When an F-35B would need to jettison stores before landing

Do Royal Navy F-35Bs have to dump their payload before landing on a carrier?

Not routinely; only an unusually heavy aircraft returning with a full strike load would need to shed stores under the described limitation.

The limitation described in this November 2025 assessment depends on the aircraft's returning load. An F-35B coming back from an air-defence mission would not normally need to discard its weapons. A heavily loaded strike aircraft returning with every bomb unused would have to shed some stores under the recovery arrangements described here. Shipborne rolling vertical landing was intended to improve that return-load margin, with completing the carrier installation presented as a funding decision. The full unused strike load is treated as an unusual case, so it does not support a claim that every landing requires jettisoning weapons.