If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5.
Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations because most other pilots would have interpreted the situation similarly, promoted, and then fired less than 4 months after moving with his family to the location of his new role. It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen as the most likely explanation, with all the risks it entails (pilots becoming more hesitant to eject or openly admit mistakes so safety can be improved).
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.
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.
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.
> This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.
The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility.
One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior.
This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass.
I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.
It seemed only to be one commandant that said he was “at fault” (in complete disregard to the other two investigations and stellar reviews to his two bosses).
Simplest reason: that commandant had a vendetta against him
> 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.
Your comment reminded me, an excellent showcase of institutional shenanigans is the Chernobyl miniseries on Netflix. Denial, blame, coverups, accountability. It's a very well made series in a grim Soviet setting.
Just please don't take it as a documentary. It's a disservice to the people that actually worked at the plant that day and portrays them as arrogant fools, which none of them actually were.
That Chernobyl Guy on YouTube did great breakdowns.
I will watch the Youtube guy you're talking about, but I did listen to a many episode podcast with the writer/director discussing the books of direct, personal interviews that were documented after the incident.
Most of the major events depicted in the show are things I recall having been reported previously.
I thought many of the workers in the plant, the first responders, etc were portrayed as heroes and most at least quite sympathetically.
Meh, the only thing you need to know about Chernobyl is
* The soviets designed a nuclear reactor and engineering plan/blueprint to making power plants
* That engineering plan required certain safety tests to be preformed before actually operating the plant
* Chernyobl did not pass those safety tests before plant operation
* Chernyobl then tried to run those safety tests after the plant was in operation (for some time).
* Chernyobl then catastrophically failed the safety tests due at least to the test setup being incorrect (you aren't supposed to be operating the plant before hand).
I disagree, this is true, but the failure was complex and worth understanding some extra nuances:
* The design of the reactors made them unsafe in a scenario where you needed to quickly insert the control rods. Doing so should reduce power output, but due to their graphite tips, it led to a sudden surge of power output.
* Leadership repeatedly didn't listen to or believe what they were hearing from boots on the ground.
* Leadership took a "it can't be that bad, let's wait and see" approach instead of a cautious approach.
* Add to this that boots on the ground were afraid to stand up to leadership.
* This repeatedly led to delayed reactions to the problems, and an increase in the severity of the outcomes.
* All of this combined with cooling failures, led to disaster.
(Heat and pressure accumulated, the reactor didn't have enough water, and then when control rods were finally reinserted, they sped up the reaction instead of slowing it down... boom.)
I mean it's a cool sequence of events and definitely if engineering interests you it's worth studying. Although I ultimately find the question of if the USSR knew about the graphite tip problem beforehand the most interesting part of the story (the HBO series taking the side of they knew). With the scandal not being the explosion but that the state was blind to problems it was causing.
But the common person just really needs to understand "garbage in, garbage out". Operating a nuclear reactor outside of specifications may result in catastrophic failure; which is why the West has so many regulations about them.
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.
They had one short sentence in there that he still had a tiny alternate primary flight display. Still had control surfaces. He knew he was descending and his authorized air space. Pull up, look at the pfd, do some resets, follow helmet malfunction protocols.
There was very little about a devils advocate side to the story.
I could imagine others joking about ejecting for minor warnings or trolling him. Especially in the marines.
Do a FOIA on all ejections because his is just one. He had a good 27 year career and ended as a colonel with retirement benefits.
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.”"
Well, that's the crux of the issue: apparently the aircraft still did respond properly to pilot inputs. Of course, it's totally understandable to get spooked by all the electronics failing and decide to rather bail out than bet on the plane still being flyable, but if you go by the book, he shouldn't have ejected...
The "small screen" the article is talking about that was still functional is likely a backup PFD, or at the VERY LEAST an attitude indicator. Validating that an attitude indicator is working is not particularly hard, especially if the flight controls are still working.
Ejecting over a populated area at a low altitude is a dangerous decision in its own right, and the unfortunate truth here is that if the choice is between "the life of the pilot" and "the lives of people on the ground" then the pilot is obligated to fly the jet until a crash is assured. Obviously I don't have all the details, but the article itself doesn't say that required instruments were unavailable.
Part of the issue here, too, is that pilots and aviation in general is an "old boys club" and this extends to giving long-tenured pilots extraordinary leeway for mistakes they made that newer or less popular people would have been crucified for. I was left wondering if that's what the first two flight reviews did, and the third one didn't.
You haven't read the article, or the part I quoted from it referring to the manual, which I would consider as "going by the book". Two of the three boards looking into the mishap "concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane".
I feel like we had a discussion of this crash in the past. Would be nice to find those threads.
Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?
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.
My tinfoil hat theory is perversely US probably wants LESS foreign F35 orders. US accounts for 80% of long term F35 procurement (~2500/3100). Capitalization / replacement of airframes across US forces is at attrocious levels. If anything US better off absorbing 100% of next 20 years of LH production, and get full F35 buy years earlier, i.e. by late 2030 instead of projected 2045s sharing with partners. Especially now LH seems to have finally sorted out Tech Refresh 3. US probably wants LH to focus on upgrading/delivering US airframes and get as much US airframes to TR3 and then block4 standards. IIRC airforce general said he would not want take pre TR3 F35s to Pacific fight. If US is serious about countering PRC in decade of concern, they need all the airframes.
For a 1-2 years, maybe, as seen with JP, but for 10+ years? That's ~200+ airframes. LH already have TR3 backlogs, and TBH if you follow the LH TR / F35 SaaS drama (LH contract essentially held DoD hostage), I'm would not be surprised if DoD doesn't want to slap LH with less global orders so they can solely focus on US program.
No such kill switch exists, the US stopped providing electronic warfare intelligence that made the jets more survivable. The stoppage of all military aid was significantly more damaging.
They also refuse to update the electronic countermeasures systems installed in Ukraine's F16. Not a kill switch, but it is impacting the usefulness of the planes.
Whether actual kill switches exist is unknown. But if you were a European country, would you take the chance of buying fighters from a country threatening to invade multiple of your allies based on their assurance that the rumors about kill switches are nothing but unsubstantiated rumors?
Regretting it though[0] - "Rasmus Jarlov, chairman of the Danish Parliament’s Defence Committee, has expressed regret over the decision to purchase the F-35. [...] He now advocates for reassessing Denmark’s strategic dependency on the United States and calls on European allies to consider doing the same."
Yeah this is both bad but also being heavily misreported: the US can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software effectively disables critical functionality which can effectively render a platform useless.
Up till now, there was no demonstrated risk of this happening - but that's a broken trust which won't be repaired for generations, if ever.
I agree with the assertion that there's no proof of a full killswitch based on known past events, but the above quoted statement is also a lot more definitive than I'm willing to be.
With a fighter jet as dependent upon electronic support systems as the F35 and which is sold around the world why wouldn't you put a highly classified backdoor killswitch into it just in case?
The idea that such a killswitch might exist is one that could have always reasonably been pondered, what's new is any/all non-US "Western" governments having to seriously entertain the idea that they would end up in a situation where the US would have a reason to use it against them.
> can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software
By what mechanism is this mediated? Because that sounds awfully similar to a kill switch in terms of the end result. Analogy by way of enterprise software: "We didn't remotely disable the software you purchased from us. Rather our server simply refuses to service your requests which happen to be required for the software to function." (Evil laugh from man with goatee immediately follows this statement obviously.)
I think they're saying there might be one, and we no longer trust the USA to believe there isn't one (and I can't really understand why we ever did, USA has been an unreliable ally even before trump).
You made the extraordinary claim that the USA has no kill switch. Where's the proof to your claim?
The kill switch first reported wasn't for jets, but was for HIMARS[0], which stopped receiving data for strikes.
But everyone viewed this kill switch as a way broader than HIMARS, and rightfully so.
It will be foolish to assume that the USA has the capacity to turn HIMARS targeting capacity off, literally incapacitating the system which was built in the 90s, but somehow won't be able to kill switch a F35... This is disingenuous.
No country should trust their national security on the whims of one guy sitting in the White House, that can decide to side with the enemy and make your jets stop working because of disabled services.
I find it curious that Israel managed to convince US that they can run their own firmware, (most probably) bypassing all this. I mean do get that region politics, oil and Iran and all, plus who sits in US power places but still.
Or why Europeans didn't insist to get same version (probably no leverage). Well any next armament purchase by Europe thats smarter than a lead bullet should have full code delivery with all build processes. Still not 100% perfect scenario but least minimum acceptable.
> Or why Europeans didn't insist to get same version (probably no leverage).
I don't think it was a matter of leverage, but more of a blind trust in US Institutions, and denying the reality of their collapse.
No one would have believed at any point in the last 80 years that the US would be threatening to invade and annex Canada or Greenland, all while having a group of protected billionaires promoting the collapse of the European Union, the rise of nazism and the protection of a Russian autocratic regime.
A system that has to call home to work and is no longer being replied to is by any functional definition under a kill switch. The orange buffoon pushed a switch in Amerikka Oblast and the weapon can no longer defend itself.
The name is imprecise and causes endless semantic discussions, what happened is lack of updates that render the aircraft vulnerable. Some will argue it's the same, some will disagree.
A common misconception - often echoed on this site - is that NATO allies and the U.S. operate on equal terms. They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen.
