Buckle up, boys, it’s time to bitch about the F-35 again. Hey, it’s been like a whole MONTH already, I didn’t want anyone to think I’d, like, forgotten about this flying shitcan, y’know.

Before we get started piling onto the F-35, here is a rather interesting documentary film about the venerable, proven, battle-hardened, tried-and-tested BAe Harrier jump-jet:

The documentary goes to considerable lengths to explain how the transition happened between the old Harrier and the current F-35B, in particular, and goes into some quite interesting detail about some of the very high-quality engineering brilliance behind the F-35’s lift-fan arrangement.

Now, I have been an extremely harsh critic of the F-35 for years, and with very good reason. I have slated this flying turducken plane for its appallingly high costs, its ridiculously stupid mission parameters, its inability to do anything right other than spend money, and its flawed premises.

But, credit where it’s bloody well due: the engine in the F-35 is a masterpiece of engineering.

And the solution that Lockheed’s engineers came up with for the V/STOL and STOVL requirements on the F-35B are, indeed, brilliant.

That’s about the nicest thing that I can say about the F-35, though.

I can appreciate the engineering for what it is because of my background in mathematics. That does not change the fact that STOVL and V/STOL aircraft are, by and large, challenging to operate cost-effectively.

Pretty much the only people who really made it work were the Brits, and that is because their mission requirements allowed them to get away with what was actually a challenging aircraft with very high maintenance requirements. It was a beast to fly and a bitch to maintain.

The Russians tried for decades to get a V/STOL aircraft into working order. They succeeded with the Yakovlev Yak-38 – and the video above points out that the F-35’s very existence as a multi-role, multi-mission fighter is due in large part to a deal between Lockheed and Yakovlev to transfer knowledge from the Russians to the Americans.

(Given the current, rather poor, state of Russo-American relations, that is a rather ironic turn of events. Can we now look forward to the Daemoncrats blaming the inevitable and ghastly failures of the F-35 programme upon the Russians, too? I mean, the stupid thing is more f***ed-up than a football bat at this point, so we might as well call it a Commie Plot…)

The Russkies more or less gave up on the concept because, frankly, it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense, for them.

The point of STOVL and V/STOL is to allow aircraft to operate from short runways and take off and land at damaged airbases. Cold War doctrine argued for decades that enemy forward airbases, on either side, were priority targets that needed to be taken out as fast as possible to establish air superiority and eventual battlefield dominance. Both the USA and the USSR had detailed battle-plans showing how this could be accomplished – though, given the missile defences deployed by the Soviets, in particular, quite how the Americans would accomplish their goals was open to question, to put it very mildly.

Within that paradigm, something like the Harrier made a lot of sense, particularly between 1960 and about 1980.

However, the advent of stealth technology on the US side changed the entire calculus of war between the two hyperpowers. Once the USA had operational F-117s and, eventually, B-2s, it was game over as far as the Soviets were concerned in terms of their ability to defend their airfields.

Which also meant that the need for aircraft that took off and landed vertically was suddenly eliminated too. And that is a big part of the reason why it never went anywhere.

Today, the only reason to deploy jets that take off and land vertically is if you have to deal with short carrier decks – and the only people who have to deal with that particular headache in a combat environment are the US Marines.

The USMC has a serious logistics issue with its fleet of assault carriers, and you can blame that problem on the US Navy. The USMC’s assault carriers have quite short flight decks and therefore they cannot carry larger fighters. And because the Marines operate with their own close-air-support wing, they need aircraft that can operate from those carriers. Helicopters won’t do, and they can’t launch A-10s from the decks of those carriers – that was never designed to be a naval-launched ground support aircraft anyway.

They need a fighter-bomber that can take off and land on short decks. Which is where the F-35B comes in. The F-35B can do that stuff.

That does not make the F-35B a good solution to the problem.

The damned thing is basically a flying kludge. It’s supposed to be a stealthy air-superiority fighter, a multi-role bomber, an intelligence-gathering aircraft, a tank-killer, and a carrier-based interceptor, all at the same time. The problem is that this all violates the single most important principle of design:

Find your focus and stick to it.

If you don’t focus on one primary mission for a weapons system so that it does one thing really well, you’ll end up with a weapons system that does lots of things very, very badly.

This has always been true no matter what weapons system you want to name. The best weapons systems in history have always been the ones that were designed for one specific purpose, and then were discovered to have numerous other uses.

The F-35B, on the other hand, is just an awful solution in almost every way.

Now, the pilot at the end of the video above points out that the F-35B is capable of doing things that the Harrier never could. I fully believe him. I have no doubt that the F-35B is much easier to maintain in a stable position than the Harrier, and is vastly easier to take off and land. I do not quibble with this, at all.

That does not mean that a V/STOL aircraft is a good idea. The requirements of such an aircraft force a design with a small wing and therefore limited manoeuvrability. The Harrier was able to overcome those limitations with its thrust-vectoring nozzles and has turned out to be a highly manoeuvrable aircraft – at subsonic speeds.

But the F-35 is supposed to operate at supersonic speeds. And that is exactly where it runs into some serious problems.

As mentioned, the wing is quite small because of that huge lift fan in the middle of the aircraft. So the plane has a stupendously powerful engine in it. But that also means that the wings are carrying an enormous amount of weight per square metre of span compared with other similar aircraft. And once you count the way that the weight of a complex V/STOL lift fan adds to the overall poundage of the airframe, you have a “ground support” aircraft that can’t really perform a ground support role.

A true ground support aircraft has to be able to move slowly enough to support troops on the ground. The F-35 can’t do that because of its small wings.

And this brings us to the wider problem with the F-35.

Aircraft design in general is all about trade-offs. You can’t have everything you want packed into an airframe. If you could, I would be a leading aircraft designer based on the ClarisWorks sketches I did as a 10-year-old, and the USAF and USN would be flying GUNDAMS, not aircraft.

However, at a certain point you have to decide what your focus will be. That is why the very best aircraft in history have always done one thing exceptionally well.

What you typically find with aircraft that specialise in doing one thing really really well, is that it is because they are so well designed that you can find secondary uses for that airframe and its components. That is how good aircraft design is supposed to work.

If, on the other hand, you design an aircraft to be a series of epic and severe compromises that tries to do everything well, you inevitably end up with an aircraft that does absolutely NOTHING well.

Such aircraft end up being very expensive failures, both in terms of dollars spent and lives lost.

So it will likely be with the scorching hot flying brick that the F-35 is likely to become. And when that happens, it will be a gigantic and colossally expensive tragedy.

The USA is setting itself up for the absolutely worst drubbing it has ever experienced in any armed conflict, ever, if it sends these flying turduckens into battle. God help the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force if that ever happens.