An F-35B dropped a Meteor missile from its internal bay for the first time

On Oct. 7, a Royal Navy test pilot flying a Marine Corps F-35B out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland opened the jet’s internal weapons bay and let an MBDA Meteor missile fall clear in level flight. The round was an inert test asset, but the Meteor team describes the flight as the first jettison of the missile from an F-35 and the opening step toward live firings.

Read next on Morning Overview: Zero Motorcycles unveiled an electric motorcycle targeted at under $8K and a street-legal dirt bike at EICMA

The F-35 Joint Program Office and MBDA announced the result on Nov. 5, four weeks after the flight. Neither announcement names the pilot or gives a release altitude and speed, and the missile’s rocket motor stayed unlit, so the trial answers one narrow engineering question: can a long air-to-air weapon leave a stealth fighter’s bay without striking the airframe or upsetting the aircraft?

A Marine airframe, a Royal Navy pilot and a combined test team

The jet was a specially instrumented F-35B assigned to the F-35 Integrated Test Force at Patuxent River, and The Aviationist reported that Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Two Three, known as VX-23, belongs to that force. The pilot came from the Royal Navy’s Air and Space Warfare Centre. In MBDA’s account of the trial, a combined British and American team drawn from the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and Lockheed Martin loaded the test asset. The Joint Program Office said, in the words relayed by Defence Industry Europe, that the flight verified safe separation and validated aerodynamic models.

The program credits the U.K. Ministry of Defence, the U.S. government, Italy’s defence ministry, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, MBDA and Northrop Grumman with backing the work.

The Royal Navy’s role at the Maryland test center predates this flight. In March 2025, Forces News named Lt. Cdr. Nick Baker as the pilot and Lt. Cdr. Lewis Roach as the engineer behind earlier trials in which a Meteor was loaded into the weapons bay of a Marine Corps F-35B, with Roach calling the first flight of a British weapon on the jet a significant milestone. Those flights gathered data on carriage; the October event is the one MBDA labels the first jettison.

Meteor’s ramjet and the inert round in the bay

Meteor is a beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile that pairs a solid-rocket booster with a throttleable ramjet sustainer. MBDA credits that arrangement with keeping propulsion available through much of the flight, which enlarges the zone from which a target cannot escape and raises the probability of a kill. A two-way data link lets the launching aircraft feed target updates to the missile, and third-party platforms can send mid-course corrections as well. It is already the primary weapon of its class on the Royal Air Force’s Typhoons, according to The Aviationist.

The round dropped on Oct. 7 kept the weight of a live Meteor but none of the hazard. Its warhead and fuel were replaced with instrumentation and ballast matched to live mass, the motor did not ignite and the control surfaces were inactive. According to MBDA, jettison testing checks that a missile separates cleanly without hitting the fuselage or wing structures or disrupting the aircraft’s flight dynamics. A missile leaving a bay drops into turbulent airflow beneath the jet, which is why each release condition is cleared separately rather than assumed.

Release profiles, live firings and the F-35A track

The Joint Program Office’s own post, as relayed by Defence Industry Europe, called the flight the first Meteor release from an internal weapons bay and said it verified safe separation while validating aerodynamic models. The aircraft stayed in level flight for the release, a deliberately benign starting condition, and the Aviationist says later flights will use more expansive profiles.

MBDA calls the Oct. 7 flight the first of a series of jettison trials. Over the coming months the team will fly further release profiles to validate safe separation across the F-35’s operational envelope, feeding the digital aerodynamic models that predict how a weapon behaves once it leaves the bay. The series is meant to end with live firings that confirm separation and fly-out performance under varied release conditions, and The Aviationist notes the results could later shape employment concepts and tactics for the missile.

Integration is split by variant. The U.K. leads the work on the F-35B, which the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force fly alongside the Italian Navy, while Italy sponsors the F-35A effort. Britain has already integrated the AIM-132 ASRAAM on its F-35Bs. The Royal Air Force is also acquiring F-35As, and the Italian Air Force operates both variants, so a missile cleared on one airframe is meant to serve several fleets. MBDA frames the program as a way to add air-to-air options and lethality to the combat air forces of Britain and Italy.

What remains unanswered is timing. MBDA says only that further release profiles will come over the coming months, and neither it nor the Joint Program Office has given a date for the live firing that closes the series or said how many release conditions the team plans to fly first.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.