Even today, with all this talk around NATO, there’s a massive U.S. military presence at NATO bases across Europe.
These forces are, in effect, under U.S. control, stationed in countries like Germany and Italy. And if Germany suddenly decided it wanted them gone - well, it’s not their call.
TL;DR: Life on the empire’s periphery might be comfortable, but you don’t get to choose your enemies - and you still have to pay your dues, or else.
That's a fantasy, unless you think Germany is occupied by the USA. But that's not the case. Occupation ended in 1954, since then the USA military is stationed in Germany (and Italy) due to contracts. This so called deployment contracts have been confirmed in 1990, when Germany became a sovereign nation again. I know, the current USA is not big on "rule of law" anymore, but even a bad deal maker should understand that there is not much to win in a war over bases they get for free now. (I'm not saying that maintaining those bases is cheap, but that's more on how the USA runs military bases than anything else.)
I find it refreshing, however, that the "we are the evil empire now" idea is getting out of the closet. Call a spade a spade.
> I find it refreshing, however, that the "we are the evil empire now" idea is getting out of the closet. Call a spade a spade.
“Good” and “evil” are moral constructs that haven’t played a meaningful role in documented geopolitics since at least the 4th century BC.
There’s a well-known quote often attributed to Hastings Ismay that captures NATO’s original purpose. I won’t paste it here as it might come off as a bit harsh, and I’m not trying to drag this discussion out further.
> That's a fantasy, unless you think Germany is occupied by the USA. But that's not the case.
Circling back to Germany—I honestly can't think of a more humiliating moment for any NATO member than this[^1]. Sure, Mr. Biden was more aesthetically pleasing than Mr. Trump but take a moment to consider the symbolism and the signals sent to ally nations. Regardless of media narratives, the events of September 26, 2022, marked a turning point that fundamentally altered Germany’s economic path and future. It was a hostile act on a massive scale, and its consequences are undeniably real for the country.
I think what altered Germany and the EU path was the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. It humiliated German politicians and their decades long policy of trying to appease and cooperate with Russia. Biden and Obama were right to warn them about over reliance on Russia
> They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen.
How do you imagine that will work? The US may have to lower the price more than they can afford to. Some countries have already cancelled their F-35 orders. You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
The F-35 was sold to us as an important multi billion business deal, with lots of European companies being promised to be subcontractors or technology partners; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... has a good overview of how much was involved. Basically, you scratch my back, we'll scratch yours kind of deal.
In hindsight, the project was (as expected) over budget etc. I wish our government(s) had given that money to European fighter jets instead. There's a chance the US will remote disable the jets that have been put into service now, or withold service / spare parts.
If the US withholds parts or services to European countries, that would certainly be an interesting twist, considering the Dutch government used this arrangement as a reason why they couldn't withhold parts to Israel despite the ongoing genocide. Had Netherland decided otherwise, the US might use that as a precendent. Or maybe they'll just set the precedent regardless.
The United States using military force against the home territory of a NATO member basically guarantees Chinese troops and weapons in Canada and Mexico. We would (deservedly) force the world to ally against us as we’d have proven ourselves to be an expansionist menace.
Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied. Chinese soldiers on the border is existential to US and when dealing with existential risks countries tend to put funny concepts such as UN charter or human rights aside.
Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies. Very doable.
> Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied
Which is why military alliance discussions aren’t conducted in public. The series of announcements would be e.g. Xi visiting Ottawa for trade talks and then announcing that Canada is under its nuclear umbrella.
> Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies
Which is why they’ve sought external security guarantees. Now that America is threatening invasion, its security guarantees are diluted. So you need someone else; the only option is China (unless the EU beefs up).
I don't really think China is an option either. Maybe for the west coast, but I really don't think they can do much for the eastern half of Canada. Though EU+China might do it.
Problem is, China might be happy to see the US invade Canada, because then they can finally take Taiwan. And that's the real danger of Trump's foolish aggression: by weakening American's alliances, he's giving China more space to assert itself and take what they want.
> Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied. Chinese soldiers on the border is existential to US and when dealing with existential risks countries tend to put funny concepts such as UN charter or human rights aside.
Talk of the Chinese being invited in by Canada or Mexico is precisely as much of a casus belli as Ukraine saying "please let us join NATO so Russia won't invade us!". Canada already has reason to fear invasion regardless, as Trump keeps talking about annexing them.
It didn't work out well for Russia, which is currently experiencing in Ukraine much what the US itself experienced in Vietnam. Or indeed in Cuba (Bay of Pigs) the year before the nuclear missiles which were much closer to a real casus belli.
It's only been months of the Trump admin and already the imperial attitudes are coming out. It's 2025, not 1900. Converting the US into an empire isn't going to go as well as you think it will.
Saying that military action is not off the table to take Greenland is literally insane.
Greenland has always been an ally, if for safety reasons the US needs more military presence on the island they could have just asked for it and it would most likely have been approved.
There is zero reason to use force, but if the US would take such steps I wouldn't be surprised if Europe starts replacing the dollar as reserve currency. This could trigger other nations like China to follow. This move would hurt the US economy way worse than the current trade war does.
Those massively military bases exist to protect Europe. The countries can of course choose to tell soldiers to fuck off but now is not a particularly good time for that. The real danger is that Trump abandons our allies because a dictator flattered him
I'm always surprised about this line of thinking. Surely an active duty pilot is going to keep his mouth shut, whereas as we see, as a retired one he's happy to talk to the papers.
On top of that, the person I want flying more of the same plane is one who’s experienced piloting it during major failure conditions. Instead they retire the experienced guy and put some other fresh hotshot in the seat.
Ironically every time someone proudly assert the existence of F-35 C++ coding standard [0], I am not sure if they actually understand the impact.
The software mess from F-35 would it be even worse without the standard, or has the existence of the standard hardly improved the coding practices as usually gets told.
Not that the answer to this philosophical question solves the issues for everyone affected by the F-35 software problems.
One fun thing about “too big” projects like the F-35 is that the project management overheads cause a kind of recursive overhead, like the rocket equation, but applied to technical outcomes instead of orbital velocity. Any change isn’t “just” the change, it now has to got through review boards, subcontractors, liaisons, integration reviews, etc…
The result is that the F-35 computers are being “upgraded” (lol) to the same compute power as a first-gen Apple Watch… starting this year and finishing who-knows-when.
Meanwhile the F-16 which is “not as important” has already been upgraded with the same kind of chips as modern GPUs and has orders of magnitude more performance than the “flying computer” the the F-35 was supposed to be.
Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already.
>"Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already."
You might be surprised by what kind of functionality can be squeezed out of "weak" CPU when programmers know how to work on hardware with limited resources.
Is it possible that there is a mistake on the page and they mean 450 Watts?
The "1 ATR SHORT" version lists 2 modules and takes 300 Watts, so 450 Watts would line up perfectly for the "1 ATR LONG" which takes 3 modules. 4.5 kW doesn't make a lot of sense here.
The F-35 was designed for export. The F-22 wasn’t and I suspect the F-47 is not either. There are different objectives at work here.
The F-35 is technically capable but even that is subject to export controls despite being purpose-built for export. A lot of European companies have a large stake in the success of the F-35 in its various versions because they are building it for European customers.
The internal conflict is that the European planes that exist are nowhere as capable as the F-35.
While the European defense contractors may promise a comparable plane, they have a poor track record of delivering such a thing anywhere close to the near future.
Well unless we in Europe want to do in direct conflict with US (ie for Greenland), this is mostly irrelevant extra capability. As Ukraine shows, peer conflicts are won by other means, not stealth air superiority over sheep herders with AKs.
Some general's wet dream of dogfights in Maverick's style are modern day fantasies. What those planes are used for are just lobbing glide bombs or shooting missiles. Their biggest enemy is on ground. Sure, small radar signature helps massively but that's not enough. Otherwise US would send 500 F-35 into North korean airspace and wipe out most of its military... not going to happen.
> As Ukraine shows, peer conflicts are won by other means, not stealth air superiority
I don't think you can conclude that when neither of the belligerents has the capability. As Gulf War shows, training and capabilities (including stealth) do enable SEAD/DEAD to an extent that unlocks air superiority.
I talk about peer conflict, which Gulf war wasn't. Old soviet tech, poorly trained soldiers with very low morale doesn't make them anyhow a peer to US army of that era. It was just a variant of that shooting goat herders, defenseless even against Apache choppers who have 0 stealth and fly low & slow.
I don't understand what that link is supposed to prove. A single F-117A getting shot down in Yugoslavia due to complacency and chance doesn't negate Nighthawks bombing SAM defended areas with impunity. Iraq had a strong and integrated AD network for the time.
Air superiority alone doesn't, but it's a massive force multiplier.
I read it and I know about that case. However, as I said I'm struggling to see your point.
I guessed you meant that that one case proves something about air superiority or Iran having an advantage over USAF, so I responded with a historical parallel.
This is a really interesting 'first thought'. "Designed for export"
Not the typical mindset of someone wanting true superiority through military power. Makes you think twice.
The F35 is expensive, keeps the defense apparatus going, and ultimately gets paid for by other countries. F22 barely reached production, so F47 will be interesting.
The F-35 is cheap for what it is capable of. F-22 and F-47 are immaterial. And the export F-35 is nerfed to some extent.
