I had no idea. Lockheed purchased a lot of STVOL intellectual property from Yak for $400 million.

And China will just copy it for free.

LOL, I skimmed the thread title and thought it said V-35B.

Doug -

I watched that video yesterday and was amazed at the lengths that the Russians had advanced with VSTOL technology. I did do a double take when I saw that swiveling nozzle that I detest so much on the F-35B rear and center on that Yak-141 (and the upper lift fan door behind the cockpit).

The reason why our (A model) canopy raises from the front axis is due to the B model lift fan.

why do you detest the swivel nozzle?

The barn door on the production airplane is there because the original folding doors on the demonstrator had catastrophic consequences for the lift fan. Had this not been the case, the folding doors would be production

Because of the complexity of the operations. I sit there at watch them twist and turn and think to myself - I have enough trouble getting my LEXs to test out properly and that thing is going to work well in the deployed environment?
It also stems from not being a fan of the V/STOL concept.
I might have had more faith in the concept had the Harriers actually moved forward with the MEF during OIF instead of continuing to base out of Al Jaber thus continuing to shorten their TOS in the AOR.


I guess I can see where you thought I might 'detest' that upper lift fan door too since I added it in there when I was talking about the swiveling nozzle, but I was really just recognizing that the F-35B shared that design concept along with the YAK-141. This is not the case, though all of the doors that have to work and the opening and closing of them and such reminds me of the same complications I mentioned above.

If I was going back in time and these were my aircraft to chose from, I'd certainly select a F-35C with the USMC boat squadrons rather than the -B model.

The reason why our (A model) canopy raises from the front axis is due to the B model lift fan.

Was the STOVL capability of the carrier ever used to good effect in combat? If it was, I’m not aware of it. The only time I’m aware of the capability being used to good effect was the time a Harrier pilot nearly ran one out of gas over open water and made an emergency vertical landing on a container ship. The captain tried to claim that the jet then belonged to him.



I was curious about that so I did some searching. It seems that the forward hinge canopy was the original design, but they changed to a rear hinged canopy in later variants to speed up the ejection sequence.

Then there were later versions builders all weather interceptors that had a much beefier looking dorsal tunnel. Those ones got the side hinged canopy .

Thanks Eric for looking that piece of info up.
I did not know it had varying designs for the canopy.

The VSTOL did give the MEUs/MAGTF the ability to exercise most of the aviation capabilities of Marine Aviation when Harriers were deployed on the LHA/LHD class of assault ships for example.

I'd say the VSTOL capability played a very important part for the British in the Falkland's war.

My critique was more about the stated tactics of moving forward with the infantry on the ground. Operating from captured airfields (Talil?), strips of highway/road, or AM-2 pads placed in the desert at FOBs.

Thanks, Brian. Was using that class of ship important, though? Or could they have gotten the job done with a carrier group?

It seems to me that they had to invent that class of ship to support the STOVL aircraft, so it would have been more efficient to just do the job with regular attack aircraft from carriers.

Neat seeing the recap of V/STOL jets at the beginning of the video and how the Yak people worked through all of the development challenges of this airplane.

No mention of the P.1154, the canceled supersonic successor to the Harrier (cost too much $$ ££, common story of a lot of canceled airplanes).

Part of the secret sauce of the Harrier's success was that they figured out the stability-vs-control issue by giving the pilot lot of control authority, while contemporary projects were working hard on artificial stability. The video mentions the -141's fly-by-wire system. Don't forget that FBW technology was just getting good enough to work in unstable airplanes in the 1980s. That generation of fast jets touted "relaxed stability" giving advantages in agility (nose always wants to point somewhere else, so when you want to change direction then in a sense the FBW computers let the airplane do that almost as much as the flight controls positively move the airplane), and improved range (reduced trim drag vs a conventional airplane's c.g. in relation to the wing and horizontal stab). Back to the Harrier and stability vs control, the Harrier's story reminds me of the Wright Brothers sidestepping rather than solving stability by building the Flyers with a lot of control authority.

The nozzle thing that's a big point of the video, I did not know that. That's another one that the Brits cleverly solved by doing something entirely different and novel with the Pegasus engine. That ultimately limited the airplane's practical development—performance and an atrocious IR signature—but they built a functional and successful airplane decades before the competition. The -141's predecessor, the Yak-38, was not what I'd call successful, yet a lot of credit is due for getting past prototype and into production. My take on the -38 was it was "before its time." Technology just took another couple of decades to make that kind of configuration viable, only to be cut short by world politics.


The Harrier and its one and only engine, compared to lifting engines and the F-35B's lift fan (driven off a PTO shaft) brings up the old "singles vs twins" argument. Any engine failure in a hover is catastrophic in a VTOL jet (eject immediately), so one engine vs three or more? Back to the argument of what technical solutions were workable in the 1960s, once again the teams at Hawker-Siddeley and Bristol-Siddeley came up with something that was ingenious.

The Yak-141 was ingenious in its own right- a generation later.

Thanks, Brian. Was using that class of ship important, though? Or could they have gotten the job done with a carrier group?

It seems to me that they had to invent that class of ship to support the STOVL aircraft, so it would have been more efficient to just do the job with regular attack aircraft from carriers.

Thanks, Brian. Was using that class of ship important, though? Or could they have gotten the job done with a carrier group?

It seems to me that they had to invent that class of ship to support the STOVL aircraft, so it would have been more efficient to just do the job with regular attack aircraft from carriers.

I don't really have a feeling for the goods or others of that design feature. Having flown both aircraft with what I consider traditional opening canopies and not the front hinged canopy, do you have a preference?

Btw - I must have forgotten this feature of the MiG-21, but I saw a video of the -21 that a pilot defected with to Isreal in the 60s and it showed the MiG-21 with a forward hinged canopy. I only remember it with the side hinged canopy.