"It's Not Even Close": Why F/A-18, F-16, F-22 and F-35 Pilot Dave "Chip" Berke Says the F-35 Stands Apart — and What Top Gun Instruction Actually Looks Like

The Pilot Behind the Quote

Lieutenant Colonel David "Chip" Berke is one of a genuinely small number of aviators in the world who can speak with direct, lived authority about flying four of America's most significant fighter jets: the F/A-18 Hornet, the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning II. A 22-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Berke has accumulated more than 2,800 flight hours across those four airframes — a breadth of experience that very few pilots in any air force on earth can claim, since it spans both fourth-generation fighters built around mechanically scanned radar and analogue-era cockpit philosophy, and fifth-generation stealth aircraft built around an entirely different relationship between pilot and machine.

Berke's career inside the fighter community is itself a study in unusual breadth. He served as the senior Training Officer at the US Navy's Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor programme — universally known by its popular nickname, TOPGUN — where he led the staff of instructors responsible for training the elite pilots who pass through that programme in advanced air combat tactics and high-pressure leadership. Before that, the Marine Corps deliberately selected him for an F-22 exchange tour with the US Air Force's elite 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada — a four-year posting specifically designed, in the words of former USMC Deputy Commandant for Aviation Lt. Gen. George Trautman, to allow the Marine Corps to "leverage" the Air Force's accumulated experience with the Raptor ahead of the Marine Corps' own transition to its first fifth-generation fighter, the F-35B. Berke subsequently became one of the first non-test-pilot Marine Corps aviators to train on the F-35B, commanding the Marine Corps' F-35 training squadron, VMFAT-501, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He also spent a year embedded as a ground-based Forward Air Controller, calling in air strikes and providing direct air support to Navy SEALs, Marines and soldiers during the Battle of Ramadi in 2006 — combat experience that sits alongside, and informs, his purely aviation-focused credentials. Since retiring from active service, Berke has become a leadership instructor with Echelon Front, the consulting firm built around the "extreme ownership" leadership philosophy popularised by former Navy SEAL officers Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

"It's Not Even Close": The F-35 Verdict

The specific comment that has circulated widely and crystallised into the "one jet stood apart" framing comes from an appearance Berke made on the Fighter Pilot Podcast, in which the hosts put a direct and simple question to him during a rapid-fire closing segment: given that he had flown the F/A-18, the F-16, the F-22 and the F-35, which fighter would he personally choose to go to war in?

Berke's answer was immediate and unequivocal. "The F-35, it's not even close," he said. "The Hornet and F-16 were awesome aeroplanes but that's a by-gone era. Those airplanes aren't even close. Raptor is incredible — best manoeuvring aeroplane — but the breadth of information, situational awareness and capacity of the F-35, there is nothing even close to the Lightning."

He went on to directly address the F-35's frequently troubled public reputation — a reputation built over more than a decade of cost overruns, development delays and critical media coverage of the programme, which holds the distinction of being the most expensive single weapons procurement programme in human history. "The plane hasn't done well in the media of late — recently it's done a lot better — but anyone on the inside that knows that aeroplane, it is by far the most capable combat airplane that's ever been built," Berke said.

Why the F-35 Wins, According to the Man Who Flew Both Fifth-Generation Jets

What makes Berke's assessment particularly significant is that he is one of the very few pilots positioned to make this specific comparison with genuine technical authority — because he is among an extremely small population of aviators who have flown both of America's fifth-generation stealth fighters, the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II, rather than simply one or the other.

When pressed on the specific technical distinction between the two aircraft's sensor capabilities, Berke offered a precise and illuminating breakdown. "The biggest difference is the F-35 is fusing radio frequency, electro-optical, infrared and laser," he explained. "The F-22 is RF only — basically just the radar. So it's the breadth of information and the spectrum out there the F-35 is way, way broader and deeper than the Raptor." In separate remarks given to Flight Global during his earlier F-35B transition training, Berke explained the conceptual lineage connecting the two aircraft: sensor fusion — the process by which data from multiple separate onboard systems, including radar, electronic warfare sensors, infrared cameras and data-links, are automatically correlated and presented to the pilot as a single, unified, easy-to-interpret picture — "was pioneered by the F-22," he said, with the F-35 inheriting and substantially expanding upon that same fundamental design philosophy.

This stands in sharp contrast to how fourth-generation fighters like the F-16 and F/A-18 — both of which Berke flew extensively before transitioning to fifth-generation aircraft — handle the same problem. In those jets, Berke notes, the various streams of sensor data are not automatically fused by the aircraft's own systems at all; instead, that fusion process happens "inside the pilot's brain," meaning the human pilot bears the entire cognitive workload of mentally integrating separate, unsynthesised displays of radar information, threat warnings, and visual observation into a single coherent tactical picture in real time, often while simultaneously manoeuvring the aircraft under high g-forces. Berke describes this difference as representing "the biggest change from the fourth to the fifth-generation fighters" — not primarily a difference in speed, manoeuvrability or weapons load, but a fundamental change in "mentality" and cognitive approach that "applies to both the F-22 and F-35 equally."