The unfortunate reality, which the US is exploiting, is that Europe would struggle to produce an equivalent of the nerfed F-35, never mind one that hadn’t been nerfed. As a consequence, the US can sell nerfed F-35s all day. There aren’t many alternatives currently. 4.5 gen aircraft aren’t competitive in a serious conflict and everyone knows it. Even the US has to contend with that reality.
BAE systems is responsible for about 15% of production, things from rear fuselage etc.
Rolls-Royce builds the LiftSystem for the F-35B variant.
Martin-Baker builds the ejection seats for all F-35s.
Leonardo builds the wing sets.
Rheinmetall is planning to build fuselage for a large number.
Kongsberg developed the Joint Strike Missile meant to be carried inside the fuselage to maintain stealth profile while engaging targets at long ranges.
True. However, did you notice the emojis used in relation to the leaked Huthi attack? It’s difficult to place confidence in individuals wielding significant power when they conduct themselves like adolescents.
This doesn’t feel fair. The standards we have for how elected officials conduct themselves is very different from what we expect from non-political career civil servants, General Officers, and the like.
At our most charitable, we ought to recognize that in a democracy elected officials are plucked from the ranks of the general public. The qualifications for office are that you are the most popular person in the room, not the smartest, or the most professional.
The trouble comes when the elected officials also want to replace non-political career officials with political allies who behave similarly to themselves, which seems to be what we are currently seeing.
I agree on everything you wrote! However, I hope citizens vote for the persons they think are going to do the best job.
Obviously, it is a gamble, to wit the current administration, but I'm sure, on election day, most voters of the USA thought that the current president would do the best job. Many learn now they were mistaken, but this happens. That's the beauty of democracy, we can vote the incompetents out.
Defense companies with workers in congressional districts and bribe politicians – I mean, make campaign contributions in exchange for huge contracts. Congress oversees the military. The officers who don't help politicians get what they want don't get promoted. The officers who do, get rank, status, book deals, and lucrative jobs at defense companies after they retire.
It's disgusting but it's not that hard to figure out how it happens.
Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark..
Did more information come up during the time period ?
Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground.
He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell the plane to switch modes from STOL to regular forward flight. He didn't see if pitch, yaw, and roll flight controls were being respected, and it doesn't seem he tried to use the backup radio, or the backup instruments, other then glancing at them.
But I don't think he made a terrible decision! Ultimately he's still alive, he healed from his injuries, and no one else was hurt, and that's a good outcome in my opinion. But maybe his judgment in a crisis situation isn't good enough for the command position he was given. He did lose a $165M piece of equipment, one that he very well may have been able land safely, and while I would never place that above the lives of actual humans, it does matter. And that's really what the three reports said: many other pilots probably would have done what he did in that situation, but he should have taken more time to ascertain whether his plane was flyable or not, even if that would have put him at further risk.
Maybe he would have been fine continuing to be a test pilot under the command of someone else's test group, but maybe his superiors decided that his actions showed he wasn't the kind of person they wanted in command. I dunno; I've never been a Marine (or any kind of military officer), so I don't know either way. But I suspect most of us here haven't, and don't really have expert knowledge on how these sorts of things are supposed to work.
> He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk.
Are you sure about this?
It takes a lot of time and hours to get a pilot to the point they can probe the edges that test pilots do. The whole goal is to actually keep them alive so their experience and observations can be used. And that just compounds. So while they fly maneuvers and situations that would absolutely overwhelm me as a 300 hour private pilot in my Tecnam, my feeling is that even at that point they fly at less relative risk than I do. They are experts in mitigating, and preparing for risk.
There are old pilots and bold pilots. I do not believe that being a test pilot is a mandate that forces one to transfer to the bold club.
He was not a test pilot! The F-35B entered service in 2015, the incident happened in 2023. He was a squadron commander, in charge of training other pilots to fly the plane.
When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU).
Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while
Then the military said the reason they had to demote him was that while a normal pilot could have done what he did, he was a test pilot and they're supposed to run closer to the redline.
Overall, that combined with the contemporaneous Secret Service gaffes that nearly had the President whacked while they stood around in photo-op poses, really made me think: What if these people are all playing at their roles and they don't actually know what to do? I know it's general Millennial jokes that "nobody knows what they're doing; we're all just making it up as we go along".
But that's not true. I kind of know a lot of what I'm doing. There's a whole bunch of things where I can just execute with low error rate. These guys are doing something more important and their ancestors did it better. Which makes me think that they're not so good at what they do.
> (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?
Maybe this will start to teach people that being a cog in a giant machine that only pretends to care about you (while really doing everything to put you in service to its own strategic goals of mass murder) isn’t really a great life decision. More high profile
stories like this would be great, in my view.
The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyovers are paid advertising to the NFL/NCAA by the military) to make it seem like you’ll be some sort of glorious hero if you join up.
> Time passed, and Del Pizzo’s trajectory through the Marine Corps moved upward and steady: deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Japan; deployments to Bahrain for combat missions into Syria for Operation Inherent Resolve. He flew Harriers off amphibious assault ships. At the Pentagon, he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff working on Southeast Asia policy, and with Navy staff on amphibious expedition warfare.
I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
> I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this conclusion is to help us think about similar situations in other settings than the US air force. It is like a philosophical dilema, should you punish someone for trying to save their life and causing damage that could have been avoided? Not everyone answers the same.
Again I agree with your angle, it's perfectly valid
The pilot, del Pizzo himself seems to have realised upon return to flying, the sound of engine dying he heard was actually the thrust engine not the main one.
Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed.
Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess
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.
Even if he held the glide without visibility (harder than it sounds) he would have had less than 60s before eating dirt (rate of descent was ~800ft/min).
Seems like there was already a thread about this. But after reading the article, my one takeaway is this: Pilots can decide in less than a minute to bail out of a fighter jet aimed at who knows what and that's OK??
I don't expect every pilot to go down with their plane, but holy crap. That plane could have taken out half a street of houses. I'm not sure how one pilot's life is worth more than potentially dozens of innocent people who happen to be living under a plane's flight path.
It's a miracle the plane landed in a swamp, of all places. Especially given how long it was in the air flying around on its own. Pretty much anywhere else besides the open ocean and it could have been an epic disaster.
I'm sure this has been expressed in the other thread, but I figured I'd share my shock for the others just reading about this now.
It's much, much less than a minute. Usually less than ten seconds.
Planes most commonly crash during takeoff and landing (why they turn on the seatbelt sign below 10000ft).
The FAA tries to make sure that approach lanes are mostly clear, but they can't plan for every scenario.
In this case the pilot knew that last time he checked, he was less than a thousand feet off the ground and descending in a plane that was out of his control with no comms (if you want to blame someone, how bout Lockheed?).
He's suppose to spend the next five seconds doing... what exactly?
This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
He's supposed to spend the next 5 seconds actually testing the flight controls to see what's working and what isn't. He's supposed to look at the backup instruments to see what his status is. He's supposed to try the backup radio to see if someone outside can help him figure out his status.
Instead, he switched the flight mode from STOL to forward flight, misinterpreted the result of that as his engine spooling down, didn't see if he could maneuver the aircraft, didn't do anything with the backup instruments except glance at them, didn't try the backup radio, and punched out.
Sure, he was descending. Did he try to pull up? Did he look at the backup instruments while doing so to see if their response to that agreed with his actions, and thus gain some information as to whether both the flight controls and backup instruments were functional? Seems like he didn't.
I'm not saying I would have made a different decision in his situation. I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like. But it sounds like that third mishap report, as well as the Marine brass, believed he should have known that he had more time to ascertain his plane's capabilities at the time.
> This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper. Yes, it seems, even in a crisis situation where he might die if he delays his decisions for too long.
And I'm not saying he absolutely should have gone down with the plane if that's what would have happened. But also consider that it seems like a near miracle that the plane didn't eventually come down in a residential area, for instance, and kill a bunch of people, especially considering how long it continued flying after he ejected. It sounds like he only considered that after he was on the ground. He needed to be thinking about that before he pulled that ejection lever.
> He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper.
In the event of an ejection, the belief is that jet is uncontrollable. In highlight with perfect knowledge, we know this wasn't the case, but in the pilot's mind, the jet was going down. It could go down with him on board, or it could go down without him on board. I think he made the right decision given the circumstances.
He had no vision to aim the jet at an unpopulated area, not bailing out might have just killed +1 person and leave an even greater mystery about the plane's technical condition and the pilots state of mind.
The F-35B entered service ten years ago, in 2015. But there have been continuous upgrades to it, and given that the 2023 incident described in the article started with the HUD (apparently) crashing 3 times in a row, there's plenty of room for improvement.
Im not a pilot or anything, but looking at the cockpit of the f35, it seems pretty weird that the whole thing is a big touch screen. Reminds me of cars replacing physical controls with touchscreens...
He wasn't loyal enough to the brand to not eject. The top brass in the F-35 project didn't like that. They needed to blame the pilot rather than the faulty machine in order to protect Lockheed Martin's and their own reputation.
From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore.
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.
Sure, maybe all those things wouldn't have worked, and he would have had to eject. Or worse, they wouldn't have worked, and he would have spent enough time trying them that it would have been too late and he would have died.
But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter: the plane was still flyable, and either a) he would have likely been able to successfully land, possibly at an alternate location with better weather, or b) he would have had the time and flight stability to try a bunch more options before deciding to eject.
