Thank you Bing, Easy Street and RAF Eng for the explanation, and the video clip makes it obvious. Its not just a lid, but a scoop as well. Clever stuff.

Some nuggets to post:

1. Another documentary by Chris Terrill coming up. I expect it will also be on BBC iPlayer.


2. F-35B fully loaded

Loaded on to this state-of-the-art jet from 17 (Test and Evaluation) is the weaponry it would typically carry on a strike mission: 22,000lb of destructive and defensive power.

n this case the ‘bombheads’ on HMS Queen Elizabeth – red-surcout-wearing air engineer technicians – carefully loaded inert Paveway laser-guided bombs and ASRAAM air-to-air missiles (for taking out aerial threats) on to the external pylons and bomb bay.

Fully-loaded, it’s known as “beast mode” by crews because of the firepower it delivers – nearly three times more than a Harrier, and as much as the heaviest payload carried by a WW2 Lancaster bomber (a Grand Slam or ‘earthquake’ bomb.

3. Junglies at the heart of the Carrier Strike Group

During Westlant, off the east coast of the United States, the Commando Merlin pilots and aircrew’s day to day work involves them flying stores around the Carrier Strike Group’s (CSG) warships and ashore, keeping everything ticking over on the mammoth operation.

In the old CVS days - how many sorties by the nine ASW Sea Kings onboard would be utility roles such as HDS or VERTREP? If freed of these tasks, does a squadron of six Merlin HM2 provide the same level of ASW coverage as nine Sea King HAS 5/6 - considering things like the increased range and endurance, and the much more capable radar and sonics?

4. I found this Corbett Paper online - I cannot recall having seen it before:

The interoperability of future UK air power, afloat and ashore: a historical analysis

Points to note:

a. To make carrier aviation viable, the aircraft have to get used to embarking and the carrier has to be up to speed with having jets aboard.

b. V/STOL makes it possible for aircraft not solely dedicated to carry operations to embark.

c. Even a V/STOL aircraft needs to be designed or modified to operate from a ship.

d. Post Falklands, nobody thought of a Joint RN/RAF force until the nineties.

e. The Invincible class carriers were busy in the Adriatic in the early nineties, and later in the late nities and beyond in the Gulf - and RAF Harriers joining the Sea Harriers.

f. The loss of Sea Harrier meant having jets embarked less often, meaning the carriers' personnel lost skills.

g. In 1982 the RAF Harrier GR3 had been able to embark aboard Hermes as she was used to having Sea Harrier aboard and fully up to speed with supporting fixed wing aircraft.

h. Points a to g were ignored by Cameron prior to SDSR 10. The STOVL-CV-STOVL debacle did is no favours and the politics made mitigating the loss of having our own jets on deck a lot harder than it would have been. This is one of the things I highlighted from that article - the embarkation of 1 Sqn with Harrier GR3 aboard HMS Hermes in 1982 and the embarkation of Harrier GR7 in the nineties was only possible as the carrier was fully swept up with having fixed wing aircraft embarked.F-35B was the correct choice, perhaps the only choice given the way the UK intends to operate a joint force and one that is not solely carrier based. It also means no need for catapults or arresting gear, and the manpower needed for them. Theoretical best is often the enemy of good enough AND feasible.

It would be interesting to see a documentary covering all the measures taken to maintain and recover skills, but think it very unlikely - not everything is public. Sometimes there were hints, sometimes one heard rumours and made logical deductions...

An F-35B with 22,000 pounds of weapons could carry 6,000 pounds of fuel and would have an effective range of ~the other end of the runway, even if 22,000 lb could be carried (with only four stations rated above 1,000 lb, and four of the rest rated for AAMs-only). Enough of this "beast mode" idiocy.

That would be the USN speeding up delivery of C's, as that's the carrier variant, would it not? (Granted, the USN pays for all of the Marine's aircraft since all of the contracts are under the umbrella of NAVAIR ... but that's getting into the beans not the bullets)

I was only going by what the Corps Director of Aviation reportedly told Congress in April...

(I heard that General Rudder's callsign is 'Stick' :))

Possibly accelerating delivery of C's as the USMC's F18s are so maintenance intensive, the USN is now all Super Hornet and F35C.

Orca, other contributors,

I hesitated to post this, but I thought it would help put the F-35B and its performance in context. Please feel free to disagree and criticise anything - that's how we all learn stuff.

