China just got hold of a stealth F-35 canopy and America wants it back

A stealth F-35 cockpit canopy has gone missing in Hong Kong. And Bloomberg says, citing people briefed on the incident, that China's government now has it.

So here's what happened. Back in late May, the parts were on their way from Australia to the US. They needed inspection, maybe repair, maybe disposal. Somewhere along that route, the shipment got diverted. It ended up in Hong Kong instead.

Nobody has said who did that. Nobody has said why.

Now, the missing piece here isn't just glass. It's an acrylic bubble with a thin, transparent coating on it. That coating is radar-absorbent material. It's part of what actually makes an F-35 hard to see on enemy radar. Lose that, and you've lost a piece of the plane's whole reason for existing.

Bloomberg also says UPS was the carrier, and that a weapons-bay door went missing along with the canopy. Nobody else has confirmed either of those two details. So for now, that's Bloomberg's reporting alone, not settled fact.

This all happened four months ago. It only came out five days ago, when Politico broke it, citing people familiar with the matter. Since then, the Pentagon and Australia have both confirmed something went wrong with the shipment. Neither has confirmed everything Bloomberg is now saying.

The Pentagon's F-35 Joint Program Office says it's aware of quote "a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components". It says it's working with US authorities and Lockheed Martin, the company that builds the jet, to get the parts back, work out what happened, and stop it happening again.

Lockheed Martin says quote "our teams handle every shipment with the utmost diligence and safeguards" to protect the F-35 programme and its allies.

Congress already knew. Staff on the key national security committees were briefed by the State Department and the Pentagon back in June. More briefings are coming.

Now, Australia flies F-35s too. Seventy-two of them. That's the backbone of its air force. Its maintenance depots can service the jets, but none of them can fix a cockpit canopy. That's the whole reason this canopy was being flown to the US in the first place.

Richard Marles is Australia's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister. He has confirmed the parts were, in his words, mistakenly diverted to Hong Kong. But he's also said something else. He believes no sensitive parts were involved. He says he feels a sense of comfort about the whole thing.

And that puts him at odds with almost everyone else. The Pentagon treats this canopy as sensitive. So does Lockheed Martin. Others who study military aviation for a living say the same. Nobody else is calling it routine cargo.

J.J. Gertler used to work for Congress. Now he studies military aviation. He says having a real F-35 component in hand would let China work out what it has already learned about the jet through years of hacking.

And China has been trying to learn about the F-35 for a long time. Its intelligence services broke into the Pentagon's network back in 2007. A Chinese national named Su Bin was convicted in 2014 for hacking F-22, F-35 and C-17 data. Leaked documents in 2015 showed China had already stolen F-35 design data, electronically, from a distance.

All of that was done without ever touching a real jet. Having the actual canopy is different. It means China can check its stolen data against the physical thing.

Hong Kong is Chinese territory, run under Beijing's national security laws. Those laws give Chinese authorities wide reach there. The Hong Kong government has declined to comment. So has the US State Department. China's embassy in Washington says it knew nothing about any of this.

Not everyone thinks this is a crisis. John Conway works at the defence consultancy Felix Defence. He says some F-35 parts are routine. You'd find them on any military aircraft. So the real question, he says, is exactly which parts went missing.

And this isn't even the first time F-35 parts have vanished. A US government audit in 2023 found more than a million spare parts had gone missing over five years. The Pentagon couldn't even review tens of millions of dollars in losses, because Lockheed Martin held the tracking records, not them.

What's different this time is where the parts ended up. And who is now reported to be holding them.

Australia's Department of Defence says it's checking whether anything went wrong on its end. It says the country runs a robust export control regime.

So here's where this stands. Nobody has said who diverted the shipment, or why. Nobody has confirmed what China has actually done with the canopy, or even whether it truly has it. And the one report claiming Beijing already holds it physically hasn't been matched by anyone else, so far.