I do find the circumstances strange, in how long it took for Marine brass to decide to relieve him of his command and torpedo his career. But I have no frame of reference for or experience around this, so perhaps it's not unusual. If he were just a rank-and-file pilot, he likely would have kept his position and continued on, perhaps with a bit of a bumpy road ahead. But he was given the command of an important group, a group tasked to refine flight procedures around this plane, and that comes with different expectations for his actions in the scenario he was in.
> 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.
Context is I remember reading comment that F35 manual calls for ejection if out of control flight under 6000ft agl. If pilot was at 750ft, it reinforces how little time/margin pilot had to make call and that he probably did everything he can until last minute.
The recent video of the air ambulance impacting the ground is really "instructive" here. There are good indications that they believed they were in level flight either because of some instrument failure or lack of attention.
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.
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.
If you don't see anything, staying in the aircraft doesn't make it any less of a missile. If he didn't eject, he could have still crashed into houses exactly like it could have after ejecting.
In the extreme, sure. And I’m not saying I know he was in the wrong. I’m just saying it’s something I think gets too little attention.
It was obviously possible to get the plane into a climb, because that’s how it ended up after he ejected. Once you are there is time to think and plan. Bad visibility doesn’t stretch infinity in the upward direction.
And how would you know if you’re climbing or not if you don’t trust the instruments?
If you still have a working attitude indicator you can trust, you obviously shouldn’t eject, but it sounds like he wasn’t sure if he could still rely on that. You don’t feel the direction the plane is going without instruments.
He means that he prefers for that poor lad to have died trying to save a piece of metal. Simple stuff, there is no going around it. For some people money is above human life.
But in this situation it sounds like the plane was highly likely to crash anyway so the estimated value you would save by potentially sacrificing him is low. Also I think the calculation is probably quite different in this situation compared to e.g. paying for safety measures in advance.
If I'm in a jet travelling towards the floor and I have the chance to survive by ejecting I will pull the level 10 times out of 10. The value of my life to me is approaching infinity in relative terms to the cost of a jet my employer pays for.
Saying the pilot did nothing wrong means the plane did something wrong; sell less expansive planes to foreign countries.
Throw him under the bus; sell more expansive planes.
I hear America is looking for efficiency and reduced gvt spendings, I'd say the F35 program is a good candidate to start, especially since now many countries aren't so fond of the whole "send all of your military data to our best friends the US of A".
Assuming it is the best when the private servers are controlled by someone who lets you use it, is it still the best when that connection is severed or when trust is broken by the nation controlling the servers, data and code? What if some president decides your nation's airstrike is not to his taste and... cancels it? What will you do then, tweet angrily about it, ask for a refund? Talking of course primarily about ODIN/ALIS.
I'd take a bicycle without electronics over an electric vehicle that decides not to start, any day, when picking military hardware.
$2t is the price tag of the entire program [1], from its conception to the jets retiring decades from now (note that programs tend to get extended, so the retirement year is probably too pessimistic). For comparison, the US is still producing F-16s, with the first F-16 produced in 1976.
F-35s has a much lower crash rate than F-16s during their first 20 years in service [2] and just recently passed 1 million flight hours [3]. The program has its problems, but it resulted in an incredibly capable fighter plane. Practically every US ally that has access to the F-35 run their evaluations and concluded that the F-35 is the best option (eg [4], quote: "F-35A offers highest overall benefit at lowest cost by far").
I mean if the air force is so uncomfortable with soldiers surviving while the $150M gadget bursts into flames, why do they even request for an ejection function in the aircrafts?
I sincerely have any doubt they will ever actually use one against a country that has any military capability, because of what the PR would be if it gets shot down.
It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject.
Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.
I think you’ll find that the cost to train pilots is also substantial. Mostly pilots have 100-1000s of hours to be “combat ready” at many $1000s/flight hr. Google says around $10M for F-35 pilot.
Better to follow protocol and eject. The link is a story where a good pilot followed protocol but still got screwed over.
Implicit in this view is that a pilot’s life has a cash value and that value is something less than “hundreds of millions of dollars” or a single digit multiple thereof.
The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD.
He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled.
How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.
> Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash.
Maybe, maybe not. But I do expect that if another pilot finds himself in Del Pizzo's situation, they're going to do a more thorough survey of the plane's capabilities before ejecting. Maybe that's the outcome the Marines is looking for, even if it puts their pilots at risk more often.
You have no real reason to believe that, you are pulling the reasons out of your rear. Read the reports, literally the investigations themselves concluded that most pilots would have ejected and that there was no misconduct.
The cost of the pilot will always be less than the cost of the plane. So why provide the capability to eject in the first place? Presumably you get better pilots when they know a problem with the plane doesn’t mean death for them or their career.
Not just that, but training pilots takes time, and getting them the experience they need to be seasoned pilots takes even more time. While you can certainly put a dollar amount on the cost of that training and experience, it's harder to quantify how much it's worth to have a trained, experienced pilot right now, vs. a new one that's starting from scratch and won't be at the same level for years.
First of all, the F-35's job is to kill people, let's not get overly moralistic here, but of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve military objectives. If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is asked to choose between losing 20 enlisted privates in a training accident vs. losing 20 B-2 bombers which one is he going to choose?
https://archive.is/192Wu
If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5.
Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations because most other pilots would have interpreted the situation similarly, promoted, and then fired less than 4 months after moving with his family to the location of his new role. It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen as the most likely explanation, with all the risks it entails (pilots becoming more hesitant to eject or openly admit mistakes so safety can be improved).
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.
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.
> This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.
The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility.
One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior.
This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass.
I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.
> human error, of course
Well management is only human...
It seemed only to be one commandant that said he was “at fault” (in complete disregard to the other two investigations and stellar reviews to his two bosses).
Simplest reason: that commandant had a vendetta against him
> 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.
The soviet russians nuked Chernobyl with this attitude, it must be good
Your comment reminded me, an excellent showcase of institutional shenanigans is the Chernobyl miniseries on Netflix. Denial, blame, coverups, accountability. It's a very well made series in a grim Soviet setting.
Just please don't take it as a documentary. It's a disservice to the people that actually worked at the plant that day and portrays them as arrogant fools, which none of them actually were.
That Chernobyl Guy on YouTube did great breakdowns.
I will watch the Youtube guy you're talking about, but I did listen to a many episode podcast with the writer/director discussing the books of direct, personal interviews that were documented after the incident.
Most of the major events depicted in the show are things I recall having been reported previously.
I thought many of the workers in the plant, the first responders, etc were portrayed as heroes and most at least quite sympathetically.
The actual guy in charge was actually not qualified and a fool tho. Afaik, arrogant too. So, "none of them actually were" is not true.
The rest of them are shown as afraid, questioning until they feel like they cant, then understanding what is happening but being helpless.
I feel like in the miniseries, only a handful of apparatchiks and Anatoly Dyatlov are really singled out for being stubborn and stupid?
Meh, the only thing you need to know about Chernobyl is
* The soviets designed a nuclear reactor and engineering plan/blueprint to making power plants
* That engineering plan required certain safety tests to be preformed before actually operating the plant
* Chernyobl did not pass those safety tests before plant operation
* Chernyobl then tried to run those safety tests after the plant was in operation (for some time).
* Chernyobl then catastrophically failed the safety tests due at least to the test setup being incorrect (you aren't supposed to be operating the plant before hand).
I disagree, this is true, but the failure was complex and worth understanding some extra nuances:
* The design of the reactors made them unsafe in a scenario where you needed to quickly insert the control rods. Doing so should reduce power output, but due to their graphite tips, it led to a sudden surge of power output.
* Leadership repeatedly didn't listen to or believe what they were hearing from boots on the ground.
* Leadership took a "it can't be that bad, let's wait and see" approach instead of a cautious approach.
* Add to this that boots on the ground were afraid to stand up to leadership.
* This repeatedly led to delayed reactions to the problems, and an increase in the severity of the outcomes.
* All of this combined with cooling failures, led to disaster.
(Heat and pressure accumulated, the reactor didn't have enough water, and then when control rods were finally reinserted, they sped up the reaction instead of slowing it down... boom.)
I mean it's a cool sequence of events and definitely if engineering interests you it's worth studying. Although I ultimately find the question of if the USSR knew about the graphite tip problem beforehand the most interesting part of the story (the HBO series taking the side of they knew). With the scandal not being the explosion but that the state was blind to problems it was causing.
But the common person just really needs to understand "garbage in, garbage out". Operating a nuclear reactor outside of specifications may result in catastrophic failure; which is why the West has so many regulations about them.
> "garbage in, garbage out"
The HBO series has a beautiful way to phrase it: It's the cost of lies.
Don’t you mean HBO?
Ah you're right, too late to edit.
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
They had one short sentence in there that he still had a tiny alternate primary flight display. Still had control surfaces. He knew he was descending and his authorized air space. Pull up, look at the pfd, do some resets, follow helmet malfunction protocols.
There was very little about a devils advocate side to the story.
I could imagine others joking about ejecting for minor warnings or trolling him. Especially in the marines.
Do a FOIA on all ejections because his is just one. He had a good 27 year career and ended as a colonel with retirement benefits.
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.”"
Well, that's the crux of the issue: apparently the aircraft still did respond properly to pilot inputs. Of course, it's totally understandable to get spooked by all the electronics failing and decide to rather bail out than bet on the plane still being flyable, but if you go by the book, he shouldn't have ejected...
