The Royal Navy wants their F-35Bs to be able to the return to the ship with more gas and weapons than they normally could by landing vertically on the decks of their two new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. The aim is to accomplish this by making a slow-speed—57 knots indicated airspeed to be exact—rolling recovery down the ship's landing and departure area, instead of a vertical landing . Officially this hybrid maneuver, which uses lift from the aircraft's wings and thrust from its engine and lift fan, has been dubbed a "Shipborne Rolling Vertical Landing," or SRVL for short.

Fixed-wing aircraft carrier aviation is not cheap, and short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) aircraft have a limited ability to bring back unspent fuel and ordnance to the ship after a mission is completed. This means good gas gets dumped, and even worse, weapons that cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars get jettisoned into the sea.

Another advantage of standardizing this recovery concept is that it will put less wear and tear on the F-35B's costly lift fan and its associated subsystems and linkages—a move that could potentially save large sums of money over the aircraft's operational life. It would also help alleviating thermal wear on the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales titanium injected deck coatings.

And why not do it? The Royal Navy spent a lot of money building massive carriers for STOVL aircraft that can operate from much smaller ships. The ability to field this maneuver operationally, and to bring back more gas and munitions while prolonging hardware life could be another set of reasons used to justify those costs.

UK F-35B pilots have been working on perfecting this landing concept in the simulator, a video of which you can see below. Make sure you have the audio on so you can hear the play-by-play narration. Also note the little pictograph of the F-35 in the lower left corner of the Helmet Mounted Display's virtual HUD. It appears to show show the pilot the lift fan and main engine RPM. Pretty neat stuff.