Navy F-35 pilots transitioning from Harrier jump jets must unlearn almost everything they know

The first time a former Marine Harrier pilot has… F-35 fighter jet Landing on the deck of an amphibious warship may require skills honed by hundreds of hours in the old aircraft in the new Lightning II.

The AV-8B Harrierthe Marine Corps’ short take-off and vertical landing fighter, saw the pilots carefully use three different controls: one to control heading, an engine throttle, and a nozzle lever that controlled engine thrust, allowing the aircraft to hover.

The combination of controls allowed Harriers to remain level while hovering over a moving ship, but it meant constant minor corrections from pilots, who trained to land on ships by delicately hovering around a landing platform in a box pattern of precise movements – left, back, right, forward – and stopping after each movement.

The fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighter flies differently.

On their first approach to land in the newer jet, former Harrier pilots may feel like they are moving too fast and instinctively make corrections that worked in the Harrier, such as pulling back and adding power. In the F-35, those same movements can cause the plane to accelerate and climb, says Maj. Travis Theimer, the executive officer of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211, who spent nearly 700 hours in the Harrier before switching to the F-35.

Business Insider spoke to pilots aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island last month during a trip to observe deployment training for Marines assigned to the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

‘I bet every Harrier pilot on his first [deceleration] to the [landing] path has accelerated and climbed over it,” he said, noting the difficult transition to the F-35.

The Corps retired its last operational Harrier squadron this year, ending decades of flying the distinctive jump jet. Many of those Harrier pilots have been transferred to the F-35, meaning they’ll have to unlearn some of the skills that once kept them safely in the air.

Harrier pilots had to pay significantly more attention to simply flying the plane, without an auto-throttle to control airspeed, although it did have an altitude-keeping system, Theimer said. Primarily an air-to-ground attack aircraft, the jet supported ground forces during the post-September 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with missions including offensive strikes and armed reconnaissance.

The F-35 stealth fighter can do that job too, but it also performs missions that the Harrier typically wouldn’t be able to do, he said, including air-to-air combat, locating and attacking enemy air defenses, and sharing information with nearby aircraft and troops on the ground.

The F-35B, a variant used by the Marine Corps for operations aboard amphibious assault ships, can also take off and land vertically like the Harrier, but most of that complex work is handled by the onboard computers. The advanced flight control system can hover and even allows the aircraft to match the speed of a warship it lands on, helping pilots far more than Harriers could.

However, such assistance does not mean that the F-35 is easier to control.

It’s a big change for pilots, said Lt. Col. Michael Jones, the commander of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211, a former F/A-18 Hornet pilot.

“They were probably riding a unicycle, and now they’re switching to a bicycle,” Jones said.

The F-35 is “not easy to use tactically,” Jones said. But the automation, flight control and speed control systems allow pilots to concentrate less on the stick and rudder work and more on the tactical fight.

For pilots used to flying the Harrier, the change can feel like “going from watching a movie on your phone to an IMAX,” Theimer said. The new aircraft consists of a weapon platform and a sensor instrument. The biggest learning curve, he said, is figuring out how to absorb and apply all that information.

The F-35 combines data from its own sensors and other connected aircraft and systems into a single battlefield image. This gives pilots more options during combat operations, but also much more information to process and respond to. “I am one person with one human brain,” Theimer said. When pilots try to perform air-to-air, air-to-ground, escort and mission command tasks simultaneously, “things start to fall outside your scan; you start to lose sight of things,” he said.

Even after hours in one F-35 simulatorTheimer said his Harrier career left him with instincts that did not translate easily to the F-35 and had to be unlearned.

“When you use brainstem power, you’re just going to muscle memory, and the muscle memory was counterintuitive to what the F-35 actually did,” he said. The answer, he said, was “just practice, just lots of reps,” aimed at approaching a hover and “breaking my muscle memory.”

Correction: September 7, 2026 – This story was updated to correct a quote from Major Travis Theimer, who said that when pilots perform too many tasks at once, “things start to fall outside your scan.”