F-35 Goes "Top Gun"

Yes, I would add that for a Navy fighter aircraft to have a "good" reputation amongst the pilots, it would need (1) a highly reliable engine (imagine yourself high up the sky, with no surface visible in field of view that is not water have only one not so reliable engine to get you back home to that tiny little carrier deck)., and (2) a tail hook and a landing gear beefy as a boson's mate's arms. If you know anything at all about carrier landings, it is merely designed as a "crash" that you should be able to walk away from, and also not rip the guts out of the plane doing so.

The landing gear have to be robust, and the tail hook must deploy and retract on demand 99.99999% of the time. I would say 100%, but that would be ridiculous.

Navy prefers its fighters have two engines. If Navy had its way, the F35 would also have two engines.

Hey, if I had to fly out over large areas of open ocean, with a single engine craft, and a possibility not so reliable engine, I would shudder at the thought of bailing over said water. In WWII, the wildcat pilot (whom I later became friends with through a WWII online game) faces steep odds versus the A6m3 "zero", but if he was even slightly injured with some bleeding, and the plane was not going to make it back to the carrier (if he could now navigate back to it), he faced what was feared the most, and that was sharks. He told me how they never really feared the Japanese pilot nearly as much as sharks. It makes one look really hard for that tiny floating speck in the ocean that is "home".

They should have gone for the F-22.

I am not privy to all the politics and other factors, but so far, the Navy's rejection of the F22 has been proven to be a good decision. F22 availability for sortie is half that of the F18. (It doesn't matter how well it flies if it ain't in the air). The F22 costs more than the F18, so Navy had predicted it would not be able to form the number of squadrons it would need. USAF logistics is having cost and other difficulties keeping repair/maintenance for F22 at forward bases. USN forward bases are aircraft carriers, and have a more limited space for all storage and repair/maintenance activity than USAF bases.

F35 is also going to have availability problems. It's high tech and high stealth mean low availability and repair/maintenance numbers similar to F22. Navy will still have F18s in fleet as they have a different mission profile from F35 (and F22), and the cost of F35, like F22, will keep the numbers down. Because of projected F35 costs, I believe Navy is already working to buy more F18s.
If I remember correctly, F22 saw its first combat mission only last year in Syria. So, it hasn't been a game changer so far. It's not even been in the game. If F22 and F35 project managers had not wisely positioned manufacturing work for these aircraft in a majority of the states, both of these programs would have been cancelled at the Pentagon's request. (Military-Industrial complex? More like Congressional-Industrial complex)

And has F22 been cleared to fly at high altitudes? I forget.

The air force's version has been flying out of Luke Airforce base in Glendale, AZ for 9 months now it's pretty neat to watch them fly around the area with the F16s.

Have they gotten the gun to work yet?