Here is a rather interesting video asking why it is that the Russians don’t use aircraft that take off and land vertically – and it’s not because they didn’t try the concept:

People who like the idea of V/STOL (Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing) jets, such as the British Harrier or the Marine Corps-spec F-35B variant, or similar jets like those, believe that vertical take-off is critical because it allows air forces to operate from damaged or rough runways. And that is true.

However, the problems with VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing), and also STOVL (Short Take Off and Vertical Landing), aircraft, make them far more of a headache than simply using STOL (Short Take Off and Landing) aircraft.

The alphabet-soup acronyms are annoying, I know, but basically each type of aircraft requires some kind of vectored-thrust engine nozzle.

The Harrier, which can take off and land fully vertically, has nozzles that rotate 90 degrees downwards. The US Marines love this thing because it allows them to deploy aircraft from their own specialised amphibious assault craft that are much smaller, cheaper, and more nimble than the massive supercarriers used by the US Navy.

The F-35B has a very complicated integrated lift system within its main Rolls-Royce engine that allows for the thrust from the engine to be directed straight downwards from both exhaust and a central lift fan. It is a colossal faff, but it does work:

Just because it “does work”, however, does not mean that the concept of vertical take-off jets is particularly sensible. The list of problems with STOVL or VTOL aircraft is enormous.

Starting with the general problems, STOVL/VTOL aircraft must have small wings in order to take off vertically. That is simple physics. The bigger the wing is, the harder it is for the aircraft to push the air out of the way in order to take off.

So let’s say you design a vertical take-off aircraft with a small wing – just like the BAe Harrier, or the Yakovlev YAK-41, or the F-35B. Great!

… Except now you have an aircraft that is stupidly heavy, because of the very complicated engine. And it drinks like an alcoholic on a five-day bar bender. And it has a very wide body, which greatly increases its radar cross section. And because it has small wings, it is much less manoeuvreable than its larger-winged conventional counterparts.

That is a big part of the reason why the Russians largely abandoned the concept and preferred to use helicopters instead – because unlike fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters are actually genuinely designed to take off vertically.

And it is not as though the Russians have abandoned the concept of vectored thrust, either. That idea actually does work and does increase a fighter aircraft’s ability to move effectively in combat. That is why the F-22 has integrated vectored-thrust exhausts, and why the new Su-57 has the same. These aircraft are highly manoeuvreable and highly nimble in the air.

So now let’s turn to the specifics of the F-35B, and what it sacrifices in order to have that oh-so-precious vertical take off ability.

I have been an extremely harsh critic of the F-35, for years, and with very good reason. I’m not even the harshest critic, because I’m not an engineer or a military man, or any sort of defence analyst. I just know how to look at numbers and draw simple conclusions from them.

And when I see a fighter aircraft whose total cost of development and production has exceeded A TRILLION DOLLARS, while the aircraft produced from the program are so full of bugs and problems that they spend anywhere from 40 to 50 hours on the ground for every hour spent in flight, and the helmets are so heavy that an ejection from the cockpit will literally break the necks of pilots under a certain weight, and the aircraft itself gets killed off in massive numbers in wargaming scenarios against much cheaper and crappier Chinese fighters…

Well, all I can say is that the entire program is idiotic.

But the most idiotic aspect of it, by far, has got to be the F-35B.

One of the major selling points behind the F-35 program was the idea of common airframes and parts between all of the variants. That flying turkey was originally marketed on the basis that up to 70% of the parts would be common between the variants, and so this would greatly reduce the total cost of operation.

But, because of the unique requirements of the vertical take off variant, the actual percentage of common parts between all airframes is roughly 20% these days.

On top of which, the airframe of the F-35 had to be designed to accommodate that massive vectoring jet in the middle, which means that all versions of this supposed “fighter” aircraft had to be designed with short stubby wings.

This means that the F-35 has an extremely high wing-load, i.e. every square foot of the wing has to “lift” a hell of a lot more mass than any of its competitors. And while it has a ridiculously powerful engine, its actual thrust-to-weight ratio is only about 1.08 for the F-35B. This is higher than a lot of existing fighters out there, including most of the F-35’s competitors, I’ll grant it that without reservation – but the F-35A has a TWR of 1.16, which is actually quite good, and while the F-35C, the Navy version, has a TWR of barely 1.01.

That is catastrophically bad, especially when compared with the previous mainstay fighter aircraft used by the Navy. And the Marine Corps version doesn’t actually have that much more thrust, given its weight, than the AV-8B Harrier that it is supposed to be replacing.

All of that is before we get to the fact that the F-35B loses about a third of the fuel volume of the main F-35A design, just because of that honking great thrust fan. And it also cannot pull the same kinds of high-stress stunts in flight, because it is too heavy – it is restricted to pulling a maximum of 7g in flight.

Then there is the fact that the exhaust from the vertical take off system was hot enough to melt the steel of the carrier decks and the runway surfaces of the Marine bases from which the thing was supposed to fly.

Lockheed was able to solve this, sort of, by changing the shape of the exhaust profile from a circle to an oval. But even then, the airbases and carriers still have to have their take-off and landing surfaces changed to withstand the extreme heat generated by the VTOL system.

And yet, with ALL of those absurd and awful problems, the F-35B is still vulnerable to Foreign Object Damage.

You and I call this “shit on the runway that gets sucked into engines and blows them the full cup”.

This is precisely the sort of thing that you find all of the time in exactly the kinds of environments that the F-35B is supposed to operate in.

What, then, was the point of the fighter in the first place, if it is literally incapable of doing what it was originally designed to do?

Here is one last point to consider:

The Russians have an entirely different philosophy to running fighter operations than the Americans do. I showcased a video explaining the philosophical differences between the two nations in one of my Monday linkage posts from a few weeks back. If you look at a Russian airbase, it is not a particularly tidy place. There is junk all over the place and the grass grows long and green all over the fields.

Why?

Because the Russians design their planes to be used and abused and still work. They have a brute-force approach to design and utilisation that Americans don’t have.

That doesn’t mean that Russian military equipment is necessarily better. One of the longest-running myths about Russian tanks is that the T-34 is that it was a cheap, reliable, high-performing German supertank-killer. It was almost none of these things. In fact, it was cheap and as such was built in huge numbers in WWII – but was actually quite hopelessly outmatched against the vastly superior German Tiger I and II.

But the Russians do tend to have the ability to learn from mistakes, both their own and those of others. They saw that VTOL aircraft were not a clever idea, and decided not to go that route.

Good for them.