combat aircraft

operations. Gray scored another  rst as he

followed his maiden landing with the  rst

launch from the ski-jump.

This method of launching the F-35B

from the British carrier is unique — the

US Marine Corps  ies from a  at deck

— and enables higher-gross weight take-

o s. Showing the pace of progress, the

other uniquely British technique, namely

the shipborne rolling vertical landing

(SRVL), has been tested too.

BAE Systems F-35 test pilot Peter ‘Wizzer’

Wilson debuted SRVL on October 13.

Previously, all carrier F-35B operations

have used vertical landings, coming to a

hover alongside the ship before ‘side-

stepping’ over the deck and descending.

SRVL has long been an ambition of the

UK when it comes to the F-35B, combining

a conventional landing approach directly

over the ship centerline and using both

thrust from the engine and lift created by

air ow over the wings. The UK is the only

nation planning to use the technique,

which will allow jets to recover at higher

boarding weights, and mean greater

‘bring-back’ — they won’t need to jettison

expensive fuel and weapons to be at an

acceptable landing weight.

Earlier this year, Wilson told Combat

Aircraft that SRVL would be trialed if

the FOCFT phase was going su ciently

well. ‘We plan to  y every pilot every

day for six days a week and there will be

some speci c events that I’ll have keen

interest in; for example, the shipboard

rolling vertical landing [SRVL] is where

the engineering is both complex and

fascinating.

‘There are multiple levels of  ight

control augmentation through the

systems automation that we have in the

F-35. The pilot essentially invokes the

level of augmentation they want. So,

I’ve fl own

more than

2,000 SRVLs in the

simulator, and am

honored to have

been able to do the

fi rst one on board

HMS Queen Elizabeth

Peter ‘Wizzer’ Wilson,

BAE Systems test pilot

there’s a fairly large matrix of test points

for each event. Usually going to a ship

for the  rst time you’d expect to start out

with minimum levels of augmentation.

The aircraft cannot ‘hook up’ to the Queen

Elizabeth at this point — the F-35 has the

capability but the ship doesn’t yet have

JPALS [the GPS-based Joint Precision

Approach and Landing System]. However,

some systems on the aircraft can

interpret data from the carrier, such as

determining its speed. JPALS is ultimately

designed to give the F-35 auto-land

capability; the pilot would simply press a

button and the aircraft lands.’

Talking speci cally about SRVL, Wilson

said, ‘We will  y down the deck centerline

for SRVL, and our modeling for this work

is very good, but we know we are going

to learn some things when we actually

get to the ship. The main challenge is

physically stopping on the  ight deck in

Above left to right:

Cdr Gray makes

the fi rst ski-jump

launch from the

carrier in BF-05

on September 25.

Crown Copyright/

LPhot Kyle Heller

The trials swiftly

moved to night-

time operations.

The long exposure

of the camera

picks up the heat

signature of the

F135 engine on the

hovering BF-05.

Lockheed Martin/

Dane Wiedmann

Below: BF-04

hovers before

touching down.

Crown Copyright/

PO Arron Hoare

78 December 2018 //^ http://www.combataircraft.net

INDUSTRY REPORT // F-35B