The US Marines just landed an F-35B Joint Strike Fighter on an old 50-foot-wide highway in Southern California, refueled and rearmed, and launched back off into the sky, according to Lockheed Martin and the War Zone on Thursday.
On top of the F-35B performing this remarkable vertical-style landing, the Marines also established an improvised forward arming and refueling point to handle other kinds of aerial vehicles in the same area.
Israel does not possess the F-35B fighter at the moment, but instead has multiple squadrons of the classic F-35A fighter, and ordered another 25 F-35As in early July, which would bring Israel to 75 F-35s.
Israel has its own version of the aircraft
The F-35A, or Israel’s customized version, the F-35I, has greater capabilities as a distance fighter than the F-35B, and Lockheed Martin has sold it about five times as much globally. The F-35B, however, has the unique vertical landing capability.
Jerusalem is still keeping an eye on the fighter, especially when it makes headlines as it did this week.
F-35’s arrive in Israel after being purchased from Lockheed Martin, November 13, 2022 (credit: LOCKHEED MARTIN)According to the report, the US Marine Corps knows that to win future conflicts in the Indo-Pacific theater, “they will have to work like never before with the other services, and do so from very austere locales.”
This week, the Marines of Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron One (VMX-1) gathered nine squadrons and other units from the Marines, Air Force, and Navy to conduct another round of the cyclical training event known as ‘Obsidian Iceberg.’
The event “is an organic effort to realize the distributed operations concept for the (short take-off and vertical landing) STOVL-capable F-35B by solving operational challenges associated with operating a fifth-generation fighter at remote locations that have little organic logistical support, let alone long, tidy runways,” said the report.
The spot where the US Marines conducted the drill was between various train tracks and route I-5 near Camp Pendleton.
In fact, the old road used to be part of the Pacific Coast Highway and has power lines and ditches to the west and active train tracks a few yards to the east.
Known as VSTOL-101, the road served for many years as a practice landing site for Marine Harriers, but VMX-1 resurrected the site for the unique training event with the F-35B.
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