAF-ARC lettering on the intakes. A roundel. “Canada” behind the cockpit. A low-visibility maple leaf on the tail.

It was the first flight of the first Canadian F-35, the end of a road that opened in 2002 and has been argued over ever since. Nobody said a word about it.

No press release from Lockheed Martin. None from the RCAF, which confirmed the flight but issued no statement. None from the Prime Minister’s Office. For a milestone in the largest procurement in Canadian air force history, the silence is the story.

Twenty-Four Years From Partner to First Flight

Canada joined the Joint Strike Fighter programme in 2002 as a Level 3 partner and then spent two decades not buying the aeroplane. Governments changed, competitions were launched and cancelled, and the CF-188 Hornets kept flying past every retirement date anyone had drawn for them.

The Future Fighter Capability Project finally opened in 2017. In 2022 Ottawa selected the F-35A. In January 2023 it announced 88 aircraft. And then, in March 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered a review of the whole thing.

The timing was not subtle. The review began as relations with Washington soured over tariffs and rather more than tariffs, and it has been running for eighteen months without a published conclusion. Canada has committed to 16 jets outright and started paying for components on another 14. The remaining 58 are, officially, still under consideration.

The Quiet Part, Said Out Loud

Canadian officials have worked hard to describe the review as routine. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Jennie Carignan, put it to CBC Radio in the flattest possible terms.

Washington has been rather less diplomatic. The US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, was asked about the possibility that Canada might take its first tranche of F-35s and then fill the rest of the order with something else.

Hoekstra went further, calling the review “an irritant that makes it harder to get to a [trade] agreement” — which is about as close as anyone has come to confirming what everybody already assumed: that 88 stealth fighters are sitting on a negotiating table.

A Photograph Ottawa Did Not Want to Release

There is a small, telling episode attached to this same airframe. When the RCAF commander, Lt. Gen. Jamie Speiser-Blanchet, signed a fuselage bulkhead destined for AR-1 at the Fort Worth plant, a military photographer recorded it. Pictures like that are normally published within hours.

This one was not. The Ottawa Citizen obtained it only through an Access to Information request, and the Department of National Defence released a grainy copy and has refused to release the surrounding records. An anonymous departmental source told the newspaper that officials wanted to avoid anything that might look like the military taking a side while the review is open.

Which explains Wednesday perfectly. A government that will not release a photograph of a signature is not going to hold a ceremony for a first flight.

The Gripen Question

What Carney has floated instead is a mixed fleet: cap the F-35 buy somewhere short of 88 and build Saab Gripen E fighters in Canada for the rest. Saab has been explicit about the industrial pitch, promising thousands of Canadian jobs. The same logic has already produced a decision elsewhere in the fleet: Saab’s GlobalEye, built on a Bombardier Global 6500, is the leading contender for Canada’s airborne early warning aircraft, and would be assembled in Montreal.

CBC News on what actually separates the F-35 from the Gripen, and why the choice is not only about the aircraft.

A split fleet is not free. Two types mean two supply chains, two training pipelines, two sets of spares and two maintenance cultures for an air force that has struggled to crew one. That is the argument Hoekstra made, and it is the argument most air forces make to themselves. It is also the argument that loses when the alternative is depending entirely on a neighbour you no longer trust.

Meanwhile, the Jets Are Being Built

None of the politics has slowed the production line. AR-1 flew on schedule. The RCAF has stood up its first CF-35A training squadron at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and will start training pilots there this year, with maintenance technicians heading to Eglin in Florida. The first aircraft is expected on Canadian soil in 2028, with a squadron reaching initial operational capability around 2029 or 2030.

Whatever Ottawa decides about the other 58, sixteen Canadian F-35s are happening. The first one is already flying. It just did it without anyone officially watching.

Sources: The Aviationist; Skies Magazine; Defence Blog; CBC News; the Ottawa Citizen via 19FortyFive.