Thats something I never even considered!
Either is fine, and the paleolithic man might be in trouble if he accidentally closes the cockpit, the clear canopy would be pretty confusing in itself I imagine.
People can have ideas independently you know 
(seriously every time I start one of these kind of threads someone seems to think it was inspired by a movie!)
Thanks for the answers everyone, some really interesting ideas! 
Before its useless – weapons? Fuel? Its useless what? And what about its useless item are you wondering about?
As I understand it, the F-22 & F-35 cockpits are best used only as shelters from weather; using them as workstations to pilot the actual aircraft is a far less tenable option.
Some confusion here.
F-16s use hydrazine to power the Emergency Power Unit = EPU. Which is only used for inflight electrical / hydraulic / engine failures. It has nothing to do with normal engine start.
A single charge of hydrazine lasts the life of an airplane. Unless the EPU fires by malfunction or in emergency and the airplane comes home intact. The operating history is most firings are due to engine failures and the vast majority of those end with ejection and the unpiloted jet crashing. So no need to recharge the hydrazine.
Knew it was one of them–Otis AFB on Cape Cod was contaminated by many things, one of which was hydrazine. Knew they had F-15s
At least it wasn’t FOOF. Google THAT and back away carefully…
I like Harry Turtledove’s alien invasion during WWII series for this. Basically, it depends on what you mean by ‘useful’. I doubt anyone before the 50’s could even figure out how to start it, let alone fly it without some sort of manual. Certainly before the 50’s you wouldn’t have crews capable of really servicing it. After the 50’s they could probably take one apart and at least see how the components of the engines worked, and most likely puzzle out the fly by wires actuators, if not figure out how the electronics really worked. They would at least know and understand that, somehow, all that silicon was acting like small vacuum tubes and generally how it worked. I think they could puzzle out some of the radar are well, though they couldn’t duplicate it. If you sent one back to the 70’s then they would be a lot further ahead on some of the materials at least with the Eurofighter. Gods know what they would make of an F-22 or F-35.
WWII or earlier I doubt they would get much out of it, except the fact that, in the future jets are obviously important. If it happened between the wars, say in the 30’s it’s possible that it would at least spur jet development by just being an example of what jets could be. It also might spark the development of miniaturization of radar quicker than historically happened. Perhaps the gun on an F-35 might spur some development along those lines as well.
I’ve always enjoyed this blog post: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride
I would posit that receiving the plane in the 1935ish timeline would give that side a sizable advantage in the fighters that they would build in preparation for the coming war, no?
Whle computerized components, HUD, radar, etc would be useless I would think the knowledge gained in avionics, aerodynamics, turbines and even weaponry would allow (say the allies) to build a vastly improved variant of the P-51 right out of the gate!
How smooth does the runway have to be? We’ve been building long straight roads for a long time - I don’t know if they would support the weight of a bomber, but I’d guess an old Roman road would work for a fighter?
FOD ingestion could happen.
No instructions? my guess is that if you send it back to before the jet age, anybody trying to fly it will grossly underestimate the required takeoff speed (and probably also the required runway length).
For the WW2-era Supermarine Spitfire, the takeoff speed is about 75 knots; for the Eurofighter, it’s more like 170 knots.
The disparity is even greater if you go farther back in time: the WW1-era Sopwith Camel has a takeoff speed of around 40 knots. If you’re a veteran Camel pilot, you’d have to be suicidal to be willing to accelerate a Eurofighter to 4X that speed before lifting off. Especially since you’re sealed into the cockpit, with no obvious way to evacuate if there’s trouble (would a Camel pilot know that the ejection system would open the canopy for him, and that his chute would deploy automatically?).
I’d think the recipients would be screwed on both fronts. In addition to “What’s a HUD?” (much less ‘Why is it all capitalized?’) but the human tendency to repurpose terms could increase the confusion: Button, canopy, nose, engine, and throttle are familiar-enough terms to the medieval man, but mean very different things today. And this is just assuming we’re writing the same language – and orthography wasn’t standardized until the mid-1800’s!
