Jump Jet 2.0: The Story of Britain's F-35B Lightning

Britain has form when it comes to jets that refuse to take off like other jets. For half a century that reputation rested on the Harrier, a machine that could hover, land on a warship deck and generally ignore the existence of runways. When the Harrier finally retired in 2011, the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy were left with a rather large, aircraft-shaped hole in their carrier plans.

The F-35B Lightning is what filled it. Stealthy where the Harrier was not, supersonic where the Harrier could only dream of it, and still, remarkably, able to land on a moving ship without a runway in sight, it is the aircraft that let Britain's carriers become carriers again rather than very large, very expensive helicopter platforms.

This is the factual story of how the F-35B came to fly for Britain, the sometimes farcical procurement decisions that nearly derailed it, and what the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy have actually done with it since, from Cold War-style deterrence patrols to strikes over Syria and a genuinely nerve-shredding incident in the Mediterranean.

Buying Into an American Fighter (1995 to 2001)

The F-35's origins lie in an American programme with an unglamorous name, the Joint Strike Fighter, launched in the 1990s to build a single family of aircraft that could replace a whole shelf of ageing jets across the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, and ideally a few allied air arms besides. Britain joined early: in 1995 the UK signed on as a formal partner, contributing around $200 million, roughly ten per cent of the concept demonstration phase, at a point when the programme was still just two rival prototypes on a drawing board.

Those prototypes went head to head in one of the more entertaining fly-offs in modern aviation history: Lockheed Martin's X-35 against Boeing's X-32, a squat, oddly proportioned machine that never quite shook off comparisons to a whale with wings. Both aircraft had to prove they could take off conventionally, go supersonic and land vertically, a combination that eliminates most sensible aircraft designs on principle alone.

On 26 October 2001 the Pentagon declared Lockheed Martin the winner, largely because the X-32's lift system was prone to a nasty phenomenon called pop-stall, where its own exhaust gets reingested into the engine mid-hover and quietly kills the thrust holding it up. The X-35 had no such habit, and evolved into the aircraft that would eventually be named the F-35 Lightning II.

By then Britain had already raised its stake considerably. On 17 January 2001, ahead of the contest even being decided, the UK signed a memorandum of understanding committing roughly $2 billion to the aircraft's development phase, in exchange for Tier One partner status, a rank held by no other country besides the United States itself.

It bought Britain a genuine seat at the design table rather than a place in the customer queue, and it is a large part of why so much of the F-35, from the ejection seat to the vertical tails to the entire rear fuselage on some builds, still carries a distinctly British manufacturing pedigree.

Three Letters, One Big U-Turn: Choosing the B (2001 to 2012)

The Joint Strike Fighter was never going to be one aircraft; it was always going to be three, sharing a family resemblance but built around very different ways of getting airborne. The F-35A takes off and lands conventionally, on an ordinary runway, and is the version bought by the US Air Force and most other customers.

The F-35C has a strengthened undercarriage and folding wings for catapult launches and arrested landings aboard a full-sized carrier, the American way of doing naval aviation. The F-35B Lightning does neither: it is the short take-off, vertical landing variant, the one that inherited the Harrier's party trick, and the only version that can fly from a carrier without a catapult or arrester wires.

Given Britain's two new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers were being designed from the outset without catapults, the B variant was always the obvious fit, and it was the version the UK originally committed to. Then, in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review, the coalition government abruptly switched the order to the carrier variant, the F-35C, reasoning that it would be cheaper over the aircraft's lifetime and would let Britain and France eventually share carrier operations.

It looked sensible on a spreadsheet. It did not survive contact with reality.

Retrofitting catapults and arrester gear onto a ship that had been designed from the keel up without them turned out to be dramatically more expensive than anyone had budgeted for, with the conversion cost for a single carrier estimated at around £2 billion and a resulting three-year delay to the ship's entry into service. On 10 May 2012, barely eighteen months after the switch was announced, the government reversed it and confirmed Britain would buy the F-35B after all, a U-turn a subsequent parliamentary inquiry described as rushed and based on incomplete policy work.

It was an expensive way to relearn what the Royal Navy could have told them from the start: if you have already built the carrier around a ski-jump, buy the jet that uses one.

First Flight, and a Very Familiar Test Pilot (2008 to 2016)

While Britain's politicians were arguing about which letter to buy, the aircraft itself was already flying. The F-35B made its first flight on 11 June 2008 from Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth plant in Texas, a conventional take-off rather than anything vertical, climbing to 15,000 feet for handling checks before returning an hour later.

The pilot at the controls that day was Graham Tomlinson, a BAE Systems test pilot and former RAF Harrier flyer, which makes the F-35B's very first flight a rather neat piece of continuity: the jump jet's successor was first flown by someone who had earned his trade on the jump jet itself. Short take-offs, hovers and full vertical landings followed the next year, once engineers were confident the aircraft's Rolls-Royce lift system behaved as advertised.

