by MATTHEW HICKLEY

Last updated at 21:51 09 November 2007

Only the neck and shoulders prove there is a human being in there somewhere.

This is how the next generation of RAF fighter pilots will look.

And with piercing green eyes staring out from behind the visor, it's no surprise that the helmet has been compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer robot in The Terminator.

Pilots flying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will have an astonishing array of technology encasing their heads - enabling them to see right through their own aircraft fuselage to the ground below.

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A series of cameras on the outside of the stealth warplane feed high-resolution images into the helmet, including infra-red images at night, which are then projected on to the inside of the pilot's visor.

Special sensors inside the cockpit track the movement of the helmet, so that when the pilot turns his head his view of the skies or ground outside changes accordingly.

When he looks down he sees not his own feet on the cockpit floor but the ground below, slipping past at hundreds of miles per hour.

On-board computers also feed in essential flight and combat data on to the display, as well as superimposing target symbols to locate enemy and friendly aircraft or ground targets, even if they are too far away to see with the naked eye.

The supersonic Joint Strike Fighter is due to replace the Harrier jump jet, and is being developed jointly with America.

Britain is due to buy 150 aircraft at around £10billion, or £66million each.

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Prototypes were used in flight by U.S. pilots earlier this year and are now being assessed by engineers at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "The computerised symbology will be displayed directly on to the pilot's visors, providing the pilot with cues for flying, navigatingand fighting the aircraft.

"It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below - like something out of Terminator."