Only a handful of jet aircraft have ever been able to hover, and even fewer are in active military service today. The physics are demanding: an aircraft must produce more thrust than its own weight, pointed straight down, while maintaining stable control in all directions. The Lockheed Martin F-35B is the only jet currently in production with full hover capability, though it shares that distinction with a short list of predecessors and experimental designs stretching back to the 1950s.
F-35B Lightning II
The F-35B is the world’s most advanced hovering jet and the only one still being manufactured. It serves with the U.S. Marine Corps, the Royal Air Force, the Italian Navy, and several other allied forces. Its hover system combines a powerful rear engine with a shaft-driven lift fan behind the cockpit. The rear exhaust nozzle swivels downward while the lift fan pushes air straight through the fuselage, splitting the vertical thrust between two points for stability. Small roll jets under the wings provide additional balance.
The Marine Corps is building its short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) fleet around the F-35B. By the end of 2026, the USMC will have received 205 F-35Bs, making it the backbone of Marine Corps tactical aviation for decades to come.
Harrier Jump Jet
The Harrier was the first successful hovering combat jet, entering British service in 1969. Its American variant, the AV-8B Harrier II, has served the U.S. Marine Corps since the mid-1980s. The Harrier’s trick is a single Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine with four rotating exhaust nozzles, two forward and two aft, positioned on either side of the fuselage. These nozzles pivot from pointing backward (for normal flight) to pointing straight down (for hover and vertical landing). No separate lift engine is needed because all the thrust comes from one powerplant routed through those four outlets.
The AV-8B Harrier II is scheduled to leave operational service in 2026, with a sundown ceremony and final flight planned for June. Its pilots and maintenance crews are transitioning primarily to the F-35B. Once the Harrier retires, it will close a chapter that proved carrier-style operations were possible from small ships without catapults or arresting wires.
Soviet VTOL Jets
The Soviet Union took a different engineering approach to hovering jets. The Yakovlev Yak-38 “Forger,” which entered service in 1976, used a combination of a main engine exhausting through two vectoring rear nozzles plus two dedicated lift jets installed behind the cockpit, angled at 13 degrees from vertical. The lift jets existed solely for takeoff and landing and were dead weight during normal flight. This “lift/cruise plus lift” layout was heavier and less efficient than the Harrier’s single-engine design, and the Yak-38 earned a reputation for limited range and payload.
Its successor, the Yak-141 “Freestyle,” used the same propulsion concept but with a supersonic-capable main engine. The Yak-141 was the first VTOL jet to break the sound barrier. It never entered full production due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but its rotating rear nozzle design influenced later Western programs, including elements of the F-35B.
Experimental Tail-Sitters of the 1950s
Before the Harrier, engineers tried a more radical idea: point the entire airplane straight up. The Ryan X-13 Vertijet, built for the U.S. Air Force in the mid-1950s, sat on its tail and launched vertically, hovering on pure jet thrust before pitching forward into horizontal flight. Control during hover came from a ball-mounted vectorable exhaust nozzle linked to the pilot’s controls, supplemented by small bleed-air thrusters on the wingtips for fine adjustments to pitch and yaw.
The X-13 demonstrated the concept successfully but revealed a critical flaw shared by all tail-sitters. During vertical landings, the pilot faced skyward with the airframe blocking any view of the ground. The pilot’s seat tilted 45 degrees toward vertical, but landing still required constant radio guidance from a ground observer talking the aircraft onto a recovery trailer. A 6-meter folding pole with distance markings on top of the trailer gave the pilot a rough visual reference, but the process was impractical for combat operations. The tail-sitter concept was abandoned in favor of designs like the Harrier that could hover while remaining in a normal flying orientation.
Why So Few Jets Can Hover
Hovering on jet thrust is an enormous energy problem. To stay stationary in the air, an aircraft’s downward thrust must exceed its total weight. For a conventional fighter, thrust-to-weight ratios above 1.0 are common at light combat loads, but sustaining that thrust pointed downward while burning fuel at extreme rates is a different challenge entirely.
Hovering with pure jet thrust is intensely fuel-intensive. An AV-8B Harrier carrying only internal fuel has a theoretical continuous hover time of roughly 27 minutes. Even with external tanks bringing total fuel to about 6,100 kilograms, that extends to approximately 48 minutes under idealized conditions. In practice, pilots keep vertical operations as brief as possible, reserving fuel for the mission and for safety margins. A typical vertical landing takes well under a minute.
This fuel penalty is the main reason most VTOL-capable jets use short takeoff runs whenever possible. A short rolling start on a runway or carrier deck uses wing lift to supplement engine thrust, allowing the aircraft to carry more weapons and fuel than a pure vertical takeoff would permit. The “short takeoff, vertical landing” profile is far more common operationally than true hover-to-hover flights.
Other Aircraft Worth Mentioning
A few other jets deserve a footnote. The Convair XFY Pogo was another 1950s tail-sitter, turboprop-powered rather than pure jet, that completed a full transition from vertical to horizontal flight and back. The Dassault Mirage IIIV, a French experimental fighter from the 1960s, used eight small lift engines plus a main cruise engine to hover, but the weight and complexity made it impractical. The Short SC.1, a British research aircraft, used a similar multi-engine lift approach and flew successfully but never advanced beyond testing.
Several modern concepts explore hover capability using multiple small engines or electric fans, but no new piloted hovering jet beyond the F-35B family is in production or advanced military development. For now, the F-35B stands alone as the only jet you can buy that will hover on command.