The Marine Corps just said goodbye to the AV-8B Harrier II.
On June 3, 2026, the last Marine Harriers completed their final flight at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, as part of a sundown ceremony for Marine Attack Squadron 223.
That ended more than 40 years of AV-8B service, and more than five decades of Marine Corps Harrier operations going back to the original AV-8A. The Marine Corps says the aircraft’s aircrew and maintainers are now transitioning to the F-35B.
And that matters, because the Harrier was never just an airplane.
It was a Marine Corps argument for its existence.
The airplane that fought gravity
So think about this: What if a Marine Expeditionary Unit could bring its own jet attack aircraft on an amphibious ship?
What if, after the enemy cratered every normal runway in the area, you could still launch a jet from a patch of road, a forward operating base, or the deck of what was basically a baby aircraft carrier?
That was the Harrier.
It was loud, hot, weird, unforgiving, and very… British. Which means it was brilliant, dangerous ,and difficult to maintain all at the same time.
The Harrier started with one of those Cold War questions that sounds crazy until you remember everyone was planning for World War III. If the Soviets attack NATO air bases in Europe, what happens when the runways get blown up?
You can have all the jet fighters in the world, but if they need 8,000 feet of concrete and the enemy just turned that concrete into gravel, congratulations, bub, you now own the world’s most expensive static display.
So the British started chasing a practical vertical/short takeoff and landing fighter. Not a helicopter. Not a science fair project. But a real fixed-wing combat aircraft that could take off and land without needing a normal runway.
The key was the Pegasus engine.
The Pegasus was developed under the NATO Mutual Weapons Development Program, first ran in 1959, and powered the Hawker Siddeley P.1127/Kestrel prototypes during flight trials beginning in 1960.
The P.1127 would eventually become the Harrier: the first operational fixed-wing vertical/short takeoff and landing fighter aircraft.
Here’s the magic trick: the Pegasus wasn’t just a jet engine. It was a vectored-thrust turbofan with four swiveling nozzles.
Instead of all the thrust going out the back, the pilot could rotate the nozzles downward and use engine thrust to lift the aircraft. In U.S. Marine Corps service, that engine family was designated the F402.
So the Harrier could fly like a jet, slow down, point its nozzles down, and land vertically.
At least, that’s the brochure version.
The combat reality was a little different. A vertical takeoff (VTOL) looks cool at an airshow, but vertical takeoff eats fuel and limits how many weapons you can carry.
The useful trick was not always “straight up and straight down.” The useful trick was short takeoff and vertical landing. A short rolling takeoff (STOVL) gave the aircraft more lift, more fuel, and more bomb-carrying ability.
VTOL was the party trick.
STOVL was the job.
Even in early ship trials, evaluators understood that vertical takeoff with a combat load was the limiting factor. The Kestrel could operate from ships, but combat-loaded vertical launches were another story. Short takeoff was the real path to making the airplane militarily useful.
The Marines saw the point before almost everyone else did
The Marine Corps didn’t buy the Harrier because it was the prettiest airplane. The Marine Corps bought the Harrier because Marine aviation has one sacred purpose: support Marines on the ground.
The Corps does not exist to win elegant airpower debates. It exists to put Marines ashore and kill everyone not dressed like them.
That means close air support, armed reconnaissance, and strike missions from wherever the Marine Air-Ground Task Force happens to be operating.
The Harrier gave the Marines a fixed-wing jet that could operate from amphibious ships, advanced bases, expeditionary airfields, and remote tactical landing sites.
The Corps’ interest in V/STOL light attack aircraft dated back to the late 1950s. The AV-8B was later designed to replace both the earlier AV-8A Harrier and the A-4M Skyhawk.
The first U.S. Marine connection came from the British Kestrel and Harrier program. In 1968, Marine Colonel Thomas Miller and Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Baker went to Britain to fly the Harrier GR.1.
Based on that evaluation, the U.S. Navy and the British Ministry of Defence signed an agreement in October 1969 to procure Harriers for the Marine Corps, with initial delivery planned for 1971.
The first Marine version was the AV-8A. It was basically the British Harrier adapted for U.S. service, with a more powerful engine.
The Marine Corps ultimately acquired 102 single-seat AV-8As and eight TAV-8A two-seat trainers. Later, those were replaced by the AV-8B Harrier II, with 262 single-seat aircraft and 21 TAV-8B trainers acquired.
So when people say “the Marines retired the AV-8,” technically they retired the AV-8B Harrier II. The AV-8A was the first-generation Marine Harrier. The AV-8B was the bigger, more capable American-British sequel.
And unlike a lot of sequels, this one was actually better.
The Harrier II: the same crazy idea, but more useful
The AV-8A proved the concept. The AV-8B made the concept more combat-relevant.
The Harrier II had a larger composite wing, more fuel, improved payload, better cockpit visibility, and later night-attack and radar-equipped variants.
