<i>I still maintain the Navy got brought in on the Joint Strike Fighter program under threat of loss of funding. That's the only way they'd have agreed to scrap decades of naval aviation design to agree to what is essentially an Air Force fighter.</i>

Something like that, from what I've heard. There's going to be three versions of that thrice-accursed F-35: a standard, a carrier, and a VTOL version (where the carrier version has re-enforced airframe bits to support the tailhook, and the VTOL one has the usual accoutrements for that sort of thing).

The plane's trying to be everything for everybody--and as a result (in my admittedly not-entirely-informed opinion) it'll fail for everybody in various and sundry ways.

I'm rather distressed that they stole the P-38's name for it, though--that was a lovely aircraft, and I'm sad to see its namesake being such a piece of...well, garbage, really.

(And the folks who designed it obviously have never been in a machine shop in their lives, too. I can't exactly *say* anything, but whoever designed one particular part was a bloody idiot who got too happy with 'nifty keen complex curvature thingy' when "simple curve plus bolted on piece" would have more than sufficed.)