You can't know whether the plane responds correctly to your inputs under instrument conditions when you can't trust the instruments.
The "small screen" the article is talking about that was still functional is likely a backup PFD, or at the VERY LEAST an attitude indicator. Validating that an attitude indicator is working is not particularly hard, especially if the flight controls are still working.
Ejecting over a populated area at a low altitude is a dangerous decision in its own right, and the unfortunate truth here is that if the choice is between "the life of the pilot" and "the lives of people on the ground" then the pilot is obligated to fly the jet until a crash is assured. Obviously I don't have all the details, but the article itself doesn't say that required instruments were unavailable.
Part of the issue here, too, is that pilots and aviation in general is an "old boys club" and this extends to giving long-tenured pilots extraordinary leeway for mistakes they made that newer or less popular people would have been crucified for. I was left wondering if that's what the first two flight reviews did, and the third one didn't.
You haven't read the article, or the part I quoted from it referring to the manual, which I would consider as "going by the book". Two of the three boards looking into the mishap "concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane".
The area being densely populated would be a point against ejecting, wouldn't it?
I think this was just a story, less an investigation. It's basically his view, the lack of closure, and the result.
I feel like we had a discussion of this crash in the past. Would be nice to find those threads.
Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?
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.
> My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail"
Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets.
US has killed the allies trust.
Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.
My tinfoil hat theory is perversely US probably wants LESS foreign F35 orders. US accounts for 80% of long term F35 procurement (~2500/3100). Capitalization / replacement of airframes across US forces is at attrocious levels. If anything US better off absorbing 100% of next 20 years of LH production, and get full F35 buy years earlier, i.e. by late 2030 instead of projected 2045s sharing with partners. Especially now LH seems to have finally sorted out Tech Refresh 3. US probably wants LH to focus on upgrading/delivering US airframes and get as much US airframes to TR3 and then block4 standards. IIRC airforce general said he would not want take pre TR3 F35s to Pacific fight. If US is serious about countering PRC in decade of concern, they need all the airframes.
If we follow your logic, they would still want the orders ; they would simply look for ways to avoid fulfilling them.
For a 1-2 years, maybe, as seen with JP, but for 10+ years? That's ~200+ airframes. LH already have TR3 backlogs, and TBH if you follow the LH TR / F35 SaaS drama (LH contract essentially held DoD hostage), I'm would not be surprised if DoD doesn't want to slap LH with less global orders so they can solely focus on US program.
No such kill switch exists, the US stopped providing electronic warfare intelligence that made the jets more survivable. The stoppage of all military aid was significantly more damaging.
They also refuse to update the electronic countermeasures systems installed in Ukraine's F16. Not a kill switch, but it is impacting the usefulness of the planes.
Whether actual kill switches exist is unknown. But if you were a European country, would you take the chance of buying fighters from a country threatening to invade multiple of your allies based on their assurance that the rumors about kill switches are nothing but unsubstantiated rumors?
Well denmark is going ahead to buy F-35 from their enemy that wants to invade them.
Regretting it though[0] - "Rasmus Jarlov, chairman of the Danish Parliament’s Defence Committee, has expressed regret over the decision to purchase the F-35. [...] He now advocates for reassessing Denmark’s strategic dependency on the United States and calls on European allies to consider doing the same."
[0] https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/den...
The made that decision earlier and it's not sure they're going to follow though.
I guess my comment above is downvoted because stating easily verifiable factual truths is not welcome?
Yeah this is both bad but also being heavily misreported: the US can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software effectively disables critical functionality which can effectively render a platform useless.
Up till now, there was no demonstrated risk of this happening - but that's a broken trust which won't be repaired for generations, if ever.
> the US can't shutdown hardware remotely
I agree with the assertion that there's no proof of a full killswitch based on known past events, but the above quoted statement is also a lot more definitive than I'm willing to be.
With a fighter jet as dependent upon electronic support systems as the F35 and which is sold around the world why wouldn't you put a highly classified backdoor killswitch into it just in case?
The idea that such a killswitch might exist is one that could have always reasonably been pondered, what's new is any/all non-US "Western" governments having to seriously entertain the idea that they would end up in a situation where the US would have a reason to use it against them.
> can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software
By what mechanism is this mediated? Because that sounds awfully similar to a kill switch in terms of the end result. Analogy by way of enterprise software: "We didn't remotely disable the software you purchased from us. Rather our server simply refuses to service your requests which happen to be required for the software to function." (Evil laugh from man with goatee immediately follows this statement obviously.)
> the US can't shutdown hardware remotely
And you know this because you've personally audited those planes?
If people are going to declare there's definitely a kill switch, then the burdens on them to provide proof.
The story being reported as a "kill switch" does not include this capability existing or being used.
I think they're saying there might be one, and we no longer trust the USA to believe there isn't one (and I can't really understand why we ever did, USA has been an unreliable ally even before trump).
You made the extraordinary claim that the USA has no kill switch. Where's the proof to your claim?
What an absurd argument to justify the baseless idea.
American-made systems are present in most western developed military hardware, there might be backdoors or killswitches in any of it.
Yes. There might be. That's the problem.
If true (The sourcing is a tad dubious?), it doesn't need to be a literal kill switch. Withholding software updates can be problematic enough.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/03/09/russian-media-claim...
The kill switch first reported wasn't for jets, but was for HIMARS[0], which stopped receiving data for strikes.
But everyone viewed this kill switch as a way broader than HIMARS, and rightfully so.
It will be foolish to assume that the USA has the capacity to turn HIMARS targeting capacity off, literally incapacitating the system which was built in the 90s, but somehow won't be able to kill switch a F35... This is disingenuous.
No country should trust their national security on the whims of one guy sitting in the White House, that can decide to side with the enemy and make your jets stop working because of disabled services.
[0]https://x.com/olliecarroll/status/1897340316942000271
I find it curious that Israel managed to convince US that they can run their own firmware, (most probably) bypassing all this. I mean do get that region politics, oil and Iran and all, plus who sits in US power places but still.
Or why Europeans didn't insist to get same version (probably no leverage). Well any next armament purchase by Europe thats smarter than a lead bullet should have full code delivery with all build processes. Still not 100% perfect scenario but least minimum acceptable.
> Or why Europeans didn't insist to get same version (probably no leverage).
I don't think it was a matter of leverage, but more of a blind trust in US Institutions, and denying the reality of their collapse.
No one would have believed at any point in the last 80 years that the US would be threatening to invade and annex Canada or Greenland, all while having a group of protected billionaires promoting the collapse of the European Union, the rise of nazism and the protection of a Russian autocratic regime.
The smart European nations didn’t buy the F-35 to begin with.
> next armament purchase by Europe
Or buy European.
Tomato tomato, they disabled features the allies relied on, so in practice it is a kind of kill switch.
A system that has to call home to work and is no longer being replied to is by any functional definition under a kill switch. The orange buffoon pushed a switch in Amerikka Oblast and the weapon can no longer defend itself.
The USA commander in chief said otherwise; You're spreading disinformation ;)
> only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed
Sure. My point is it does become small enough to fail if its effective price to taxpayers doubles due to allies cancelling orders.
> remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets
Source?
https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-repor...
One of many.
> the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets.
Could you provide some references to this? A quick search only turned up denials that such a kill switch exists.
https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-repor...
The name is imprecise and causes endless semantic discussions, what happened is lack of updates that render the aircraft vulnerable. Some will argue it's the same, some will disagree.
A common misconception - often echoed on this site - is that NATO allies and the U.S. operate on equal terms. They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen.
Even today, with all this talk around NATO, there’s a massive U.S. military presence at NATO bases across Europe.
These forces are, in effect, under U.S. control, stationed in countries like Germany and Italy. And if Germany suddenly decided it wanted them gone - well, it’s not their call.
TL;DR: Life on the empire’s periphery might be comfortable, but you don’t get to choose your enemies - and you still have to pay your dues, or else.
That's a fantasy, unless you think Germany is occupied by the USA. But that's not the case. Occupation ended in 1954, since then the USA military is stationed in Germany (and Italy) due to contracts. This so called deployment contracts have been confirmed in 1990, when Germany became a sovereign nation again. I know, the current USA is not big on "rule of law" anymore, but even a bad deal maker should understand that there is not much to win in a war over bases they get for free now. (I'm not saying that maintaining those bases is cheap, but that's more on how the USA runs military bases than anything else.)
I find it refreshing, however, that the "we are the evil empire now" idea is getting out of the closet. Call a spade a spade.
> I find it refreshing, however, that the "we are the evil empire now" idea is getting out of the closet. Call a spade a spade.
“Good” and “evil” are moral constructs that haven’t played a meaningful role in documented geopolitics since at least the 4th century BC.
There’s a well-known quote often attributed to Hastings Ismay that captures NATO’s original purpose. I won’t paste it here as it might come off as a bit harsh, and I’m not trying to drag this discussion out further.
> That's a fantasy, unless you think Germany is occupied by the USA. But that's not the case.
Circling back to Germany—I honestly can't think of a more humiliating moment for any NATO member than this[^1]. Sure, Mr. Biden was more aesthetically pleasing than Mr. Trump but take a moment to consider the symbolism and the signals sent to ally nations. Regardless of media narratives, the events of September 26, 2022, marked a turning point that fundamentally altered Germany’s economic path and future. It was a hostile act on a massive scale, and its consequences are undeniably real for the country.
