The F-35 is beginning to make its mark on the UK’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy who operate the aircraft.
Tony Osborne
Royal Air Force F-35Bs briefly conducted missions from snowy Estonia in the early weeks of Russia’s war in Ukraine as part of NATO reassurance measures. Credit: UK Royal Air Force
On July 19, it will be a decade since Lockheed Martin delivered the UK’s first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Today, the aircraft is beginning to make its mark on the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy.
British F-35s have made operational debuts from land and sea in the skies over Syria and Iraq, embarked and completed a transoceanic deployment aboard the UK’s new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier and advanced cooperation with other F-35 operators.
However, the program remains controversial in the UK because of its perceived high operating costs and the apparently glacial pace of the fleet buildup. Budget cutbacks have slowed the delivery rate, preventing a second front-line squadron from forming, and the Lightning Force—the joint Royal Air Force and Royal Navy construct that operates the aircraft—has struggled to hang on to personnel, in particular engineers.
Yet, officers remain positive about the outlook for the fighter. Even though 2022 was seen as a period of reset for the force after the eight-month Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 21 cruise to the Indo-Pacific region, the UK’s training system is delivering trained personnel, and the F-35 force has thrown itself into operations in Eastern Europe as part of reassurance initiatives and combat air patrols following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The original plan was this would be a reset year to regenerate capability,” Group Capt. Philip Marr, station commander of RAF Marham, the UK’s main F-35 operating base, tells Aviation Week. “They were literally straight back in [from the carrier deployment] supporting NATO partners.”
As well as flying combat air patrol sorties over Poland in conjunction with RAF Eurofighter Typhoons, the UK F-35s also conducted operations from Amari, Estonia, in deployments that were set up over days rather than weeks and months.
“The jet performed very well,” says Stewart Campbell, executive officer for 617 Sqdn., the UK front-line F-35 unit. “We were working seamlessly together [with Typhoon pilots], speaking to them, sharing information and sharing the same tanker even though we were operating out of a different country.”
Commanders are also continuing to absorb some 600 lessons learned from the CSG 21 deployment ahead of additional plans for F-35s to embark on the UK’s aircraft carriers later this year.
The UK dispatched eight F-35s on HMS Queen Elizabeth for the deployment, which were joined by 10 F-35Bs from the U.S. Marine Corps as well as Leonardo Merlin support helicopters. The deployment allowed the UK and Marine Corps F-35s to train with several international air forces and navies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the cruise was largely trouble-free until the loss of one UK F-35 during takeoff in the final weeks of the deployment. An accident report has yet to be published but is expected to attribute the loss to foreign object damage.
Among the outcomes from the deployment was the realization that the UK needs to put more personnel on the ship to support flight deck operations, enabling crew to be rotated on and off the hot flight deck more regularly. A significant success was the embarking of two UK Deployable Mission Rehearsal Trainers (DMRT) onto the ship. These ISO containers include mission simulators that allow the pilots to maintain currency of emergency skills while onboard the ship, rather than traveling to their home base to use simulators there. U.S. Marine Corps pilots performed some 550 sorties in the simulators during the CSG voyage, BAE Systems officials say.
Closer to home, the UK Lightning Force is also helping the UK’s other F-35 community to grow. Just 29 mi. down the road from Marham, is RAF Lakenheath, home of the U.S. Air Force’s first F-35 units in Europe. However, the construction of the infrastructure to support Lakenheath’s planned fleet of 54 aircraft is behind schedule, so USAF pilots are using the four full-mission simulators at Marham’s Integrated Training Center to maintain currency (AW&ST Dec. 6-19, 2021, p. 28). Commanders from both sides are hoping to enhance this relationship further in the coming weeks, with Marham- and Lakenheath-based F-35s set to fly together in the Point Blank combined air operations exercises.
The UK and U.S. would like to link Marham’s full-mission simulators with those at Lakenheath RAF so Royal Navy and USAF crews can train together in the virtual world.
In the fall, the second of the UK’s carriers, HMS Prince of Wales, will head to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. for the third round of developmental testing (DT). DT-3 will complete the operational envelope for operations from the Queen Elizabeth-class ships, including the Shipborne Rolling Vertical Landing (SRVL) capability that helps avoid the need to jettison expensive, heavy weapons before carrier landings. It will also enable carrier operations with external stores, allow the F-35s to begin operating in higher sea states and confirm the use of Power Nozzle Braking to provide additional braking action after an SRVL. HMS Prince of Wales will be used for the trials because it is the only one of the two ships fitted with the Bedford Array approach glideslope lighting system. The Lightning Force hopes to establish a second front-line squadron during the next two years as more F-35s are delivered.
The UK so far has taken delivery of 23 of the 48 F-35Bs it has on order. Three of those aircraft are based in the U.S. to support operational test and evaluation. Deliveries of the first tranche of aircraft are due to be complete in 2026-27.
Commitments made in 2015 for the UK to purchase a full complement of 138 aircraft were softened in last year’s Integrated Review of Security, Defense, Development and Foreign Policy, which stated that the UK would be committed to the F-35 platform for the life of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. Negotiations are underway for the delivery of a second tranche of 26 aircraft, which would take the fleet to 76 aircraft overall, allowing the formation of three front-line squadrons equipped with between 12 and 16 aircraft at a time. Buys beyond that are likely to depend on the outcome of the business case submission for the UK’s Tempest Future Combat Air System, which will be decided at the end of 2024 and will help determine whether the UK and its partners pursue development of a new-generation combat aircraft or if more F-35s are the fallback option.
