Reply to post:

There's a very finely balanced decision to be made here.

The more automation you can introduce into aviation the safer you can make it. Because meatsacks make mistakes. Of course that's assuming that your piece of automation actually works as advertised. So making carrier landings easier is in general a good thing. Remember that you may be asking your pilots to take off, mid-air refuel, fly for several hours to a destination, get shot at, then fly back (possibly re-fuel again) and then try to land on a carrier at night. By the time they get back they're going to be tired and not at their most alert, being on the come-down from the stress of cobat. So the easier you make stuff, the lower the chance of accidents.

On the other hand, brand new systems take time to integrate, time to train on and time to iron out the bugs. Plus cost more. So tried and tested and less complicated may be the right solution initially. Maybe buy later, when it's an off-the-shelf job, tested by the Americans for a few years?

You may also get the attitude of senior officers that "In my day I had to fly when it was all manual and difficult, so why can't these young whippersnappers? Aren't they supposed to be elite?"

I also read that the US had much higher casualty rates than we did, flying Harrier. There could be any number of reasons for this, but the suggestion was that it was because the US Marines tend to get the third pick of the pilots, after the Navy and Airforce have taken the cream. Harrier was of course a bugger to fly when transitioning from normal to vertical flight, so much harder than the F35 will be. But I wonder if that also suggests to them that they want all mod-cons?