The AV-8B II+ added the APG-65 radar, which was also used by the F/A-18.
It first flew in 1981 and entered Marine Corps service in 1985.
The Harrier II could carry bombs, rockets, missiles, and a 25mm cannon. It still was not a fast airplane by fighter standards.
It still didn’t have the range of a conventional strike aircraft. It still had one engine, and every Harrier pilot knew that if that one engine decided it had enough for the day, you were going to have a pretty personal conversation with Martin-Baker
But aircraft design is always a compromise.
The F-14 had range and speed. The A-10 had armor and gun. The F/A-18 had carrier flexibility.
The Harrier had basing.
That was the trade that was the trade off. And for the Marines, that trade made sense.
Falklands: not the Marine Harrier, but the legend mattered
Before the AV-8B became famous in American service, the broader Harrier family got its combat reputation in the Falklands War.
This was not the U.S. Marine AV-8B. It was the British Sea Harrier and RAF Harrier GR.3. But it mattered because it proved that small-deck, shipborne Harriers could matter in a real war, far from home, under terrible conditions.
During the Falklands War, the British task force was 8,000 miles from home, lacked airborne early warning aircraft, and its Sea Harriers were outnumbered.
26 Sea Harriers from HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible destroyed 23 Argentine aircraft in air-to-air combat without losing a Sea Harrier in air combat. RAF Harrier GR.3s also deployed in the ground-attack role.
That doesn’t mean the Harrier was suddenly the world’s best fighter.
It means the Harrier was the aircraft the British could actually bring.
And in war, “the airplane you can actually bring” beats “the better airplane sitting at home” every day of the week.
That same logic is why the Marines loved it.
Desert Storm: the Harrier does the Marine Corps thing
Operation Desert Storm was the AV-8B’s coming-out party.
This is where the Harrier showed why the Marine Corps had put up with all the weirdness.
The AV-8B was the first Marine Corps tactical strike platform to arrive in theater. During Desert Storm, three squadrons totaling 60 aircraft plus a six-aircraft detachment operated ashore from an expeditionary airfield, while another 20-aircraft squadron operated from a sea platform.
During the ground war, AV-8Bs were based as close as 35 nautical miles from the Kuwait border, making them the most forward-deployed tactical strike aircraft in theater.
That is the Harrier’s value proposition right there.
You can argue about range, payload, survivability, and speed. Those criticisms are fair. But while everyone else is arguing, the Harrier is already forward, already loaded, and already supporting Marines.
During Desert Storm, AV-8Bs flew 3,380 sorties and 4,083 flight hours while maintaining a mission-capable rate above 90 percent. During surge operations in the ground war, the average turnaround time was 23 minutes.
The Department of Defense’s own 1992 audit gives more context. It noted that 85 AV-8Bs flew more than 10,500 hours during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, including more than 4,100 combat hours, more than 3,000 combat sorties, with nearly 6 million pounds of ordnance delivered.
It also recorded a 90 percent mission-capability effectiveness rate during those operations.
So how did it perform?
In its intended role, very well.
After the Gulf War: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and the Red Sea
After Desert Storm, The AV-8B kept going.
Harrier saw use in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and against Houthi forces.
The Libya example is especially Harrier.
In March 2011, AV-8B Harriers from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit joined Operation Odyssey Dawn, striking Qadhafi regime ground forces and air defenses in support of the U.N.-authorized campaign.
Two days later, when an Air Force F-15E crashed in Libya, the Marines launched a Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel mission from USS Kearsarge.
The package included two AV-8B Harriers, two MV-22 Ospreys, and two CH-53E Super Stallions. The Harriers provided close air support, including dropping two 500-pound laser-guided bombs in the area, while an Osprey extracted the downed pilot.
That’s the Marine Corps in one mission package.
Jets, tiltrotors, helicopters, infantry, and a ship. All working together. All close enough to matter.
Was it easy to fly?
No.
The aircraft relied on reaction controls—often called puffer ducts—to help control pitch, roll, and yaw at low speed. Engine air was piped from the intake to pitch control thrusters on the nose, wings and tail.
A normal jet landing is already complicated. You manage airspeed, descent rate, glide path, lineup, power, and attitude. On a carrier, you add a moving deck and the knowledge that if you mess up badly enough, you are going swimming or you are going through the back of the ship.
In a Harrier, the pilot had to transition from wing-borne flight to jet-borne flight. As the airplane slowed down, normal aerodynamic control surfaces became less effective.
If you were heavy, if it was hot, if the airfield was at high altitude, if the wind was wrong, you could run out of options very quickly.
That is not an airplane a group of savages could hop into and defeat the Psychlos with.
Was the Harrier dangerous?
Yes.
It didn’t have the atrocious safety record of the F-104 Starfighter, but from January 1985 through December 1991, excluding Persian Gulf conflict mishaps, AV-8Bs experienced 34 Class A mishaps and eight fatalities.