British test pilots stayed heavily involved through the years that followed. BAE Systems test pilot Peter Wilson, another veteran of the Harrier community, became the first pilot to launch an F-35B from a ski-jump ramp during trials, proving out the exact manoeuvre Britain's carriers would eventually depend on, and later flew the aircraft's first ever shipborne rolling vertical landing, a technique that lets a heavily loaded jet land with some forward speed rather than a dead hover, buying back fuel and weapons weight it would otherwise have to dump first.

Weapons trials ran in parallel: in 2014 the F-35B completed its first firing and separation tests with two of the weapons that would become its standard British load-out, the ASRAAM air-to-air missile and the Paveway IV precision-guided bomb, both already familiar from the Typhoon and Tornado fleets.

The Dambusters Return: 617 Squadron Stands Up (2018)

Britain's first operational F-35B squadron did not need a new name; it revived one of the most famous in the RAF's history. On 18 April 2018, the RAF reformed 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, forever associated with the bouncing-bomb raids of 1943, as the UK's first front-line Lightning unit. It was a deliberate piece of symbolism: a squadron once built around a wildly unconventional weapon now flying a wildly unconventional aircraft.

The squadron's jets crossed the Atlantic for the first time on 6 June 2018, when four F-35Bs made the roughly eight-hour flight from the United States to become the first of the type permanently based at RAF Marham in Norfolk, home to Britain's Lightning Force ever since. By December that year the RAF had declared Initial Operating Capability from land, the point at which the jet was judged ready for operational tasking, a milestone that arrived barely six months after the first aircraft had even landed at Marham.

Back Aboard a Carrier: First Landings on HMS Queen Elizabeth (2018)

The whole point of the exercise, of course, was getting the jet back onto a British carrier deck, and that moment arrived on 25 September 2018, when Royal Navy Commander Nathan Gray and RAF Squadron Leader Andy Edgell brought their F-35Bs down onto HMS Queen Elizabeth, stationed off the east coast of the United States, the first fixed-wing combat aircraft to land on a British carrier in seven years. It was a quietly enormous moment for a navy that had spent most of the previous decade with carriers but no jets to put on them.

A few weeks later, on 13 October 2018, BAE test pilot Peter Wilson went a step further, carrying out the world's first shipborne rolling vertical landing aboard Queen Elizabeth, touching down with forward speed rather than a full hover. The manoeuvre matters more than it sounds: a dead-hover vertical landing forces a pilot to dump unused fuel and weapons before touching down, whereas a rolling landing lets the jet come back aboard heavier, meaning less waste and a faster return to the fight.

Between them, the two techniques gave Britain's carriers a flexibility no Harrier-era ship had ever had.

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Into Combat Over Iraq and Syria (2019 to 2021)

The Lightning's combat debut was almost anticlimactic by design. On 16 June 2019, two RAF F-35Bs flew the type's first operational sorties in support of Operation Shader, Britain's contribution to the coalition campaign against Daesh, patrolling over Syria from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus alongside the RAF's Typhoons. Over the following nine days the jets flew a further eleven sorties without dropping a single weapon, a deliberate, cautious operational debut intended to prove the aircraft, its pilots and its ground crews under real conditions before anyone asked it to actually pull a trigger.

It nonetheless made the RAF only the fourth air arm in the world, after Israel, the US Marine Corps and the US Air Force, to fly the F-35 in combat.

The jets started dropping ordnance for real two years later, during Carrier Strike Group 21, HMS Queen Elizabeth's seven-month maiden operational deployment that departed Portsmouth on 22 May 2021 and sailed close to 50,000 nautical miles to the Indo-Pacific and back. The strike group carried eighteen F-35Bs between its embarked squadrons, eight British jets from 617 Squadron alongside ten United States Marine Corps aircraft from VMFA-211, an unusually close arrangement that let a single flight deck effectively double as two nations' front line at once.

On 20 June 2021, F-35Bs flying from the carrier struck Daesh targets over Iraq and Syria, the first genuine air-to-ground combat strikes flown from a British carrier deck since the Harrier era, part of a total of 44 combat sorties flown during the deployment.

The One That Went Over the Side (2021)

Not every moment of that deployment was a triumph. On 17 November 2021, while Queen Elizabeth was operating in the eastern Mediterranean, an F-35B attempted a take-off run up the ship's ski-jump and simply did not generate enough thrust to get airborne, the result of a protective intake blank that had been left inside the engine and never removed before flight.

The Royal Navy pilot tried to abort, realised too late that the jet was going over the bow regardless, and ejected in what became the first operational use of the F-35's Martin-Baker Mk16E seat anywhere in the world, landing safely back on the carrier's own deck as his aircraft, tail number ZM152, disappeared into the sea.

