First Female F-35 test Pilot:
First female F-35 pilot completes initial flight
Having lost a friend and colleague in an ejection, the difference between survival and not can be fractions of a second and frankly the auto eject is a good feature which will save lives. Discussion surrounding better to be dead than disabled can take place elsewhere...
Turbine D - Let people read the article and they'll find that your 'quotes' give a very misleading impression of what Grp Capt Townsend was saying. Also as Jackonsville doesn't have a ramp there is little value in testing the jet there. Weather in Pax in March can be lovely, just not this year.
That said, I disagree with some of the Grp Capts comments about the relevance of the ship to the aircraft, in a similar vein to FODPlod. The point about the mission to Afghan in 2005 misses the role of the CVS and it's fighter controllers in Air Defence, but then that gap was still filled with Sea Harrier, AMRAAM and Blue Vixen in 2005 so he didn't need to worry about it!
As for the comments regarding what an aircraft carrier is, made in Parliament quoted by ORAC, I would suggest that that is the language used when trying to convince politicians that building brand new carriers is easy. The truth is somewhat different as we have discovered in the past 15 years!
Spaz - F-35B wet runway testing was done a couple of years ago, at Edwards, to a very tight spec that could only be done on the special runway section as discussed in the article. There's photos and articles out there on the internet, if they're not already on a page here somewhere.