The same audit said the AV-8B had more than two to three times as many Class A mishaps per 100,000 flight hours as other Navy and Air Force tactical aircraft during that period.
That is a problem.
A DoD audit pointed to engine reliability. It said the F402 engine ranked low in reliability compared with other Navy and Marine Corps tactical aircraft, and specifically said the F/A-18 engine was five times more reliable by mean engine flight hours between failures during that analysis period.
But the Harrier’s accident rate wasn’t bad because the airplane was “bad.” It was because the airplane spent a lot of time in the most dangerous parts of aviation: takeoff, landing, shipboard operations, low-altitude work, and vertical/short takeoff and landing transitions.
And whether you operate a nuclear power plant or fly a plane, the change in conditions is what kills you. The Harrier lived in that world of changing conditions,
So yes, it was dangerous. But the danger was tied to what made it useful.
The maintainers: keeping a science project angry enough to fly
If the pilots had a hard job, the maintainers had a miserable one.
The Harrier was a maintenance-intensive aircraft because everything about it was weird. A conventional jet engine points backward. The Harrier’s Pegasus/F402 engine had to provide forward thrust, downward thrust, and transition between the two. To do so, It had four swiveling exhaust nozzles.
It had heat issues. It had shipboard corrosion. It had a single engine that mattered a lot because there was no second engine to get you home.
A Marine maintainer was maintaining a jet, a lift system, a heat-management problem in the form of a water-injector, a corrosion problem, and British engineering.
Fleet Readiness Center East supported the Harrier and its F402 engine from 1973 onward. Since 1991, FRCE serviced 1,046 F402 engines, returning an average of 32 engines to the fleet each year.
That is a lot of engine work.
And as the aircraft aged, the supply chain got harder. Older engines required more repairs, and some parts were no longer readily available from the original equipment manufacturer.
Engineers had to develop repair procedures to keep the fleet going.
And because it was a single-engine aircraft, readiness mattered. There was no casual attitude toward “good enough.” A maintainer’s work was directly tied to whether a pilot got a usable airplane and whether Marines on the ground got close air support.
A jet can look cool in a movie.
But somewhere, a tired lance corporal is trying to find a part that has not been manufactured in years so the cool movie jet can actually fly tomorrow.
So why retire it?
The Harrier was not retired because it suddenly became useless. It was retired because the Marine Corps is moving into a fifth-generation tactical aviation fleet, and the F-35B now does the Harrier’s core vertical trick while adding stealth, sensors, networking, modern weapons integration, and a much better ability to survive in a high-end threat environment.
The F-35B is the real reason the Harrier could finally go away.
The F-35B is not just “the new Harrier.” It is a stealth aircraft with a lift fan and swiveling rear nozzle that can operate from amphibious assault ships and short expeditionary sites, while also bringing sensor fusion and networked combat capability the Harrier could never have.
Modern air defenses are not the same as the ones the AV-8B faced in 1991 and the F-35B model has proven itself time and time again.
By 2026, the Harrier was old. Its parts were old. Its engine support was old. Its maintainers were performing miracles, but miracles aren’t a sustainment strategy.
The Pepsi Jet scandal: when a joke became a lawsuit
One bit of Harrier lore to touch on: In 1996, Pepsi ran a commercial for its Pepsi Stuff promotion. The ad showed a student arriving at school in a Harrier jet with the caption implying it cost 7,000,000 Pepsi Points. Pepsi meant it as a joke.
But a man named John Leonard did not.
The rules in the commercial allowed people to buy extra Pepsi Points for ten cents each, so Leonard realized he could theoretically buy enough points for about $700,000. He raised the money, sent Pepsi an order form, 15 original Pepsi Points, and a check for $700,008.50. On the order form, he wrote in “1 Harrier Jet.”
Pepsi returned the check and basically said, no, we are not giving you a military attack aircraft because you found a math problem in our commercial.
The court agreed with Pepsi. The judge concluded that no reasonable, objective person would have understood the commercial to be an actual offer for a Harrier jet.
What the Harrier really meant
The Harrier was not the best fighter, but that was never the point.
The Harrier was the airplane that let the Marine Corps turn amphibious ships into small strike carriers. It gave Marines fixed-wing close air support without needing a supercarrier or a perfect runway.
It could get closer to the fight, operate from places conventional jets couldn’t, and turn around quickly when Marines on the ground needed help.
It was a compromise machine. But all military equipment is compromise. The question is whether the compromise fits the mission.
For the Marine Corps, the Harrier fit.
The AV-8B is retired now, but the Harrier’s real legacy isn’t the hover. It is not the Pepsi lawsuit. It is not the bad guy in True Lies hanging off a missile.
The legacy is this: The Harrier showed that sometimes the most important question is not “what can this airplane do?”
It’s where can this airplane do it from?
