Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin Corporation — the largest defense contractor in the world by revenue, ~$71B, ~121,000 employees, HQ at 6801 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda MD. Aeronautics is run out of Fort Worth, Texas, where the F-35 Lightning II line is; other major programs include the F-22 Raptor, C-130J Super Hercules, THAAD and PAC-3 missile defense, the Orion crew capsule and the Skunk Works at Palmdale.

N35LX is the CATBird — Cooperative Avionics Test Bed — a Boeing 737-330 built in 1986 for Lufthansa as D-ABXH, later PK-IAA, acquired by Lockheed Martin in September 2003 and rebuilt into a flying laboratory. It wears a full F-35 nose radome, a set of wing-like sensor stubs forward of the cockpit that reproduce the fighter's antenna geometry, and a cabin of test stations. The point is to fly the Lightning II's sensor-fusion software in a real electromagnetic environment before it ever goes into a single-seat jet, with engineers aboard watching it work. Its avionics test station was refreshed in 2014 to handle F-35 Block 3 software.

Two caveats to read the map with. First, the FAA registration has lapsed — the aircraft is not in the current MASTER file, so the Mode S hex A3E384 here comes from the registration record rather than from a live sighting. Second, this is a defense flight-test asset and routinely flies with ADS-B out disabled, so it may sit inactive at Fort Worth indefinitely. That is the aircraft, not the tracker.

One more thing worth saying plainly: Lockheed Martin has no executive Gulfstream on the US civil register. The only other aircraft the FAA attributes to the company are a 1975 Piper Navajo at Palmdale, a Diamond motorglider, three test articles at Missiles & Fire Control in Orlando, and N859NA — the X-59 QueSST supersonic demonstrator. Corporate lift is charter or fractional.