Just for the RECORD
Professor Leishman's papers seem to bear out exactly my early misgivings about the inherent aerodynamic flaws - including the hazards of not testing specifically and just number-crunching prosaically toward an expectation. I don't envy Tom McDonald now because it rightly falls to him to try and prove that it can be operated within safe limits - but I honestly doubt that it can - certainly not as a battlefield vehicle and IMHO, not even to a safe civil standard. I just hope he (TM) doesn't find out the hard way. I had heard about some of the frights that the TP's were having at Pax River and I really wonder how the system can morally expect them to press on with these tests without a bang-seat mod. John Farley says that an ejection seat could be fitted and that there is a design extant (maybe Boscombe Down or Martin Baker). I certainly would not go fly these trials without being properly "seated" and I doubt JF would either. It's just not fair to task people to do that, no matter how gradually you temper the profile and approach the problem.
AsymmVR is quite a lethal evolution - without considering the other hardware and software ailments that can crop up unannounced in flight-test, whether testing the boundaries of the envelope or not. Having a seat would be more than just "nice".