What followed was less a rescue than a genuinely difficult piece of deep-sea salvage: the jet came to rest inverted on the seabed roughly 2,000 metres down, and Ministry of Defence recovery teams worked through the following weeks to retrieve it, along with detached components, before the operation was confirmed complete on 7 December 2021, partly to keep its stealth technology and mission systems out of reach of anyone with an unhealthy interest in either.

It remains the only F-35B lost by the UK to date, and a pointed reminder that even a fifth-generation stealth fighter can be undone by something as mundane as a forgotten intake cover.

Under the Skin: Stealth, Sensors and a Fan Behind the Cockpit

Strip away the history and the F-35B is, mechanically, one of the odder solutions in modern aviation. Thrust comes from a single Pratt & Whitney F135 engine producing over 40,000 pounds of afterburning thrust, more than enough to push the jet past Mach 1.6, but for vertical flight that thrust has to be redirected almost entirely downward, and a single rear nozzle alone cannot balance an aircraft on its tail.

The solution, developed by Rolls-Royce and directly descended from ideas the company explored on the Harrier decades earlier, is a shaft-driven lift fan mounted just behind the cockpit: a two-stage, counter-rotating fan roughly the width of a dustbin lid that spins up to produce over 20,000 pounds of thrust of its own, drawing power mechanically from the same engine rather than burning any fuel itself. Open the doors above and below the fuselage, swivel the rear exhaust nozzle downward, and the aircraft effectively balances on two separate columns of air, one from the fan up front and one from the engine at the back, a genuinely strange piece of engineering that somehow works reliably enough to land on a moving ship in bad weather.

Stealth is handled less by any single gadget and more by shape and material, a radar cross-section deliberately kept small through faceted panel lines, internally carried weapons and radar-absorbent coatings, all wrapped around sensors considerably more capable than anything the Harrier ever carried. The Northrop Grumman AN/APG-81 radar, an active electronically scanned array, can track targets well over 150 kilometres away in either active or passive mode without necessarily giving away its own position, while the aircraft's distributed aperture system stitches together a set of body-mounted cameras to give the pilot something close to a 360-degree view of the surrounding sky through the helmet visor.

British aircraft typically carry the AIM-132 ASRAAM short-range missile and the Paveway IV precision-guided bomb, both already combat-proven on the Typhoon, with longer-range weapons such as the Meteor missile and the SPEAR 3 stand-off munition planned for future integration as the Lightning Force's weapons list continues to grow.

Growing the Lightning Force: 809 Squadron and the Numbers Game (2023 to 2025)

For its first five years in British service, the F-35B was effectively a one-squadron force, and that always looked like a temporary state of affairs rather than a permanent one. It changed on 8 December 2023, when the Royal Navy reactivated 809 Naval Air Squadron, itself a name with real pedigree, as the UK's second front-line Lightning unit, almost exactly forty-one years after the squadron had last flown, disbanded in the aftermath of the Falklands War.

Along with 617 Squadron, it now forms part of a jointly staffed Fleet Air Arm and RAF organisation known as the Lightning Force, sharing aircraft, aircrew and maintenance in much the same spirit as the old Joint Force Harrier once did.

The wider procurement picture has been slower and considerably messier. Britain originally set its sights on 138 F-35s over the programme's lifetime, but only ever placed a firm order for the first 48, the last of which were still being delivered into 2026 rather than by the end of 2025 as once planned, and affordability pressure has made the full 138 look increasingly unlikely to survive contact with the defence budget.

The government's June 2025 Strategic Defence Review confirmed at least a partial answer: alongside 15 more F-35Bs, Britain committed to buying at least twelve F-35A jets, the conventional runway variant, configured to carry both nuclear and conventional weapons as part of NATO's nuclear mission, a role the short take-off B variant was never designed for.

Even with the fleet still growing, 2025 delivered the clearest demonstration yet of what the Lightning Force can actually do at scale. HMS Prince of Wales sailed from the UK on 22 April 2025 leading Carrier Strike Group 25, officially titled Operation Highmast, Britain's largest Indo-Pacific deployment since Queen Elizabeth's own 2021 voyage. Across 223 days at sea and more than 40,000 nautical miles, the strike group's embarked air wing grew from an initial eighteen F-35Bs to twenty-four, drawn jointly from 617 and 809 Squadrons, the largest number of British Lightnings ever operated from a single carrier and a deployment explicitly tied to Britain finally declaring Full Operating Capability for the F-35B, seven years after the type first arrived at RAF Marham.

Legacy in the Making

Unlike the Harrier, whose story runs from a tethered hover in Surrey to a rather undignified sale for spare parts, the F-35B's British chapter is still being written, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Two carriers with jets to fly from them, two operational squadrons, combat missions already flown in anger, and a procurement argument still working itself out in Whitehall: it is, in its own way, exactly the kind of unresolved, still-evolving story the Harrier itself spent fifty years living through. The Dambusters, fittingly, are back in the air.

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