Comment by mmooss
3 months ago
What evidence is there of that?
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
3 months ago
What evidence is there of that?
And without the F-35B, what would be flown by the US Marines, and by most other countries' aircraft carriers, all of which require vertical take-off and landing?
Late addition of VTOL variant on mandates common airframe when it was well known that only Lockheed had anything in pipeline that could match the requirements and even then -B meant delays and issues due to inherent complexity of VTOL (to the point Britain nearly canceled the order for -B, only finding out it was too late to refit Queen Elizabeth carriers with CATOBAR kept the purchase afloat)
Reality is that VTOL model is ultimately a niche variant whose mandated commonality with air force and CATOBAR carrier variants impacted negatively both non- and VTOL options.
However, slapping supersonic VTOL requirement on what was supposed to be F-16 replacement in the given timeframe meant Lockheed would automatically get ahead as every other vendor had to scramble nearly from scratch while L-M had fresh supersonic VTOL data from both their own lab work and experimental work on Yak-141
That is a theory, but the evidence is that VTOL F-35s are needed and used widely.
> -B meant delays and issues
The -B was the first of the three variants to become operational.
For very special meaning of operational that could be summarized as "USMC could not allow it to fail".
And the delays were on the whole project due to forced commonality (in addition to L-M being L-M)
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Harrier 2.0