16
with the F-35B are scheduled to begin in
late September this year off the east coast
of the US. “We will fully embark onto the
ship with around 200 personnel from Pax,”
says Peters, with assistance from No 17 TES
at Edwards. “We will take two test F-35Bs
from here aboard the Queen Elizabeth this
year for two periods of approximately four-
week trials, which will be conducted back-
to-back with a short break in the middle.
Another six-week period will follow
next year in the autumn timeframe.”
‘Wizzer’ Wilson is set to play a crucial
role in the QEC trials. “I’ve been to
three prior F-35B ship trials as a flying
test pilot. I’m not the project pilot for
QEC – that is Sqn Ldr Andy Edgell –
but I’ll be one of the four pilots.”
Clearly, Wilson’s prior experience will
be very important as the ITF takes the first
F-35Bs out to the huge new Royal Navy
aircraft carrier. “We plan to fly every pilot
every day for six days a week and there
will be some specific 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.”
Asked about the first time an F-35B will
land on HMS Queen Elizabeth, Wilson
says that it will be a vertical landing (VL)
onto the deck. “The first landing will be
a side step to VL and we don’t expect any
surprises. We’ve done a lot of this type of
work before – there’s enough read-across
between the US Marine Corps carriers and
the Queen Elizabeth – so we know how
the jet operates around the ship and we are
comfortable with the modelling and that
events will go as the simulator shows us.
“There are multiple levels of flight control
augmentation through the systems automation
that we have in the F-35. The pilot
essentially invokes the level of augmentation
they want. So, there’s a fairly large matrix oftest points for each event. Usually going to
a ship for the first 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 aeroplane 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.“We will fly down the deck centreline for
SRVL, and our modelling 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 flight deck in a safe fashion. It’s all about
the flying qualities, the friction on the deck,
the visual landing aids and how the helmet-
mounted display
[HMD] performs.”
Previously
known as
the BedfordF-35 LIGHTNING II UK FLIGHT TEST