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8
> “Good” and “evil” are moral constructs that haven’t played a meaningful role in documented geopolitics since at least the 4th century BC.
I'm showing my age here, sorry. It is a play on something Ronald Reagan said about another empire.
Evidently you don't know much about humiliating moments for NATO members.
I think what altered Germany and the EU path was the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. It humiliated German politicians and their decades long policy of trying to appease and cooperate with Russia. Biden and Obama were right to warn them about over reliance on Russia
[dead]
> They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen.
How do you imagine that will work? The US may have to lower the price more than they can afford to. Some countries have already cancelled their F-35 orders. You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
The F-35 was sold to us as an important multi billion business deal, with lots of European companies being promised to be subcontractors or technology partners; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... has a good overview of how much was involved. Basically, you scratch my back, we'll scratch yours kind of deal.
In hindsight, the project was (as expected) over budget etc. I wish our government(s) had given that money to European fighter jets instead. There's a chance the US will remote disable the jets that have been put into service now, or withold service / spare parts.
If the US withholds parts or services to European countries, that would certainly be an interesting twist, considering the Dutch government used this arrangement as a reason why they couldn't withhold parts to Israel despite the ongoing genocide. Had Netherland decided otherwise, the US might use that as a precendent. Or maybe they'll just set the precedent regardless.
> You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
The opium wars would disagree
The United States using military force against the home territory of a NATO member basically guarantees Chinese troops and weapons in Canada and Mexico. We would (deservedly) force the world to ally against us as we’d have proven ourselves to be an expansionist menace.
Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied. Chinese soldiers on the border is existential to US and when dealing with existential risks countries tend to put funny concepts such as UN charter or human rights aside.
Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies. Very doable.
> Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied
Which is why military alliance discussions aren’t conducted in public. The series of announcements would be e.g. Xi visiting Ottawa for trade talks and then announcing that Canada is under its nuclear umbrella.
> Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies
Which is why they’ve sought external security guarantees. Now that America is threatening invasion, its security guarantees are diluted. So you need someone else; the only option is China (unless the EU beefs up).
I don't really think China is an option either. Maybe for the west coast, but I really don't think they can do much for the eastern half of Canada. Though EU+China might do it.
Problem is, China might be happy to see the US invade Canada, because then they can finally take Taiwan. And that's the real danger of Trump's foolish aggression: by weakening American's alliances, he's giving China more space to assert itself and take what they want.
Perhaps the us should consider this before it talks about invading nato counties.
> Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied. Chinese soldiers on the border is existential to US and when dealing with existential risks countries tend to put funny concepts such as UN charter or human rights aside.
Talk of the Chinese being invited in by Canada or Mexico is precisely as much of a casus belli as Ukraine saying "please let us join NATO so Russia won't invade us!". Canada already has reason to fear invasion regardless, as Trump keeps talking about annexing them.
It didn't work out well for Russia, which is currently experiencing in Ukraine much what the US itself experienced in Vietnam. Or indeed in Cuba (Bay of Pigs) the year before the nuclear missiles which were much closer to a real casus belli.
The people wanted the opium.
The implications are that non financial or indirect financial leverage would be used to make you "want" to complete purchase.
Well that period seems to be ending right in front of our eyes.
It's only been months of the Trump admin and already the imperial attitudes are coming out. It's 2025, not 1900. Converting the US into an empire isn't going to go as well as you think it will.
Saying that military action is not off the table to take Greenland is literally insane.
Greenland has always been an ally, if for safety reasons the US needs more military presence on the island they could have just asked for it and it would most likely have been approved.
There is zero reason to use force, but if the US would take such steps I wouldn't be surprised if Europe starts replacing the dollar as reserve currency. This could trigger other nations like China to follow. This move would hurt the US economy way worse than the current trade war does.
Those massively military bases exist to protect Europe. The countries can of course choose to tell soldiers to fuck off but now is not a particularly good time for that. The real danger is that Trump abandons our allies because a dictator flattered him
I'm always surprised about this line of thinking. Surely an active duty pilot is going to keep his mouth shut, whereas as we see, as a retired one he's happy to talk to the papers.
On top of that, the person I want flying more of the same plane is one who’s experienced piloting it during major failure conditions. Instead they retire the experienced guy and put some other fresh hotshot in the seat.
But he made the gold turkey look bad.
Ironically every time someone proudly assert the existence of F-35 C++ coding standard [0], I am not sure if they actually understand the impact.
The software mess from F-35 would it be even worse without the standard, or has the existence of the standard hardly improved the coding practices as usually gets told.
Not that the answer to this philosophical question solves the issues for everyone affected by the F-35 software problems.
[0] - http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
One fun thing about “too big” projects like the F-35 is that the project management overheads cause a kind of recursive overhead, like the rocket equation, but applied to technical outcomes instead of orbital velocity. Any change isn’t “just” the change, it now has to got through review boards, subcontractors, liaisons, integration reviews, etc…
The result is that the F-35 computers are being “upgraded” (lol) to the same compute power as a first-gen Apple Watch… starting this year and finishing who-knows-when.
Meanwhile the F-16 which is “not as important” has already been upgraded with the same kind of chips as modern GPUs and has orders of magnitude more performance than the “flying computer” the the F-35 was supposed to be.
Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already.
>"Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already."
You might be surprised by what kind of functionality can be squeezed out of "weak" CPU when programmers know how to work on hardware with limited resources.
Having written 4KB assembly demos for BBS sites back in the 80s and 90s, I would not be surprised at all.
What does surprise me is a $110M plane that is being upgraded at the low-low-cost of a mere $300K each to this: https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-i...
Yes, that "High-Performance Integrated Core Processor" is pulling 4.5 kW to produce as much computer power as a typical PC in the late 1990s!
Is it possible that there is a mistake on the page and they mean 450 Watts?
The "1 ATR SHORT" version lists 2 modules and takes 300 Watts, so 450 Watts would line up perfectly for the "1 ATR LONG" which takes 3 modules. 4.5 kW doesn't make a lot of sense here.
The typo-free spec sheet is an extra $150K.
The F-35 was designed for export. The F-22 wasn’t and I suspect the F-47 is not either. There are different objectives at work here.
The F-35 is technically capable but even that is subject to export controls despite being purpose-built for export. A lot of European companies have a large stake in the success of the F-35 in its various versions because they are building it for European customers.
I think at large european industry has more stake in F-35 not being bought, and local planes be used instead.
The internal conflict is that the European planes that exist are nowhere as capable as the F-35.
While the European defense contractors may promise a comparable plane, they have a poor track record of delivering such a thing anywhere close to the near future.
Well unless we in Europe want to do in direct conflict with US (ie for Greenland), this is mostly irrelevant extra capability. As Ukraine shows, peer conflicts are won by other means, not stealth air superiority over sheep herders with AKs.
Some general's wet dream of dogfights in Maverick's style are modern day fantasies. What those planes are used for are just lobbing glide bombs or shooting missiles. Their biggest enemy is on ground. Sure, small radar signature helps massively but that's not enough. Otherwise US would send 500 F-35 into North korean airspace and wipe out most of its military... not going to happen.
> As Ukraine shows, peer conflicts are won by other means, not stealth air superiority
I don't think you can conclude that when neither of the belligerents has the capability. As Gulf War shows, training and capabilities (including stealth) do enable SEAD/DEAD to an extent that unlocks air superiority.
I talk about peer conflict, which Gulf war wasn't. Old soviet tech, poorly trained soldiers with very low morale doesn't make them anyhow a peer to US army of that era. It was just a variant of that shooting goat herders, defenseless even against Apache choppers who have 0 stealth and fly low & slow.
Perhaps you're not aware that this happened? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
USA has air superiority only against 3rd world countries, and even then, history shows that air superiority has never won any war.
I don't understand what that link is supposed to prove. A single F-117A getting shot down in Yugoslavia due to complacency and chance doesn't negate Nighthawks bombing SAM defended areas with impunity. Iraq had a strong and integrated AD network for the time.
Air superiority alone doesn't, but it's a massive force multiplier.
I sent a link about Iran, you comment about Jugoslavia.
You don't have to read my link, but you can also skip on making completely unrelated comments if you don't feel like doing the reading.
I read it and I know about that case. However, as I said I'm struggling to see your point.
I guessed you meant that that one case proves something about air superiority or Iran having an advantage over USAF, so I responded with a historical parallel.
I have my doubts that the F-35 is anywhere as capable as advertised.
This is a really interesting 'first thought'. "Designed for export"
Not the typical mindset of someone wanting true superiority through military power. Makes you think twice.
The F35 is expensive, keeps the defense apparatus going, and ultimately gets paid for by other countries. F22 barely reached production, so F47 will be interesting.
The F-35 is cheap for what it is capable of. F-22 and F-47 are immaterial. And the export F-35 is nerfed to some extent.
The unfortunate reality, which the US is exploiting, is that Europe would struggle to produce an equivalent of the nerfed F-35, never mind one that hadn’t been nerfed. As a consequence, the US can sell nerfed F-35s all day. There aren’t many alternatives currently. 4.5 gen aircraft aren’t competitive in a serious conflict and everyone knows it. Even the US has to contend with that reality.
