F35 gets shellacked by an F16

They held a  "basic fighter maneuvering exercise" aka mock dogfight between the just going into service F35 and a twenty year old F16.  The F16 out flew the F35 and was able to gain missile launch position and gun fire position repeatedly.  The F35 pilot's report somehow leaked out of Lockheed Martin and got posted on the "War is Boring" website a week or so ago.  Aviation Week, highly respected industry trade journal, ran the story this week.  According to the pilot, the F35's flying qualities are "not intuitive or favorable".   The F35  has "inferior energy management" which is jargon for lack of engine power.  And the stability augmentation system  limited motion of the flight control surfaces reducing turn rate and maneuverability. 
   Stability Augmentation ("Stab Aug for short") goes back to the ancient F101 Voodoo fighter of the 1950's.  Voodoo was fast, supersonic in fact, by virtue of a pair of J57 engines, the best of Pratt and Whitney for that year.  It was designed before the area rule of supersonic streamlining was discovered and suffered for it.  It was marginally stable in flight. If the pilot pulled back on the stick too hard, Voodoo would "pitchup"  flip up vertically to the airstream and then fall off into a flat spin, for which recovery was impossible.   After loosing a number of Voodoos to pitchup, stability augmentation system was added. Stab Aug was a few black boxes with gyros that monitored pitch rate and first gave the pilot a warning horn, and then grabbed the stick and pushed it forward if the pilot failed to heed the warning horn.  Stab aug on the Voodoo was a red X failure, the plane was too dangerous to fly if stab aug was broken.  Pilots were required to switch stab aug off at low altitude (like coming in to land) lest stab aug push the stick forward and auger the Voodoo into the ground.
    Apparently the F35 is even less stable than the old Voodoo and requires stab aug on all axis, roll, pitch, and yaw.  The microprocessor[s] stand between the pilot's stick and the flight control surfaces, and flat out change the pilot's commands as it suits them.  The microprocessors are very conservative and don't allow much in the way of high G maneuvers.   
   Lockheed Martin said that the F35 was supposed to finger targets at long range with radar and missile them.  Sounds good, but usually higher headquarters will forbid firing on targets that cannot be seen and positively identified.  We had this in Viet Nam. By the time you get close enough to positively identify your target, you are so close that a good old fashioned dog fight is going to happen.