"This room is the most advanced painting facility in the world," retired US Air Force pilot and F-35 simulation instructor Rick Royer told me as we toured Lockheed Martin's highly secure plane facility in Fort Worth, Texas.
The Aircraft Final Finishes bay is where America's most expensive weapons system gets coated with a highly classified stealth technology, which makes it invisible to radar.
After the jet is assembled and before it can take flight, three laser-guided robots apply the Radar-Absorbing Material (RAM) to each of Lockheed Martin's F-35 Lightning II variant aircraft.
Here's all we know — and can share — about how the F-35 gets its invisibility cloak:
SEE ALSO: There's nothing else like America's most expensive war machine ever
First, each F-35 variant is assembled in Lockheed Martin's mile-long production facility.
Once an F-35 is ready to leave the production line, it is carefully rolled ...
... into the windowless, multistory, 226,000-square-foot Aircraft Final Finishes (AFF) complex.
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