Further to the Col. Tomassetti quote above, here is one more (he is retiring/retired now):
The “Ready Room” as the Learning Center for Air Combat Jun 2013
"...The goal — I know why the Marine Corps wanted an expeditionary airplane, I get it because I grew up in that environment, but I will tell you, the sort of personal stamp that I have tried to put on this thing since I joined the program in 1998 is I wanted a STOVL airplane that could do all the things that the Marine Corps needed, but was easy to fly.
Because like you said, I went to three memorial services in my first year in the fleet [in a Harrier]. And that was painful, and that hurt because I knew those guys and I lived with those guys.
There were some shortfalls of the airplane, there were some shortfalls in our training, and again, it was airplane that really demanded that you were on your toes every single minute you were in the cockpit.
And we’re smarter than that now; we’re better than that now. A little bit because computers are better than they used to be and what we can do with computers and airplanes are better.
But the whole point of building this particular STOVL airplane, From my view and the other Harrier pilots in the developmental phase was to make it easy to fly. We knew what the price that the people who flew that airplane paid, and we didn’t want to see that repeated.
Simple things like hey, the airplane won’t let you decel to the hover if you’re too heavy. A simple safety feature like that, might have saved people in the Harrier.
And the fact that we’re smart enough now to figure out how to incorporate that into an airplane and make it work and the fact that I have a STOVL airplane that I don’t need three hands to fly like I did in the Harrier.
I got an airplane that you tell I want to go up; I want to go down, I want to go forward, I want to go back, and it says I got it. I’ll figure out what to do with all of those things that can maneuver and wiggle. And you just tell it what you want it to do.
I think we need to give the airplane time to sell itself, and we need to give the folks a chance to digest what that means, and then go back and take another look at how we train people to fly it and realize that we’re going to spend 90 percent of our time talking about tactical capability of the airplane and about 10 percent talking about takeoff and landing."
The ?Ready Room? as the Learning Center for Air Combat | SLDInfo