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F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

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Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#311

Post by rbanffy »

bumby wrote: post #303
ncallaway wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap Chinese phones get to take the mass production benefits of the iPhone and Android markets and then *relax* most of the requirements to get cheaper parts. The military tends to *tighten* the requirements when it’s procuring parts, so more things end up as custom development. I have no idea what ratio something like an F-35 is for COTS vs custom hardware, though.

I’m not sure there’s much relaxing in quality control in aerospace. The specs are already pretty tight.

You could, but usually that causes lower performance. When building an airframe, a gram not needed is a gram wasted. In fighters it's far less stringent than spacecraft - for those, even a screw one turn longer than needed is something to avoid.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#312

Post by ozim »

Scoundreller wrote: post #301
tehf0x wrote: post #265

So a similar thing happened near some friends' in France. A military jet crashed into the forest near their house, but the air force couldn't figure out where it had gone. Eventually a farmer noticed that a new pond had appeared on his land. The jet made enough of a crater when crashing that drained the nearby swamp and created a new pond deep enough to conceal the full fuselage, thus completely hiding the airplane.…

I wonder if some of the "autopilot" functionality for military aircraft is to swan-dive into water/forest if everyone has already ejected. If it's going to crash (and can't autoland, which it probably shouldn't attempt even if it could if something ejection-worthy happened), might as well obliterate the thing in a safe place.

Well usually it is pilots responsibility to try to aim it in safe direction as much as possible and only then eject. Basically like captain on the ship you don't eject but you are last one to leave the ship after you made what is possible to save others from harm (unless they are of course hostile forces).

I think quite some pilots died this way because they were trying to the last second to save other lives.

If plane is that much out of control that you cannot do much, adding some code to try to do something might make things actually worse from my perspective.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#313

Post by bob1029 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #301
tehf0x wrote: post #265

So a similar thing happened near some friends' in France. A military jet crashed into the forest near their house, but the air force couldn't figure out where it had gone. Eventually a farmer noticed that a new pond had appeared on his land. The jet made enough of a crater when crashing that drained the nearby swamp and created a new pond deep enough to conceal the full fuselage, thus completely hiding the airplane.…

I wonder if some of the "autopilot" functionality for military aircraft is to swan-dive into water/forest if everyone has already ejected. If it's going to crash (and can't autoland, which it probably shouldn't attempt even if it could if something ejection-worthy happened), might as well obliterate the thing in a safe place.

Some Hollywood points in this direction. E.g. the Behind Enemy Lines ejection scene.

Seems like a pretty good idea to self-destruct the most sensitive hardware (computers/chips/storage modules/etc) if recovery of the aircraft is no longer feasible.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#314

Post by jmclnx »

>“Now that I got that out of the way. How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace said on social media. “How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?”

Sure lets put tracking devices in these stealth planes, will make it easy for anyone to find, even the Russians or Chinese.

How dumb can a Congress Person get, they surprise me everyday.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#316

Post by MarkMarine »

Scoundreller wrote: post #301
tehf0x wrote: post #265

So a similar thing happened near some friends' in France. A military jet crashed into the forest near their house, but the air force couldn't figure out where it had gone. Eventually a farmer noticed that a new pond had appeared on his land. The jet made enough of a crater when crashing that drained the nearby swamp and created a new pond deep enough to conceal the full fuselage, thus completely hiding the airplane.…

I wonder if some of the "autopilot" functionality for military aircraft is to swan-dive into water/forest if everyone has already ejected. If it's going to crash (and can't autoland, which it probably shouldn't attempt even if it could if something ejection-worthy happened), might as well obliterate the thing in a safe place.

The thing you’re thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were steering away from populated areas)

By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#317

Post by jandrewrogers »

the_sleaze9 wrote: post #190
melling wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of an absurd thing to say. However, it’s repeated all the time, and in every generation in some form. One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could educate people at a younger age so they understand this, maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society. Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a percentage of GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-d…

What an odd form of comparison, Military spending is almost entirely a function of tax, not Gross Domestic Product of a country. But taking just one aspect of that graph – overall military spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we were involved in a full scale occupation of another country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my humb…

In the US, education spending significantly exceeds defense spending. It is almost entirely allocated under State budgets, the number you are referring to is Federal. The Federal government could stop spending on education entirely and expenditures would still exceed the military. The US spends far more on education per student than almost any other country, per the OECD. It raises the question of why the US still has mediocre outcomes in education given the amount of money spent on it.

The US spends a lot on the military but at least the outcome of that expenditure is an exceptional and unmatched capability. One can argue whether or not that capability is needed, but at least they are getting what they are paying for to some extent.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#318

Post by johnklos »

jmclnx wrote: post #314

>“Now that I got that out of the way. How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace said on social media. “How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?” Sure lets put tracking devices in these stealth planes, will make it easy for anyone to find, even the Russians or Chinese. How dumb can a Congress Person get, they surp…

How dumb could a person be, suggesting that something be installed in an expensive airplane that couldn't possibly ever be turned off!

Sigh.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#319

Post by ozim »

kunwon1 wrote: post #131
btbuildem wrote: post #70

An 80's movie dream is playing out for some rural kids, where they stumble upon a smouldering high-tech wreckage and as they explore it, men in suits pour out of black SUVs and talk to them in taciturn ways. Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.

I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual knowledge about. A broad overview of my understanding of…

It is quite clear dogfights happen only in the movies. But all my knowledge about fighter jets comes from YouTube fighter jet pilot channels.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#320

Post by [deleted] »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #174
kunwon1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual knowledge about. A broad overview of my understanding of…

I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases, runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is p…

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