Insights from Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth
A recent article published by the Royal Air Force provided some interesting insights from Air Chef Marshal Harv Smyth.
In an article published November 3, 2025 entitled “Legacy to Lightning”. Air Chief Marshal spoke to the question of legacy fighters working with the F-35.
During Exercise Falcon Strike, Royal Air Force pilots fly the Harrier and Tornado alongside the F-35 Lightning, the service’s cutting-edge 5th-generation fighter.
This unusual pairing isn’t mere nostalgia. It represents a deliberate philosophy: the future of air combat grows from lessons learned in yesterday’s cockpits.
Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth embodies this evolution. Since joining the RAF in 1991, he’s flown hundreds of operational missions over Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, as Chief of the Air Staff, he oversees the service’s most significant transformation in decades, including the recent decision to purchase twelve F-35A jets and join NATO’s nuclear mission.
Yet Smyth sees no contradiction between honoring the past and embracing the future. “Flying the Harrier taught us to be exceptionally agile and unconventional in our approach,” he explains. “The Lightning takes that mindset and supercharges it.”
The Harrier’s influence on modern tactics runs deeper than most realize. Its Short Take-Of f and Vertical Landing capability wasn’t simply an engineering achievement they orchestrate entire systems.
Yet the core principles remain unchanged: survivability, adaptability, mission effectiveness. “What 5th Gen enables beyond legacy platforms is decision superiority,” Smyth argues, “and that is battle-winning.”
Legacy aircraft taught pilots to innovate under pressure, adapt tactics to technology, and think beyond their immediate cockpit.
These attributes haven’t become obsolete.
They’ve become essential in an unpredictable, volatile world where agility, integration, and readiness determine outcomes.
The transition from legacy to Lightning isn’t merely about replacing aging metal with newer designs.
It requires evolving how pilots think, how squadrons train, and how air forces organize for combat.
The RAF’s current global posture demands both cutting-edge technology and hard-won tactical wisdom.
Exercise Falcon Strike exemplifies this approach, deliberately placing legacy and modern aircraft in the same battlespace to extract maximum learning from both.
Critics might question the value of maintaining and exercising older platforms when resources could flow entirely toward 5th-generation capabilities.
But this misses the point.
Legacy aircraft serve as living laboratories, reminding younger pilots of fundamental principles that sophisticated technology can sometimes obscure.
They force squadrons to consider how capabilities translate across different platforms and how mixed formations create tactical opportunities unavailable to homogeneous forces.
As the RAF looks toward the F-35A, the future Global Combat Air Programme, and whatever comes next, it does so with clear eyes about where these capabilities originated.
Today’s 5th-generation tactics weren’t conjured from thin air.
They evolved from decades of operational experience, tactical experimentation, and lessons learned by aircrew and ground teams whose innovation, courage, and commitment continue to shape how nations project power through the air.
The Harrier’s agility and the Tornado’s tenacity live on in every Lightning mission.
Understanding this continuity matters, not for sentimental reasons, but because it reveals how military capability actually develops: slowly, painfully, building on what worked while discarding what failed, standing always on the shoulders of those who came before.