All aircraft designs are 'compromised' in one way or another. No one aircraft can do everything that any aircraft could do. The Lancaster was a superb bomber, but probably not a good fighter. The Typhoon is an awesome air combat aircraft, but not much good at hauling cargo. All aircraft are designed to meet requirements: some don't drive the basic airframe design (example - digits of cockpit displays must be at least 3.4 mm high, or something). But some DO drive the whole design (example - 'combat range of 1000 miles at low level at high speed' drove the TSR2 design).

So what drove the F-35 design? The requirements were driven by years of studies that showed a need to balance out and out airframe performance against required strike mission loads while exploiting low observability and more advanced sensor and communications capabilities. Internal weapons bays would be required to support a reduced signature. LO ruled out external fuel tanks as a solution to achieving desired ranges. All that would place pressure on aircraft internal volume, and that in turn meant that F-35 would never be a 'lean and mean' 9g dogfighter. The Key Performance Parameters (KPPs - JSF speak for key requirements) were carefully chosen to reflect those basic objectives.

The F-35B design was also driven by two key requirements that were particular to STOVL. These were to perform a STO for a given mission in a certain length - this figure was driven by the size of USN LHD flight decks. The second requirement was the vertical landing bring back (VLBB), calling for the aircraft to be able to land vertically with a specified internal weapon load. These two requirements absolutely drove the design of the F-35B. They could only be met by a powered lift aircraft that had enough powered lift capability and internal weapons bay volume. ( The F-35B team also had to meet a number of 'joint' KPPs, but the only performance related 'joint' KPP was that for mission radius. )

The choice of these two KPPs was deliberate and informed. The people drawing them up back in the 90s had realised that any powered lift aircraft design would experience huge pressure on internal volume (lift fans take up space). As a result, they only asked for the STOVL aircraft to bring back (or carry) 1,000lb class weapons, to give the design team some margin on both volume and wight. Unfortunately, in the early days of the development programme, the LM JSF team had a poor handle on airframe weight and internal design. Really poor. That led them to believe that they could produce a 'common weapons bay' design for all 3 variants, giving the STOVL variant the ability to carry 2,000lb weapons internally. They couldn't. LM then had to redesign the STOVL aircraft more or less completely, with the big change being reducing the size of the weapons bays back to the 1,000lb weapon size originally envisaged. (By the way, at that time, all three variants were grotesquely overweight and unable to meet any performance related KPPs - the B variant led the subsequent redesign effort, but all three aircraft were extensively changed).

The F-35B is not 'significantly compromised'. Its design is deliberate and aimed at meeting KPPs that supported operation from ships. It's damn near the size of an F-4. It can launch from a ship at higher weights than the F-4 could from UK ships. It can land on with 3,200lbs of internal weapons. Its sensor and comms capabilities are way ahead of anything else out there. And it can operate from ships that have got around 600 feet of deck. It's the future of maritime air power for those countries that can't afford, or don't know how to build, CVN type carriers and the aircraft to go on them. (Right now, only the US can do that).

My view (and that's all it is) is that the next few years will see more and more countries putting F-35Bs on a variety of ships, some called 'aircraft carriers'. The Japanese, South Koreans and Italians are al moving that way. The UK seems to be planning a joint UK/USMC air wing for the QE's 2021 deployment, with somewhere about 24 aircraft embarked.

Final point. I'm not an LM shill. I'm not an F-35 fanboy. I'm just an old naval aircraft engineer who has a little understanding of just how damn hard it is to design, make, test and deploy a supersonic STOVL strike aircraft to sea. I admit to getting a bit miffed when the efforts of extremely fine and clever people (not including me, by the way) are disparaged, especially when lots of those clever people are excellent Brits.

Best regards as ever to all those who are working hard right now to give the UK an outstanding maritime strike capability, and to those who are getting ready to deploy it.

Engines

Very well said, Engines. This stuff is hard!

Thank you, Engines, for bringing your usual grasp of detail, balance and not a little common sense to the forum.

And beautifully written, may I add. Anyone thinking of posting questions about the F-35B/QNLZ combination would do well to read Engines' posts first.

Yet again Engines, you put many other posters to shame with an intelligent and informed post.

Ignoring the obvious stealth advantages, how does the Gripen compare to the F35?
Would there be a benefit in having additional simpler & lower cost aircraft on board to supplement a tier 1 aircraft on missions that would support its operational capabilities?

Tech Guy, Hula,

Perhaps I can help a little here.

Tech, your question helps illustrate the difficulty in comparing aircraft that were designed against different requirements. The Gripen is, in my view, a very good medium weight fighter bomber, with some excellent supportability features and good performance. However, it's not a very good naval aircraft, as it wasn't designed to operate from ships. Actually, it's a really poor naval aircraft, as it can't operate from a carrier at all.

