Originally Posted by
chopper2004
Btw do those budding F-35 pilots have to fly couple of hours in say Juno to learn VTOL handling like the old,days of the Harrier course when studes picked for that flew 5 hours at Shawbury on the Gazelle.
No rotary flying needed because of all the exceptional work which went into developing the STOVL control system for the F-35B. It was all done in the UK on the VAAC Harrier and was one of the UK's entry tickets to Tier 1 partner status in the JSF programme. The aircraft retains conventional stick-and-throttle control (stick = up/down/left/right, throttle = fore/aft) at all stages of flight, unlike the Harrier which switched from conventional controls to helicopter-like (stick = cyclic, throttle = collective) during transition to the hover.