[DioraMoostebeers]

The Daily Mail: May 10 2012 12PM

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond will announce the Government is abandoning plans to buy the conventional take-off version
of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It will instead opt for the F-35B model which takes off and lands like a Harrier jump jet.

The move, signed off by David Cameron at a meeting of his National Security Council this week, is especially humiliating because
plans for the jump jet were controversially axed by the Coalition in the Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010. The jump
jet was Labour's choice - one that Mr Cameron derided as an 'error'. The Coalition claimed the carrier variant - the F-35C - was
a more capable aircraft that could fly further, carry more bombs and would be inter-operable with the U.S. and French navies.

But Mr Hammond will abandon the plan because of the cost of fitting the 65,000-tonne carriers with catapults and arrester wires
- so-called 'cat and traps' - so the F-35C could be safely launched and land had trebled from around £600million to around £2billion.

Pressing on with the plan could have delayed the £6.2billion HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales by another three years -
until 2023. The programme would also have provided only one operable carrier because of these costs. By switching to jump jets,
the aircraft carriers will be able to operate the warplanes from 2018.



Pictures:- Top Left:- F-35C; Top Right:- F-35B STOVL (Short Take Off, Vertical Landing); Bottom:- HMS Queen Elizabeth