plus a much more expensive and complicated airframe designed to be regularly handle water landings without complications.
Even if you could slow the thing down enough to deploy a parachute ... if the results of building VSTOL into the plane are so disastrous then surely it's worth exploring other options to be able to deploy fighters from boats without needing an carrier with a full airstrip on it.
it wouldn't provide the same benefits for, e.g., improvised land-based airfields.
Right, so from what I read just now (about the harrier at least) it doesn't have those advantages anyway because the vertical thrust ruins the landscape and kicks up dirt which clogs the engines ... perhaps that's fixed by the thruster fan of the F-35?
But the point is that the main reason they wanted this capability is so they didn't need carrier support to have their own aircraft, not so they could land in random spots on land, right?
Even if you could slow the thing down enough to deploy a parachute ... if the results of building VSTOL into the plane are so disastrous then surely it's worth exploring other options to be able to deploy fighters from boats without needing an carrier with a full airstrip on it.
it wouldn't provide the same benefits for, e.g., improvised land-based airfields.
Right, so from what I read just now (about the harrier at least) it doesn't have those advantages anyway because the vertical thrust ruins the landscape and kicks up dirt which clogs the engines ... perhaps that's fixed by the thruster fan of the F-35?
But the point is that the main reason they wanted this capability is so they didn't need carrier support to have their own aircraft, not so they could land in random spots on land, right?