AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 192 / 192

Plate 192 of 192 · Modern age · Stealthy short take-off and vertical landing multirole fighter

Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning

F-35B Lightning, painted as ZM166, a Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning of No. 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force, flying from RAF Marham and the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, as photographed at the Royal International Air Tattoo in 2025: the short take-off and vertical landing version of the F-35 that the RAF and Royal Navy fly together, 35 ft in span, with one Pratt & Whitney F135 afterburning turbofan exhausting through a three-bearing swivel nozzle, a shaft-driven lift fan behind the cockpit, caret intakes with diverterless bumps either side of a chined, faceted nose, a trapezoidal wing, twin outward-canted fins, all-moving tailplanes and a frameless one-piece canopy, shown standing level on its tricycle undercarriage in cruise configuration with every door closed and no external stores: dark grey radar-absorbent finish overall with a gold-tinted canopy, a pale low-visibility ring roundel and a pale ‘032’ on each side of the nose, the squadron’s lightning-bolt badge and ‘032’ on both fins, ‘ZM166’ on the tail booms, pale formation-light strips and serrated door seams, in service (the RAF Museum’s full-scale model at Hendon is a 1998 F-35A display mock-up of a different shape, so a real RAF airframe is shown instead; no photograph showed upper-wing roundels, so none are painted, and the main-wheel track is taken from a single head-on photograph).

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as ZM166, a Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning of No. 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force, flying from RAF Marham and the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, as photographed at the Royal International Air Tattoo in 2025: the short take-off and vertical landing version of the F-35 that the RAF and Royal Navy fly together, 35 ft in span, with one Pratt & Whitney F135 afterburning turbofan exhausting through a three-bearing swivel nozzle, a shaft-driven lift fan behind the cockpit, caret intakes with diverterless bumps either side of a chined, faceted nose, a trapezoidal wing, twin outward-canted fins, all-moving tailplanes and a frameless one-piece canopy, shown standing level on its tricycle undercarriage in cruise configuration with every door closed and no external stores: dark grey radar-absorbent finish overall with a gold-tinted canopy, a pale low-visibility ring roundel and a pale ‘032’ on each side of the nose, the squadron’s lightning-bolt badge and ‘032’ on both fins, ‘ZM166’ on the tail booms, pale formation-light strips and serrated door seams, in service (the RAF Museum’s full-scale model at Hendon is a 1998 F-35A display mock-up of a different shape, so a real RAF airframe is shown instead; no photograph showed upper-wing roundels, so none are painted, and the main-wheel track is taken from a single head-on photograph). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (1023 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (full-scale model); engine, crew and dimensions are for the F-35B Lightning modelled here.

History

The F-35B Lightning

In the mid-1990s the United States set out to replace a whole generation of combat aircraft, the F-16, the A-10, the Navy’s F/A-18 and the Marine Corps’ Harrier, with one family built around a common design, the Joint Strike Fighter. Britain, looking for a successor to its own Harriers, joined in 1995 and became the only top-tier foreign partner. Boeing and Lockheed Martin each built two demonstrators. Lockheed’s X-35 first flew on 24 October 2000, and in the summer of 2001 the X-35B showed the hardest trick of all, taking off in a short run, going supersonic and landing vertically on the same flight. Lockheed Martin won the contract on 26 October 2001, and the aircraft was named Lightning II, after the wartime P-38 and the English Electric Lightning.

The F-35 was built in three versions sharing one shape: the F-35A for runways, the F-35C with a larger wing for carrier catapults, and the F-35B for short take-off and vertical landing. The B is the hardest of the three. Behind the cockpit sits a lift fan built by Rolls-Royce, driven by a shaft from the front of the engine and covered by a large hinged door, while at the tail a three-bearing swivel nozzle turns the exhaust downwards and roll posts in the wings keep it level in the hover. To keep it stealthy the weapons are carried in internal bays, the intakes have no splitter plates, the edges are aligned and the door seams are serrated. The first F-35A flew on 15 December 2006 and the first F-35B, BF-1, on 11 June 2008; it made its first vertical landing on 18 March 2010. Weight problems, software delays and soaring costs dogged the programme, but the US Marine Corps declared its first F-35B squadron operational in July 2015.

Britain chose the F-35B so that it could fly from the new carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, and calls it simply the Lightning. BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage and tail surfaces of every F-35, and British industry makes about 15 per cent of each aircraft. No. 617 Squadron reformed with the type at RAF Marham, and its first jets flew in from the United States on 6 June 2018. It was declared operational in January 2019, flew its first combat missions over Iraq and Syria that June, and in 2021 sailed with 809 Naval Air Squadron and US Marines aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth on a deployment to the Far East. RAF and Royal Navy crews fly the Lightning together, and more than 1,000 F-35s of all three versions have now been built for the United States and its allies. In the gazetteer the type is represented at the RAF Museum London by a full-scale model.

This airframe

F-35B ZM166

ZM166The airframe modelled

ZM166 is one of the RAF’s production F-35B Lightnings, built by Lockheed Martin at Fort Worth in Texas and flown by No. 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, from RAF Marham in Norfolk and from the Royal Navy’s carriers. The RAF Museum’s full-scale model at Hendon is an early display mock-up of the conventional-take-off F-35A, built before the production shape was settled, so the model shows a real RAF airframe instead. It follows photographs of ZM166 at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in 2025: an overall dark grey radar-absorbent finish with a gold-tinted canopy, a pale low-visibility ring roundel and a pale ‘032’ on each side of the nose, the squadron’s lightning-bolt badge and ‘032’ on both fins, ‘ZM166’ on the tail booms, pale green formation-light strips and a pale intake warning chevron. It stands level on its undercarriage in cruise configuration, with the lift-fan and auxiliary inlet doors closed, the nozzle straight aft and no external stores; the serrated seams of those doors are painted rather than modelled as separate panels. No photograph showed roundels on the upper wings, so none are painted, and the track of the main wheels is taken from a single head-on photograph.

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the F-35B Lightning in one UK collection.

Every airframe and serial All 192 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.