The AV-8B Harrier II has completed its final chapter of operational service with the U.S. Marine Corps, marking the retirement of a vertical and short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) platform that defined close air support doctrine for over half a century. The aircraft, a joint development between McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace that evolved from the original Hawker Siddeley Harrier of the late 1960s, gave the Marine Corps a unique expeditionary strike capability requiring no conventional runway infrastructure. Its departure, commemorated at the Cherry Point Air Show at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina — one of the primary homes of Marine attack aviation — closes a chapter that spanned conflicts from the Falklands to Iraq to Afghanistan.
The Harrier's defining aeronautical achievement was its Pegasus vectored-thrust turbofan engine, which redirected exhaust through four rotating nozzles to enable hover, vertical lift, and conventional forward flight within a single airframe. For aviators, this represented an extraordinary departure from standard fixed-wing handling: pilots managed not only conventional flight controls but also nozzle angle and reaction control valves for low-speed and hover operations, making the Harrier one of the most demanding and unforgiving aircraft in any Western inventory. The type carried a notable accident rate throughout its service life, a reflection of the inherent complexity of operating at the edge of aerodynamic convention, and it demanded exceptional proficiency from its pilots.
The retirement is directly tied to the fielding of the Lockheed Martin F-35B, the STOVL variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, which the Marine Corps has been transitioning to across its attack and fighter-attack squadrons. The F-35B preserves the expeditionary V/STOL concept the Harrier pioneered — operating from amphibious assault ships and austere forward bases — while delivering fifth-generation sensor fusion, stealth, and a dramatically expanded flight envelope. For Marine aviators and the operators who plan around Marine air support, the transition represents a significant capability upgrade even as it extinguishes an aircraft with an almost mythological status in military aviation culture.
For the broader professional aviation community, the Harrier retirement is a notable moment in the longer arc of propulsion and aerodynamic innovation. The powered-lift principles the Harrier demonstrated directly influenced certification frameworks now being applied to advanced air mobility and electric vertical takeoff and landing development. FAA and EASA powered-lift certification standards, currently under active development for eVTOL operators, draw conceptual lineage from the engineering lessons accumulated across decades of Harrier operations. The transition from the AV-8B to the F-35B also illustrates a recurring pattern in aviation: that revolutionary capability, once proven operationally viable, eventually yields to a successor platform that integrates that capability as a baseline feature rather than a defining characteristic. The Harrier proved the concept; the F-35B industrializes it.