Navy cuts scrap key landing upgrade for UK F-35B jets

Published: 14 November 2025. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online.

For years, the United Kingdom has championed the F-35B Lightning II as the backbone of its carrier strike capability, a fighter designed to anchor the nation’s maritime air power well into the mid-21st century. Yet the story of Britain’s F-35 programme has increasingly been overshadowed by concerns over delays, rising costs, and diminishing capability. The latest blow came quietly, almost unnoticed, with a single line buried deep within the Ministry of Defence’s annual accounts. On page 146, in a section marked without fanfare, the document records the cancellation of the Shipborne Rolling Vertical Landing upgrade. The amount saved, according to the report, is £309,000. The cost to the Royal Navy, say defence experts, may be immeasurably higher.

To understand why, one must first appreciate the role the SRVL system was meant to play. Unlike conventional carrier-based jets, which rely on catapults and arrester wires, the F-35B uses vectored thrust and a lift fan to perform short take-offs and vertical landings. The United States Marine Corps, the other major operator of the aircraft, uses hover-style landings as the primary method of recovery. But the Royal Navy had long intended to take a different approach. The SRVL technique, developed specifically for Britain’s two Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, was designed to allow F-35Bs to land with significantly heavier payloads by making use of both aerodynamic lift and powered lift during approach.

In an SRVL, the aircraft approaches from astern, maintaining around 40 knots of forward speed relative to the carrier’s deck. Combined with the carrier’s own movement, the aircraft benefits from additional lift generated by its wings, reducing reliance on the engine’s vertical thrust. This allows it to return with more fuel, more ammunition, and a greater margin of safety than a pure hover landing. Some estimates suggest the difference could be as much as 7,000lbs. In practical terms, it meant that British pilots could bring home expensive and sensitive weaponry rather than dumping it into the sea simply to shed weight. It also spared the engines from the extreme stress of repeated vertical descents, theoretically extending their operational lifespan.

The Royal Navy invested heavily in the system, fitting HMS Prince of Wales with a specialised visual landing aid known as the Bedford Array, which provides crucial references to assist pilots during the rolling approach. Flight trials had already demonstrated the technique’s viability, with test pilots completing successful SRVL recoveries. The expectation was that both carriers would eventually be equipped and that British F-35Bs would routinely employ the method during operations.

Instead, the MoD has now opted to remove SRVL from future plans entirely. HMS Queen Elizabeth will not receive the Bedford Array. Trials have ceased. And the Royal Navy has been instructed that hover-style landings will remain the sole approved method of recovery for the foreseeable future. For a saving of £309,000—less than the cost of a single air-to-air missile—the UK has effectively abandoned years of research, a significant technological investment, and a capability that was supposed to offset the inherent limitations of the F-35B variant.

Those limitations are real and consequential. The British F-35B currently carries three weapons: the Paveway IV guided bomb, the ASRAAM short-range missile, and the AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air weapon. Crucially, the ASRAAM cannot be carried internally, meaning any aircraft equipped with it loses much of its stealth profile. Only the AMRAAM fits inside the internal bay, where stealth is preserved. For missions in which stealth and air dominance are critical, it is the AMRAAM load that defines the aircraft’s combat potential.

The F-35B’s vertical landing constraints, however, mean that aircraft returning from patrols must often jettison either fuel or weapons to meet strict weight limits. In strike missions—where precision weapons are usually expended on target—this is less problematic. But in air combat patrol duties, the aircraft may return fully armed after several hours on station. In these scenarios, dropping expensive air-to-air missiles into the ocean is not merely wasteful but operationally damaging. Each AMRAAM is estimated to cost around £1.2 million—over four times the amount saved by cancelling the SRVL system. In combat terms, a reduced missile load could leave the carrier group vulnerable to saturation attacks or limit the fleet’s ability to sustain combat operations over extended periods.

The MoD’s cancellation of the landing upgrade has therefore reignited broader concerns about the state of British maritime power. Many analysts already viewed the F-35B as a compromise, forced upon the UK by the 2010 decision to reverse an earlier plan to equip the carriers with catapults and arrester gear. That earlier plan would have allowed the Royal Navy to operate the F-35C—a variant with greater range, greater payload capacity, and conventional carrier landing capability—or even legacy aircraft such as the F-18 Super Hornet at far lower cost. The reversion to the jump-jet configuration left the UK with a more expensive aircraft offering reduced combat capability. SRVL was supposed to compensate for those sacrifices. Now, even that mitigation has fallen away.

The landing system is not the only casualty of the MoD’s latest cost-cutting drive. The same annual report lists a series of cuts that have unsettled defence planners and reignited debate about whether Britain is genuinely preparing for a more dangerous world, as ministers frequently claim. The early decommissioning of amphibious assault ships HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, the retirement of a Type 23 frigate, the withdrawal of two RFA tankers, and the cancellation of towed array sonar for HMS Iron Duke all appear in the latest round of reductions. Even more troubling for some observers, six cancelled projects relate to accommodation and infrastructure—the very foundation upon which recruitment and retention depend.

This flurry of reductions comes just a week after the Government announced a £9 billion programme to improve military housing and facilities, a figure that critics argue is simply a rebranding of existing budget allocations stretched over a decade to create the appearance of new investment. For many within the forces, the contradiction between rhetoric and action has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

The Royal Navy’s difficulties mirror a wider pattern across the armed services. Long-term procurement decisions are frequently overridden by short-term budget pressures. Unlike France, which employs a multi-year defence investment model with predictable funding cycles, the UK continues to rely on annual budgeting that rewards deferrals, cancellations, and quick savings rather than long-term value. The result, critics argue, is a slow erosion of capability across the board, from nuclear submarines to carrier aviation.

The loss of SRVL, in the grand scheme, may seem like a technical footnote. But for many within the defence community, it symbolises something larger: a system where sophisticated capabilities are announced with fanfare, tested with enthusiasm, and then abandoned quietly when budgets tighten. It illustrates a pattern in which ambitious vision falters against financial constraints, leaving the armed forces with tools that are increasingly mismatched to the threats they are meant to counter.

The F-35B remains a powerful aircraft, and the Royal Navy’s carrier strike group remains among the most formidable maritime assets in Europe. Yet the cancellation of SRVL is a reminder that even the most sophisticated machines are only as effective as the systems, logistics, and long-term planning that support them. As Britain navigates an era of heightened global tension, the question is not whether the country has world-class platforms. It is whether it has the sustained political will to maintain and enhance them.