I could imagine it would actually irrevocably hamper the recipients’ progress. Yeah, they’d recognize the machine as something related to the Bristol/Fokker/Camel they previously used and they’d understand it was super-advanced. But leaping to “Wow! You make the wings this shape and put the propulsion system here” would lead them to putting gasoline engines into a body of the wrong shape and then crashing all over the place (or trying to mount jet engines into Piper/Cessna type bodies and, again, crashing all over the place). And then they’d be focussing on material science and jet/body design to fit the unfamiliar body/engine configuration. By the time they got that synchonized (effectively trying to skip over the Zero/Stuka/Spitfire era) their side would have been defeated.
Understanding the tale of Oedipus as my Classics professor taught it, Roman roads were not only narrow, but deeply channelled by much use. Those channels (ruts) made it difficult for Oedipus or his father to get out of each other’s way. They would also cause serious problems for the wheels of a jet plane. Furthermore, I’d wonder if two of the three wheels of a jet fighter would be able to fit on a roman road or if the pilot would have to settle for the nose wheel to run along the lane while the rear wheels straddled it. No matter what, that would be a rather bumpy surface to be traveling along at 170 knots! Would Medieval cobblestones be a whole lot better?
And then I keep thinking about the assumptions and unfamiliarity someone from too-long-ago might have. It seems to me someone is going to get sucked into a jet’s air-intake the first time the recipients turn it on – “Oh, sorry Gwendolyn! Hey, how did this giant garbage disposer get here, anyway?” And, of course, it’ll be clogged and not work after that. Or someone’s going to press the wrong button and either eject himself into the sky and break everything when he lands (the chute would fail to fully open at such low speed/altitude) or launch chaff and kill a handful of people back there who were standing around watching the experiments.
–G!
The Typhoon’s first flight was 1994, and the project started in 1983, so I bet they’d have a better handle on it in the 1970s than we think.
Typically what it looks like happens is something gets developed in a lab somewhere, and then it becomes an actual viable product/weapon about a decade or two later.
So I’d imagine anything high-tech in a Typhoon was probably in the lab in the 1970s somewhere at the very worst. Some things were in use, but not widespread by then- carbon fiber composites and fly-by-wire was already in use on a number of planes as was relaxed stability.
If I had to guess, the single biggest thing in the 1970s would be the computing hardware from a mid-1990s aircraft (or later)- that would probably advance the state of that art quite a bit.
I’d think you might be able to take your Typhoon back to the 1970s and with a lot of effort, they’d be able to support it and provide spares, at least enough for them to do a lot of flight testing and reverse engineer things.
What if it were sent back to Kitty Hawk, NC, on December 17, 1903?
Thinking about it, sending it relatively far back to for example during the Renaissance-18th century time span would actually likely increase its long term usefulness. They wouldn’t be able to actually use it, but it would serve as a potential inspiration for all sorts of advances with a lot of time for the inspirations to have an effect. The simple knowledge that a heavier than air vehicle is possible would spur advances.
And they’d have the right mindset to think of it as a machine to be investigated and not magic. The big danger would be them managing to wreck it.
I read a book many years ago, about modern ships being sent back to WWII. As I remember, there was a new weapon that was fired by a satellite, that could kill a specific target on the ground with some sort of energy weapon. EIther during a test, or in an actual operation, something went wrong and a task force was sent back in time and scattered about the world. Several ships were destroyed, and many survived with no way of returning to the present. The surviving brass decided to contribute to the war effort.
Since the aircraft carrier had an extensive library, plus flying examples of aircraft, they helped the Americans build reproductions of A-4 Skyhawks. Once those were developed, they built A-7 Corsair IIs. They may have built other aircraft, but I don’t remember. (And some Marines used modern martial combat techniques after some temporal-spatial locals started a ruckus with them when Black Marines entered a bar in Hawaii.)
Given that jet aircraft existed in 1939 and the A-4 first flew in 1954, modern-ish jet aircraft (i.e., earlier types in use up into the '90s) could probably be produced and flown. F/A-18s, not so much. I don’t think it’s the airframes, as much as the systems.