Credit: Lockheed Martin

The British public may be disappointed if, after enduring traffic mayhem and paying for their Fairford and Farnborough show tickets, they expect to see the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter emulate the vertical landings (VL) that the AV-8 Harrier family has made routine since the Beatles were playing dodgy nightclubs in Hamburg.
U.S. Marine Corps aviation boss Brig. Gen. Matthew Glavy has said there are no plans for the F-35B to perform VLs in the U.K., because the program staff has not finished testing the matting that is needed to protect the runway from exhaust heat. (The program office, Marines and Lockheed Martin did not return emails about any part of this story.) It may sound like a simple issue, but it pops the lids off two cans of worms: the program’s relationship with the truth, and the operational utility of VL.
In December 2009, the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Navfac) issued specifications for contractors bidding on JSF construction work. The main engine exhaust, the engineers said, was hot and energetic enough to have a 50% chance of spalling concrete on the first VL. “Spalling” occurs when water in the concrete boils faster than it can escape, and steam blows flakes away from the surface.
Lockheed Martin was dismissive. The specifications were out of date and based on worst-case assessments, the company said, and tests in January 2010 showed that “the difference between F‑35B exhaust temperature and that of the AV-8B is very small, and is not anticipated to require any significant Conops [concept of operations] changes.”
Navfac ignored Lockheed Martin and commissioned high-temperature-concrete VL pads at four sites. At the Navy’s Patuxent River, Md., flight-test center, F-35Bs perform VLs on a pad of AM-2 aluminum matting, protecting the concrete from heat and blast. Why didn’t the January 2010 tests result in a change to the specifications? How were those tests performed? The Navy has referred those questions to Lockheed Martin, which has repeatedly failed to answer them.
This isn’t the only instance where Lockheed Martin has tried to shoot the messenger on the basis of weak facts.  When a Rand Corp. report last year concluded that the JSF will cost more than three single-service programs, Lockheed Martin accused Rand of using “outdated data” but founded that criticism on numbers that were not in the report.