Soviet Yak-38 Vertical Take Off & Landing (VTOL) Jet Fighter

Yakovlev Yak-38 Soviet Naval Aviation
yolkhere
There are a couple of views of the Yak-38 sitting on the deck in the first part of this video. I'm watching this and I see the air inlet hatch open behind the pilot and I think that look's just like the F-35. Those dang Russians are pretty clever. They had a VTOL jet fighter 40 years ago, and we're just now getting around to building our own.
    Well, they were able to design one and make it work, but it was not what you would call a rousing success. Also they went broke and we didn't, so neener, neener, neener. I found this summary on Fiddler's Green, a paper model site.

Preceded by the Yak-36 'Freehand' and the barely related yak-36M, the USSR's first operational VTOL aircraft was the Yak-38 'Forger'. Superficially similar to the early Harrier, the 'Forger' was burdened with two extra lift engines, which increased the basic weight and reduced the fuel capacity. Payload was about one-third that of the Mk I Sea Harrier and endurance in hot weather about 15 minutes. A constant problem was ingestion of exhaust gases back into the engine, which caused power loss. Failure of one lift jet (which had an operating life of only about 22hours) would cause an immediate uncontrollable roll. The 'solution' to this was to fit a system that automatically ejected the pilot in the event of an engine failure. Unsurprisingly, as many as one-third of Russia's 'Forgers' were lost in accidents.

They only built 231 of them compared to more than 1600 MiG-29's.

Fiddler's Green has a several pictures of the Yak-38, including this one:

Seconds later , as you can see, two tiny turbines started to whirr and then the Yak 38 magically jumped from my hand and attacked the dog sitting under the kitchen table.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video with a different one.