What european companies built the F35? Especially what part of the software is from Europe ?
BAE systems is responsible for about 15% of production, things from rear fuselage etc.
Rolls-Royce builds the LiftSystem for the F-35B variant.
Martin-Baker builds the ejection seats for all F-35s.
Leonardo builds the wing sets.
Rheinmetall is planning to build fuselage for a large number.
Kongsberg developed the Joint Strike Missile meant to be carried inside the fuselage to maintain stealth profile while engaging targets at long ranges.
It’s bizzare to think that high command in the US is that shortsighted.
True. However, did you notice the emojis used in relation to the leaked Huthi attack? It’s difficult to place confidence in individuals wielding significant power when they conduct themselves like adolescents.
This doesn’t feel fair. The standards we have for how elected officials conduct themselves is very different from what we expect from non-political career civil servants, General Officers, and the like.
At our most charitable, we ought to recognize that in a democracy elected officials are plucked from the ranks of the general public. The qualifications for office are that you are the most popular person in the room, not the smartest, or the most professional.
The trouble comes when the elected officials also want to replace non-political career officials with political allies who behave similarly to themselves, which seems to be what we are currently seeing.
I agree on everything you wrote! However, I hope citizens vote for the persons they think are going to do the best job.
Obviously, it is a gamble, to wit the current administration, but I'm sure, on election day, most voters of the USA thought that the current president would do the best job. Many learn now they were mistaken, but this happens. That's the beauty of democracy, we can vote the incompetents out.
That’s a fair assessment :-)
I can hardly blame them for that when my own communication is full of emojis. I mean, I blame them for literally everything else, but not that.
Defense companies with workers in congressional districts and bribe politicians – I mean, make campaign contributions in exchange for huge contracts. Congress oversees the military. The officers who don't help politicians get what they want don't get promoted. The officers who do, get rank, status, book deals, and lucrative jobs at defense companies after they retire.
It's disgusting but it's not that hard to figure out how it happens.
Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475
Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark..
Did more information come up during the time period ?
Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
The article mentions that "A small backup display was partially functional, but Del Pizzo had to look down to see it".
He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground.
He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell the plane to switch modes from STOL to regular forward flight. He didn't see if pitch, yaw, and roll flight controls were being respected, and it doesn't seem he tried to use the backup radio, or the backup instruments, other then glancing at them.
But I don't think he made a terrible decision! Ultimately he's still alive, he healed from his injuries, and no one else was hurt, and that's a good outcome in my opinion. But maybe his judgment in a crisis situation isn't good enough for the command position he was given. He did lose a $165M piece of equipment, one that he very well may have been able land safely, and while I would never place that above the lives of actual humans, it does matter. And that's really what the three reports said: many other pilots probably would have done what he did in that situation, but he should have taken more time to ascertain whether his plane was flyable or not, even if that would have put him at further risk.
Maybe he would have been fine continuing to be a test pilot under the command of someone else's test group, but maybe his superiors decided that his actions showed he wasn't the kind of person they wanted in command. I dunno; I've never been a Marine (or any kind of military officer), so I don't know either way. But I suspect most of us here haven't, and don't really have expert knowledge on how these sorts of things are supposed to work.
> He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk.
Are you sure about this?
It takes a lot of time and hours to get a pilot to the point they can probe the edges that test pilots do. The whole goal is to actually keep them alive so their experience and observations can be used. And that just compounds. So while they fly maneuvers and situations that would absolutely overwhelm me as a 300 hour private pilot in my Tecnam, my feeling is that even at that point they fly at less relative risk than I do. They are experts in mitigating, and preparing for risk.
There are old pilots and bold pilots. I do not believe that being a test pilot is a mandate that forces one to transfer to the bold club.
He was not a test pilot! The F-35B entered service in 2015, the incident happened in 2023. He was a squadron commander, in charge of training other pilots to fly the plane.
He was 700 feet off the ground and descending
That gives him a window of what? 1-3 seconds maybe? To "test" if controls were working
The entire story is pretty interesting, actually.
When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU).
Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while
Then the military said the reason they had to demote him was that while a normal pilot could have done what he did, he was a test pilot and they're supposed to run closer to the redline.
Overall, that combined with the contemporaneous Secret Service gaffes that nearly had the President whacked while they stood around in photo-op poses, really made me think: What if these people are all playing at their roles and they don't actually know what to do? I know it's general Millennial jokes that "nobody knows what they're doing; we're all just making it up as we go along".
But that's not true. I kind of know a lot of what I'm doing. There's a whole bunch of things where I can just execute with low error rate. These guys are doing something more important and their ancestors did it better. Which makes me think that they're not so good at what they do.
> (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?
I suspect an average dispatcher is an order magnitude more likely to have someone reporting they crashed a plane than actually did crash a plane.
Ha, interesting example of a sensitivity/specificity test.
Maybe this will start to teach people that being a cog in a giant machine that only pretends to care about you (while really doing everything to put you in service to its own strategic goals of mass murder) isn’t really a great life decision. More high profile stories like this would be great, in my view.
The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyovers are paid advertising to the NFL/NCAA by the military) to make it seem like you’ll be some sort of glorious hero if you join up.
> Time passed, and Del Pizzo’s trajectory through the Marine Corps moved upward and steady: deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Japan; deployments to Bahrain for combat missions into Syria for Operation Inherent Resolve. He flew Harriers off amphibious assault ships. At the Pentagon, he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff working on Southeast Asia policy, and with Navy staff on amphibious expedition warfare.
I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
> I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this conclusion is to help us think about similar situations in other settings than the US air force. It is like a philosophical dilema, should you punish someone for trying to save their life and causing damage that could have been avoided? Not everyone answers the same.
Again I agree with your angle, it's perfectly valid
Yeah, it is something different, but this is a story about a guy who dedicated his life to something, and then lost everything he worked for.
I think the question about “is that something anyone should be working for?” is just as important as “was it fair to the one so working?”.
The pilot, del Pizzo himself seems to have realised upon return to flying, the sound of engine dying he heard was actually the thrust engine not the main one.
Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed.
Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess
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.
Yes 750m doesn't give much room for errors or time
It was 750 feet, not meters. So much less room.
Even if he held the glide without visibility (harder than it sounds) he would have had less than 60s before eating dirt (rate of descent was ~800ft/min).
Seems like there was already a thread about this. But after reading the article, my one takeaway is this: Pilots can decide in less than a minute to bail out of a fighter jet aimed at who knows what and that's OK??
I don't expect every pilot to go down with their plane, but holy crap. That plane could have taken out half a street of houses. I'm not sure how one pilot's life is worth more than potentially dozens of innocent people who happen to be living under a plane's flight path.
It's a miracle the plane landed in a swamp, of all places. Especially given how long it was in the air flying around on its own. Pretty much anywhere else besides the open ocean and it could have been an epic disaster.
I'm sure this has been expressed in the other thread, but I figured I'd share my shock for the others just reading about this now.
It's much, much less than a minute. Usually less than ten seconds.
Planes most commonly crash during takeoff and landing (why they turn on the seatbelt sign below 10000ft).
The FAA tries to make sure that approach lanes are mostly clear, but they can't plan for every scenario.
In this case the pilot knew that last time he checked, he was less than a thousand feet off the ground and descending in a plane that was out of his control with no comms (if you want to blame someone, how bout Lockheed?).
He's suppose to spend the next five seconds doing... what exactly?
This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
He's supposed to spend the next 5 seconds actually testing the flight controls to see what's working and what isn't. He's supposed to look at the backup instruments to see what his status is. He's supposed to try the backup radio to see if someone outside can help him figure out his status.
Instead, he switched the flight mode from STOL to forward flight, misinterpreted the result of that as his engine spooling down, didn't see if he could maneuver the aircraft, didn't do anything with the backup instruments except glance at them, didn't try the backup radio, and punched out.
Sure, he was descending. Did he try to pull up? Did he look at the backup instruments while doing so to see if their response to that agreed with his actions, and thus gain some information as to whether both the flight controls and backup instruments were functional? Seems like he didn't.
I'm not saying I would have made a different decision in his situation. I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like. But it sounds like that third mishap report, as well as the Marine brass, believed he should have known that he had more time to ascertain his plane's capabilities at the time.
> This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper. Yes, it seems, even in a crisis situation where he might die if he delays his decisions for too long.
And I'm not saying he absolutely should have gone down with the plane if that's what would have happened. But also consider that it seems like a near miracle that the plane didn't eventually come down in a residential area, for instance, and kill a bunch of people, especially considering how long it continued flying after he ejected. It sounds like he only considered that after he was on the ground. He needed to be thinking about that before he pulled that ejection lever.
> He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper.
Isn’t that only for test flights?
> I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like.
In IFR conditions (= you can't see anything) losing your instruments means you're hosed as you can't trust your senses.
There was also some talk of feeling like he was falling but of course with no vision you will have no idea what way you are going based on you senses.
Don't these planes have the basic instruments as a backup to the helmet display?
In the event of an ejection, the belief is that jet is uncontrollable. In highlight with perfect knowledge, we know this wasn't the case, but in the pilot's mind, the jet was going down. It could go down with him on board, or it could go down without him on board. I think he made the right decision given the circumstances.
He had no vision to aim the jet at an unpopulated area, not bailing out might have just killed +1 person and leave an even greater mystery about the plane's technical condition and the pilots state of mind.
