A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake
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?
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.
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.
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.
You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
The opium wars would disagree
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).
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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
And you know this because you've personally audited those planes?
The story being reported as a "kill switch" does not include this capability existing or being used.
You made the extraordinary claim that the USA has no kill switch. Where's the proof to your claim?
American-made systems are present in most western developed military hardware, there might be backdoors or killswitches in any of it.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/03/09/russian-media-claim...
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.)
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?
[0] https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/den...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
USA has air superiority only against 3rd world countries, and even then, history shows that air superiority has never won any war.
Air superiority alone doesn't, but it's a massive force multiplier.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
It's disgusting but it's not that hard to figure out how it happens.
Did more information come up during the time period ?
Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
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.
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.
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.
Better to follow protocol and eject. The link is a story where a good pilot followed protocol but still got screwed over.
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.
The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.
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.
Don't throw good money after bad.
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).
That Chernobyl Guy on YouTube did great breakdowns.
* 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).
* 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.)
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.
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 rest of them are shown as afraid, questioning until they feel like they cant, then understanding what is happening but being helpless.
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 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.
At least put all that extra nonsense at the end.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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
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
With low altitude being an aggravating factor he was always 100% correct in ejecting and whatever the plane did afterwards is largely irrelevant.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
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...
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.
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.
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?
Don't these planes have the basic instruments as a backup to the helmet display?