A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

I hate the long form so much. I come for the information about the plane crash details, and I get the wall of verbal diarrhea about pilot's upbringing.

At least put all that extra nonsense at the end.

I feel like in previous reporting I'd seen suggestions that the other pilots had lost confidence in him, and that you couldn't be the leader of a squadron if any of the pilots had any doubts.

This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.

The soviet russians nuked Chernobyl with this attitude, it must be good

To me that smells like a plane that is too expensive to lose and someone higher up was looking for an excuse.

Sure the pilot with his life on the line could have risked the investment into his education on top of the investment into the aircraft to figure out whether an ill-prepared procedure was really ill-prepared — but should that really be the expectation?

If you rely on your pilot having to interpret written procedure in a very specific way by mind magic, that is on those who wrote the procedure. I am not sure if "ignores the procedure of a aircraft that expensive" is the skill you are looking for, even if it safes the aircraft for the moment.

> It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen

Only because people aren't willing to accept the fact that this is just rank, base, bog standard, internal military politics. The pilot was probably fine until he got a new, important posting that displaced someone else and that someone else was willing to throw some elbows to get it overturned.

As for fault, the reality of the military command chain is that you are responsible for shit that goes wrong on your watch even if it isn't necessarily your fault. You can lose the ability to get important postings if something bad goes wrong even once. Generally, those people run their time out as quietly as possible and leave. It is not smart of the military, but the military isn't noted for smart.

I do hate the long form filler. Are there a lot of people that will only consume information if there is a huge article around it? I'm not saying I like tldr either, but there's an optimal middle ground somewhere.

As I have said before: the pilot is alive instead of deceased so it was a good decision.

I came here to say exactly the same

Even if he would have trusted the alternative controls the jet has, he was in clouds over a densely populated area going 350mph just 750 feet above the ground, far below the 6000 feet the article quotes from the manual.

"In fact, the F-35B’s flight manual said, “the aircraft is considered to be in out of controlled flight (OCF) when it fails to respond properly to pilot inputs,” adding, “if out of control below 6,000 feet AGL (above ground level): EJECT.”"

I think this was just a story, less an investigation. It's basically his view, the lack of closure, and the result.

My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail". They needed to blame the pilot, and certainly didn't need anyone familiar with the defects of the plane in a prominent command or as a general.

So they fire the guy, and promote someone else that can be relied on to say that the F-35 has no more defects than any other plane had at this point in the program, and we can trust the US military industrial complex to deliver the F-47 in a similar fashion.

At the same time, you send a message: eject when your plane is misbehaving and you'll end your career. Sure, there's a risk that someone won't eject when they should, but there's also a chance that you'll be able to cover up another malfunction when the pilot nurses the plane back to base.

Did Pizzo say anything disparaging about the F-35? I doubt it. But when you've got billions of dollars of revenue/potential embarrassment on the line, you don't take chances.

Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475

Losing all instruments with no visibility is still ejectable even if he thought the engine was still running. He was disorientated and relying on his instruments, when flying under IFR (instrument flight rules) loss of instruments is tantamount to loss of control. The likely outcome in those situations is controlled flight into terrain at 350+mph.

With low altitude being an aggravating factor he was always 100% correct in ejecting and whatever the plane did afterwards is largely irrelevant.

Mostly the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an airplane that's not ready for prime time yet.

Plus it's running Kubernetes for all of that!

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

> He didn't try to see if his flight controls (pitch, yaw, roll) were still responding, he didn't make use of the backup instruments, he didn't try the backup radio, and he had enough fuel to land elsewhere. The letter of the procedures may have said that he was in an out-of-control flight condition, but the procedures were too vague, and he should have had the experience to second-guess them and ascertain if his plane was actually out of control.

If the article is correct, the issue started when he was 750 feet above the ground depending at 800 feet per minute. He decided to eject approximately 30 seconds layer, at an approximate above ground height of 350 feet. Presuming he decided to continue troubleshooting, he was going to impact the ground in 25 seconds, and the ejection seat does take a few seconds for the pilot to clear the fuselage (and any explosions at impact).

This is a tragic situation to be in. He was under an immense time pressure to make a decision and from his understanding, the plane was out-of-control. He also doesn't know for sure if his rate of decent has accelerated, so he might have been dozens of feet above the ground.

I understand the armchair flying with perfect understanding and time to think it through means that he should have tried more stuff, but in the seat? I would have ejected. I think the majority of folks would have.

IIRC he had no visibility so he couldn't test controls with eyeballs, can only assume out-of-control-flight scenario. Backup instruments said he was below 6000ft above ground level, aka trust instrument = potential for single digit seconds from hitting ground, and supposedly the F35 manual states ejection is the only option under those conditions.

The F-35, like most modern fighters, is highly unstable in pitch without active control. Yaw and roll have some aerodynamic stability depending on the plane's mode. VTOL mode is even less stable. In VTOL mode, no visual reference, failing flight instruments, with multiple fault indicators and what appeared to be a failed transition to conventional flight mode, it's hard to blame the pilot for punching out. The transition is one-button automatic, with automatic coordination of engine power and nozzle positions. It's possible to reverse the process at any point in the transition, although that didn't happen here.

The "Command report" is available here.[1] But at the point that relevant flight data recorder data ought to appear, it's censored. Power faults and crashes of one of the redundant flight computers are mentioned. No full timeline. The report mentions that the transition to conventional flight mode did happen after the pilot punched out. But there are no technical details as to whether it was slower than normal.

Not enough info to form an opinion.

[1] https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/FOIA/F-35%20Mis...

Personally I think the risk he exposed others to gets too little attention. That jet could have come down anywhere. I can understand it’s a nerve wrecking situation and that ejecting is a likely outcome in any event, so “sooner rather than later” might feel like the better option. But sending the jet off as a cruise missile could have been avoided.

"But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter" -- curious what you mean by that?

Extremely easy for you to write this treatise from the comfort of your armchair.

Do you understand this failure occurred at less than a thousand feet AGL?

The F-35 would be a horrible place to start, because it is actually the best multirole jet fighter you can buy and gives you a massive advantage

> (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU).

I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are.

The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pilot isn't doing a good job of saying "don't worry about me, let's talk about the plane". He keeps chiming in with these questions about the plane crash that seem to come out of nowhere.

He also doesn't even mention that he's concerned that the plane crash might have injured someone else.

Maybe there's more to this that was edited out.

But I'm not sure what the criticism is: she's supposed to stop asking questions about his injuries, and suddenly ask about a possible plane crash that they haven't had any reports of yet? What would that even achieve?