If you're going down in zero visibility, what good can you do staying in the jet?
I think there are many other moving parts in this story that aren’t public knowledge.
Mostly the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an airplane that's not ready for prime time yet.
The F-35B entered service ten years ago, in 2015. But there have been continuous upgrades to it, and given that the 2023 incident described in the article started with the HUD (apparently) crashing 3 times in a row, there's plenty of room for improvement.
Im not a pilot or anything, but looking at the cockpit of the f35, it seems pretty weird that the whole thing is a big touch screen. Reminds me of cars replacing physical controls with touchscreens...
Plus it's running Kubernetes for all of that!
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
I didn't watch the video but the article only mentions the F-16, not the F-35.
He wasn't loyal enough to the brand to not eject. The top brass in the F-35 project didn't like that. They needed to blame the pilot rather than the faulty machine in order to protect Lockheed Martin's and their own reputation.
This was discussed four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475
From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore.
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.
Sure, maybe all those things wouldn't have worked, and he would have had to eject. Or worse, they wouldn't have worked, and he would have spent enough time trying them that it would have been too late and he would have died.
But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter: the plane was still flyable, and either a) he would have likely been able to successfully land, possibly at an alternate location with better weather, or b) he would have had the time and flight stability to try a bunch more options before deciding to eject.
I do find the circumstances strange, in how long it took for Marine brass to decide to relieve him of his command and torpedo his career. But I have no frame of reference for or experience around this, so perhaps it's not unusual. If he were just a rank-and-file pilot, he likely would have kept his position and continued on, perhaps with a bit of a bumpy road ahead. But he was given the command of an important group, a group tasked to refine flight procedures around this plane, and that comes with different expectations for his actions in the scenario he was in.
> 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.
It started at 750ft
> Observe, orient: Jet still in the clouds, about 750 feet above ground, still in his control, descending glide path, about 800 feet per minute
Then brokenness again
> About 30 seconds had passed.
By then he might have been gliding halfway towards terrain.
> He felt the nose of the aircraft tilt upward. He felt a falling sensation.
Subtext is that this feels like stalling with only a few hundred feet and a few seconds left. There's no room to recover control surface.
There's only so much you can read in so little time with fallback instruments. Airspeed means squat, climb rate can be unreliable.
> Forty-one seconds.
Next loop is going to be either nothing happened or ground contact. What to you do.
>6000ft above ground level
Context is I remember reading comment that F35 manual calls for ejection if out of control flight under 6000ft agl. If pilot was at 750ft, it reinforces how little time/margin pilot had to make call and that he probably did everything he can until last minute.
The recent video of the air ambulance impacting the ground is really "instructive" here. There are good indications that they believed they were in level flight either because of some instrument failure or lack of attention.
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.
If you don't see anything, staying in the aircraft doesn't make it any less of a missile. If he didn't eject, he could have still crashed into houses exactly like it could have after ejecting.
In the extreme, sure. And I’m not saying I know he was in the wrong. I’m just saying it’s something I think gets too little attention.
It was obviously possible to get the plane into a climb, because that’s how it ended up after he ejected. Once you are there is time to think and plan. Bad visibility doesn’t stretch infinity in the upward direction.
And how would you know if you’re climbing or not if you don’t trust the instruments?
If you still have a working attitude indicator you can trust, you obviously shouldn’t eject, but it sounds like he wasn’t sure if he could still rely on that. You don’t feel the direction the plane is going without instruments.
"But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter" -- curious what you mean by that?
He means that he prefers for that poor lad to have died trying to save a piece of metal. Simple stuff, there is no going around it. For some people money is above human life.
Sorry but I'm sure that's not what he meant.
Money is above human life at some point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
But in this situation it sounds like the plane was highly likely to crash anyway so the estimated value you would save by potentially sacrificing him is low. Also I think the calculation is probably quite different in this situation compared to e.g. paying for safety measures in advance.
If I'm in a jet travelling towards the floor and I have the chance to survive by ejecting I will pull the level 10 times out of 10. The value of my life to me is approaching infinity in relative terms to the cost of a jet my employer pays for.
Of course. This calculation obviously only applies to an abstract life.
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?
To be fair his armchair is under a thousand feet AGL too
Saying the pilot did nothing wrong means the plane did something wrong; sell less expansive planes to foreign countries. Throw him under the bus; sell more expansive planes.
I hear America is looking for efficiency and reduced gvt spendings, I'd say the F35 program is a good candidate to start, especially since now many countries aren't so fond of the whole "send all of your military data to our best friends the US of A".
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
Assuming it is the best when the private servers are controlled by someone who lets you use it, is it still the best when that connection is severed or when trust is broken by the nation controlling the servers, data and code? What if some president decides your nation's airstrike is not to his taste and... cancels it? What will you do then, tweet angrily about it, ask for a refund? Talking of course primarily about ODIN/ALIS.
I'd take a bicycle without electronics over an electric vehicle that decides not to start, any day, when picking military hardware.
$2 trillion to develop something that can't even dependably fly and the Pentagon can't even pass an audit. What a joke.
$2t is the price tag of the entire program [1], from its conception to the jets retiring decades from now (note that programs tend to get extended, so the retirement year is probably too pessimistic). For comparison, the US is still producing F-16s, with the first F-16 produced in 1976.
F-35s has a much lower crash rate than F-16s during their first 20 years in service [2] and just recently passed 1 million flight hours [3]. The program has its problems, but it resulted in an incredibly capable fighter plane. Practically every US ally that has access to the F-35 run their evaluations and concluded that the F-35 is the best option (eg [4], quote: "F-35A offers highest overall benefit at lowest cost by far").
[1]: https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-mil...
[2]: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more...
[3]: https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-fligh...
[4]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...
> A sign at the base entrance says, "The 'noise' you hear is the sound of freedom."
And that is how they normalize their atrocities.
I mean if the air force is so uncomfortable with soldiers surviving while the $150M gadget bursts into flames, why do they even request for an ejection function in the aircrafts?
Good PR I guess? Highest level specialists have demands. I fail to see how top pilots would agree to sit in suicide machines.
Article mention 1/10 critical failure rate (injuries or worse). I wonder how much of a push is made in this direction?
Given (implied in article) sentiment I wouldn’t be very surprised if stakeholders wouldn’t want ejection to be too safe.
Cynical take would be it is a free soldier behind enemy lines.
I sincerely have any doubt they will ever actually use one against a country that has any military capability, because of what the PR would be if it gets shot down.
[dead]
So which one actually ejected? Tre or Cheez?
It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject.
Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.
I think you’ll find that the cost to train pilots is also substantial. Mostly pilots have 100-1000s of hours to be “combat ready” at many $1000s/flight hr. Google says around $10M for F-35 pilot.
Better to follow protocol and eject. The link is a story where a good pilot followed protocol but still got screwed over.
10m for new pilot. This guy was a full bird instructor with 1000s of hours. Probably closer to 30 or 50 million.
Implicit in this view is that a pilot’s life has a cash value and that value is something less than “hundreds of millions of dollars” or a single digit multiple thereof.
The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD.
He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled.
How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.
I think the plane is only $136M in the context of the overall program and it's projected number of planes built over the program lifespan.
The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.
Of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve objectives.
Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash.
It’s similar to why search and rescue don’t bill you after they’re called - they don’t want to add a reason to hesitate and make your problems worse.
> Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash.
Maybe, maybe not. But I do expect that if another pilot finds himself in Del Pizzo's situation, they're going to do a more thorough survey of the plane's capabilities before ejecting. Maybe that's the outcome the Marines is looking for, even if it puts their pilots at risk more often.
You have no real reason to believe that, you are pulling the reasons out of your rear. Read the reports, literally the investigations themselves concluded that most pilots would have ejected and that there was no misconduct.
You don’t know what you are talking about.
The cost of the pilot will always be less than the cost of the plane. So why provide the capability to eject in the first place? Presumably you get better pilots when they know a problem with the plane doesn’t mean death for them or their career.
Not just that, but training pilots takes time, and getting them the experience they need to be seasoned pilots takes even more time. While you can certainly put a dollar amount on the cost of that training and experience, it's harder to quantify how much it's worth to have a trained, experienced pilot right now, vs. a new one that's starting from scratch and won't be at the same level for years.
It is absolutely bad practice to throw away a $25 million investment because of a single mistake (that was not a mistake in this case).
Don't throw good money after bad.
The only thing such a policy leads to is losing pilots, either by them not ditching when they should or them leaving a toxic work environment.
In other words to you human lives are worth less than F-35s.
Yes. There is a finite $ value on a human life from a government point of view.
For your loved ones it is infinite.
But for a government with X funds and Y lives to save, there has to be a price.
If someone ejects on every little problem, you spend billions more on that and billions less on some other life saving initiatives.
Putting aside the bad ejection survival stats.
Yes, governments will assign a value to human lives for making decisions.
This angle doesn't make much sense in the context of a weapon
First of all, the F-35's job is to kill people, let's not get overly moralistic here, but of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve military objectives. If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is asked to choose between losing 20 enlisted privates in a training accident vs. losing 20 B-2 bombers which one is he going to choose?
Dans ce pays, il est bon de tuer un pilote de temps à autre, pour encourager les autres.
The alternative solution, using planes that don't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, seems easier