Some help here - a conventional naval aircraft that uses catapults and arresting gear needs a range of special design features. The main aerodynamic features are an ability to carry out approach and landing at much lower speeds than land based aircraft, to allow the arresting gear to bring it to a halt, and special aero design to allow it to get airborne safely at the end of the catapult launch. These drive large wings and control surfaces, plus a ton of other stuff. The main airframe feature is the extra strengthening to handle the launch and arresting loads, as well as the far higher landing loads caused by the 'no flare' landing required to accurately engage the arresting gear. This last one is really significant. The Gripen has none of these. They are very, very major and significant, and add a LOT of weight to the aircraft.

Very few land based aircraft have made the transition to a flight deck. The only ones that jump out of my aged brain are the FJ-1 to FJ-4 Fury of the 1950s, and the T-45 Goshawk of the 1980s. The T-45 was just a trainer, and didn't have to carry weapons, but even so it had to have major changes made to operate from the deck, adding more than a ton to its empty weight. The FJ-1 Fury was a minimum change from the Sabre, but it rapidly grew into the totally different FJ-4 to be combat effective. Of course, the STOVL Harrier made the transition with not too many modifications, but that's not a cat and trap aircraft.

Hula, as far as I know, the current deployment of QE with the embarked F-35Bs is planning to extend the envelope of SRVL operations to higher weights and also more demanding deck conditions. I'd expect that they would want to clear night ops as well. Yes, the risks associated have certainly been thoroughly reviewed, and would have been reviewed again before the trials plan was approved. I don't believe there's any loss of 'appetite' - SRVLs are very important to the UK to give greater flexibility and more bring back to F-35B operations. However, I'm not 'in the loop' these days, so I'm prepared to be proved wrong in my assumptions.

Hope this reply helps everyone get a better understanding of the challenges and the solutions that the teams have to develop to get aircraft to sea and operate effectively. I know that this is a specialist area of knowledge, and I'm always happy to help where I can.

Best Regards as ever to all those Fleet Air Arm people who are, once again, showing the world new ways of operating aircraft at sea.

Engines

It might be reasonable at this point to remind everyone of Rafale, which aside from the F-111 (I believe) is the only high-performance aircraft to have been designed from the egg for CTOL and CV. They did a nice job (inventing CATIA in the process) and Rafale M has a much lower OEW than F-35B or F-35C, and can definitely beat the former in everything except LO, and (I suspect) can haul as much as far as the latter also.

This brings up an interesting viewpoint on carrier STOVL. When you operate a jet fighter from an 800-1000 foot deck, you need some assistance in acceleration and deceleration. On a conventional carrier, this is provided by catapults and arrester gear that (speaking hypothetically as an aviator) I leave behind on the boat. When I go STOVL, I take those functions off my >50,000 ton ship and put them on my airplane, where I carry them around all the time, even when I'm pulling 7 g. Note the OEW delta between the F-35A and F-35B, even though the latter has no internal gun and an aggressively lightened structure.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, one could say "but wait, STOVL lets me operate from mini-carriers". But when you define your carrier-air mission such that you want to do defensive CAP and air-to-ground missions concurrently, and your airplane is F-4-sized, this no longer applies.

I recently watched a 3 part series on the QE ("Rise of the Supercarrier) on the Smithsonian channel - I suspect it's the same thing you got in the UK earlier as it was created by the BBC. Interesting and informative - we've really not heard all that much about the two new British carriers on this side of the pond.
But it does beg the question - the primary advantage of STOVL is it allows for a much smaller carrier. But the Queen Elizabeth is huge - even by aircraft carrier standards. Yea, it's smaller than the American Nimitz and new Ford class, but it's much larger than the WWII vintage carriers. So why not provide it with cat/trap capabilities?

Good question! Initially, the plan was to operate the F35B, and hence no need for cats and traps. However, the carriers were to be designed for future conversaion to cats and traps, to future proof post F35B.

Then, F35C began to come into the picture. The defence review in 2010 proposed that we might sell one carrier (after the global financial crisis) and fit the other one with cats and traps for F35C.However, this was to utilise the EMALS from the Ford, which was proving troublesome and expensive. So before long, the idea began to falter.
The 2016 defence review reverted to F35B, and retention of both carriers, albeit with the second having enhanced amphibious (read Royal Marines) capability. So back to STOVL.

Theoretically, both could go CATOBAR in future if required, although it sounds like open-heart surgery!