Well, the USMC desire for a total STOVL Force could backfire???

If the F-35B is cancelled, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal as all Marine Corp pilots are already trained for CATOBAR operations.

The only ways it can backfire are
a) The F-35B enters service but becomes a maintenance nightmare.
b) The F-35B is so disruptive to carrier flight operations, that the DoN has to transfer money from the Marine Corps’ aviation budget to cover additional Navy squadrons.

That was always my fear with the F-35B. Nobody can deny its capability, albiet with shortcoming compared to the other variants, but the question is whether it will be reliable enough (something which a lot of STOVL proponents took for granted). At this point, a lot of work needs to be done there. Maybe they can be sorted out, maybe not but is the will to do so there with current fiscal realities?

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That was when it still had a JBD and you could line up aircraft behind the one launching.[/QUOTE

The origanal design had two blast defectors side by side

Problem with that is that it used several deck park spaces.

Hi Liger intresting point about jet blast deflectors, the earliest models showed CVF with them but the later models not, the don’t feature in the BAe videos and are not present in the Navy News cut away, also every thing has been bought for the STOVL carriers such as deck edge lifts, props, fin stabilisers ect ect but no jet blast deflectors, the navy were not going to use them.

Tests showed the F-35B would need development of a new kind of jet blast deflector, so they decided to just forgo it. Would have meant that on a STOVL CVF, jets would have been a serious blow to a STOVL CVF’s ability to rapidly launch jets. With 3 JBDs spread 100ft apart, you’d be able to launch a flight of four F-35s (last one off the fan tail) in very rapid succession and have a flight launch tempo much higher than a catapult version, even with EMALS.

Similarly Kandahar had enough hard surface to operate fixed wing slow movers and uav’s so I dont know if your description of a totally disrupted site is absolutely accurate – plus the Harrier’s where able to operate there and they weren’t vtol’ing it and weren’t sucking up intake fulls of FOD

The Pegasus doesn’t have hear the airflow requirements that a F135 would have.

Someone else beat me to it, but it serves six different nations…or has at one time or another.

For an aircraft designed to do a specific mission for the RAF, six different operators isn’t that bad. It has given all of its operators the flexibility of ship-board or forward based operations.

You should have a look at the article about the USMC’s Harrier II in the latest AFM. It’s an interesting read, and it’s obvious that the aircraft is performing fine work where it is deployed with forward-basing locations still being a key part of its operations. This is something now other fixed-wing type can employ at the moment. You may have some reason for not liking the type, but the folks who employ it in this case don’t seem to agree with you.

An interesting tidbit I learned from the article is that the Litening AT pod may now be carried on the centerline station, which allows the underwing pylons to all be used for external fuel tanks and/or weapons.

I thought EOTS was supposed to provide all navigation and targeting functions.

Some would argue that the Osprey isn’t working yet because they had to rewrite the rules of how to fly it and outright discard the tests it could never pass. Has it even achieved any milestones that warrant bringing it up as a positive for keeping the Harrier?

Besides brining a lot more Marines to the fight in Afghanistan than a CH-46 could? It did very well deployed. Right now it has two issues:
1) The RR AE1107s have proven less than reliable and a bit underpowered. They are going to be replaced by the GE38s on the CH-53K.
2) The Cobras can’t keep up.

It was the original point, but the flexibility STOVL gave to sea basing later became important, & was the sole justification for the use of Harrier by 5 of the 7 services which bought it.

The IDF has expressed an interest in the F-35B because it thinks that STOVL could be useful for operating from runways with lots of newly-made holes. Not unprepared strips, but unusable by most aircraft.

Problem there is FOD