The that’s supposed to form the backbone of the western world’s air forces for the next couple decades already has an awkward reputation, having been publicly maligned as . We still don’t know everything about the jet, but the Joint Strike Fighter is looking pretty impressive in this video that just popped up on Instagram.

In the video, an F-35 enters a steep climb, until the aircraft is flying ninety degrees straight up. The pilot pitches the nose back again, briefly flying level and inverted, then nearly completes a loop. At one point the F-35’s nose is pointed in the opposite direction of the aircraft’s direction of travel. The jet stalls and momentarily appears to hover in midair. The fighter appears to enter a flat spin, falling at an alarming rate, then straightens out and zooms away:

The clip was uploaded to Instagram by Captain Andrew “Dojo” Olsen, lead pilot and commander of the , and was apparently taken at the F-35 Demo Team’s home at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. The Demo Team is working on a routine showing off the F-35’s aerobatic skills, reportedly to start at the .

We have one question: what took the Pentagon so long to release a video like this? The F-35 has been dogged by controversy for more than a decade, including charges it “.” The F-35 has been initial operations capable (meaning that it’s cleared to perform limited combat operations such as dropping laser and satellite-guided bombs and firing air-to-air missiles) for three years. The world F-35 fleet has racked up more than 100,000 flight hours without so far as a public hint of this sort of agility. Why did it take this long to even hint at the jet’s true maneuverability?

Is what we see in the video a sign the jet is a killer in air-to-air combat? Yes and no. The clip is a distilled shot of the jet’s overall agility, and some moves, like the flat spin, are not useful in combat. F-35 advocates have always emphasized that the jet is designed to kill aerial opponents before the enemy has a chance to force a dogfight, beyond visual range, where its stealth, sensors, and networking capabilities would allow it to see the enemy first and then set up an ambush. Still, the enemy gets a say in the matter (the Vietnam War was a classic example of the “oh, everything will be beyond visual range” thinking meeting a hard reality) and jets such as the Russian would attempt to force F-35 pilots into dogfights. If and when that happens, maneuverability will be a powerful factor.

We don’t know what the complete F-35 routine will look like, and how many more surprises it will hold. We do know that, according to the , the routine will last 13 minutes, showing off the jet’s “speed, agility, and high G turning.”

Previous F-35 demos have been comparatively boring, lacking the sort of incredible maneuvers shown on the Instagram clip. Here’s a solo flight from the 2018 Royal International Air Tattoo at Farnborough, UK:

But now the wider public might be getting a real shot at seeing how it can handle.