Asked what single upgrade he would make to the F-22 if cost were not a constraint, Berke did not hesitate: "The sensors — electro-optical, infrared and laser, and every pilot in the Raptor knows that. And it needs a helmet" — a reference to the advanced helmet-mounted display systems that allow F-35 pilots to see fused sensor data and targeting information projected directly onto their helmet visor, a capability the F-22 has historically lacked in comparable form.

What a Real Day at TOPGUN Actually Looks Like

Berke's testimony is equally valuable for what it reveals about the genuine, unglamorous mechanics of training at the actual TOPGUN programme — material that consistently undercuts the romanticised Hollywood version of the school that both the original Top Gun and its 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, have embedded in popular imagination.

Contrary to the film's depiction of dramatic, secrecy-shrouded mission briefings conducted in open hangars where anyone walking past could plausibly overhear classified mission details, Berke is direct about the operational reality: a typical day at TOPGUN is overwhelmingly classroom-based academic instruction, with actual flight time being a genuinely scarce and carefully rationed resource. "A good day at Top Gun? I'd get two, maybe three, dogfights — three would be a really good day," Berke said. He broke down the actual time economics of a single training engagement with characteristic precision: "A one-against-one dogfight flight would be 45 minutes total and, of that, there is probably 25-ish minutes of really manoeuvring and bending the jet around" — meaning that even a single dedicated dogfight training sortie spends nearly half its total duration on transit, setup, debrief and procedural overhead rather than the high-intensity manoeuvring that audiences associate with the term "dogfight."

On the persistent and dramatically compelling question of whether the kind of swaggering, supremely confident fighter-pilot ego depicted by characters like Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick genuinely exists within the real TOPGUN community, Berke's answer was again direct: "Yes. People have massive egos. But often it is revealed in a subtle way — not by being obnoxious but by people not listening." He has been candid in multiple interviews that managing ego — both his own and that of the pilots around him — represented by far the single biggest leadership challenge he encountered throughout his time as a TOPGUN instructor, a theme that runs directly through to the leadership consulting work he has built his post-military career around.

Berke also offered a specific and technically grounded correction to one of the most dramatic recurring elements of the Top Gun film franchise: G-LOC, or g-force-induced loss of consciousness, which depicts pilots blacking out under extreme manoeuvring loads. He confirmed that G-LOC is a genuine and historically serious phenomenon that has, in the past, resulted in the loss of both pilots and aircraft — but noted that it is considerably less common in the F/A-18 specifically than in some other airframes, identifying the F-16 in particular as "the most notorious G-LOC plane" within the fighter community, while also noting that modern cockpit technology has been specifically engineered over recent decades to reduce the risk.

Why His Testimony Carries Weight

What separates Berke's assessment of the F-35 from the broader, often polarised public debate over the aircraft's value — a debate that has run for well over a decade and has frequently pitted defenders of the programme's transformative sensor and networking capabilities against critics focused on its cost overruns, maintenance challenges and protracted development timeline — is the specific and rare nature of his comparative vantage point. He is not assessing the F-35 in the abstract, or relative to aircraft he has only studied or flown briefly. He flew the F/A-18 and F-16 as his primary combat aircraft across real operational deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He then flew the F-22 intensively for four years at the heart of the US Air Force's most demanding fighter test and evaluation community. He then transitioned to the F-35B and helped stand up the Marine Corps' own training pipeline for the aircraft from essentially the ground up.

That sequence — fourth-generation combat experience, followed by deep immersion in one fifth-generation aircraft, followed by transition to and instruction on the other — is precisely the kind of comprehensive, hands-on comparative experience that makes his verdict carry genuine technical weight rather than simply reflecting institutional loyalty to whichever aircraft he happened to be flying at the time he was asked. When a pilot with that specific career arc says, without hesitation, that the F-35 is "not even close" to the Hornet or the Viper, and that even the formidable F-22 Raptor — which he separately and consistently praises as the best pure manoeuvring fighter aircraft he has ever flown — cannot match the F-35's breadth of fused sensor information and situational awareness, it represents one of the more credible and well-informed individual data points available in the long-running public debate over whether the F-35 programme's enormous cost has ultimately been justified by the capability it has delivered.

Sources

1. Airplane Geeks Podcast — 864 Jet Fighter Pilot (September 17, 2025) — airplanegeeks.com
2. F-16.net Forum — Dave "Chip" Berke Interviewed on Fighter Pilot Podcast — f-16.net
3. Flight Global — USMC Hopes to Leverage USAF's F-22 Experience When Deploying F-35B — flightglobal.com
4. The Cipher Brief — Lieutenant Colonel David "Chip" Berke — thecipherbrief.com
5. SPYSCAPE — 7 Secrets of Real-Life Top Guns & Trainers — spyscape.com
6. History vs. Hollywood — Is Top Gun: Maverick Realistic? The Planes, The Pilots, The Plot — historyvshollywood.com
7. Wikipedia — United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program — en.wikipedia.org