It may be naive to ask this but... can I get a tail number? I'm not 100% sure these would have one I could look up on flightradar but a national post asking people to help find their plane would be way more useful with a little more info about the actual aircraft. We know it was "Sunday afternoon" over South Carolina somewhere but if we had some "last known location" info or something this might be solvable with some math estimates.
F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
321–330 of 693 posts
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#322An 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.
The real question IMO is whether the 6th generation fighters (Next Generation Air Dominance program in the USA) are making the right design trade offs. They are projected to be bigger, more expensive, and ordered in fewer numbers than even the F-22. Are we better off with fewer but more advanced super weapons, or with many more cheaper weapons? In the era of UA/RU war where few-thousand-dollar drones are spanking mul…
Yeah, far more F35s will be ordered than F22s, in the end the program ground out a pretty successful jet.
The next generation may be the questionable one.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not pretty right now. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/03/1173535...
blanket free lunch is disgustingly wasteful and a terrible solution for needy children. It is like buying a new car whenever you have a flat tire. I can feed my own kids, I don't need them picking up an extra slice of pizza every day for fun and throwing milk and plates and disposable utensils in the garbage. Ask any lunch worker about the additional garbage and waste it generates. The correct solution is to remove t…
There should never be any judgement regarding a child's financial situation during the school day.
The place where I grew up handled this in the best possible way: Every kid got a lunch if they went through the lunch line, without exception. The school system simply kept track of which students got a meal, and at the end of the month, they'd either mail a bill or it would be covered through the free lunch program.
Under this system, there was no opportunity for students or staff to pass judgement on students for their financial situation.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.
The plane-sized drones are capable of some autonomous operation. It may or may not be possible to spoof that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... The smaller drones are not usually autonomous. See the Starlink alleged incident. Inertial guidance is popular but very expensive to do accurately with laser gyros. I'm surprised there haven't been more "terrain following" systems. There's probab…
> See the Starlink alleged incident.
Ukraine says it happened and Musk does too - is ‘alleged’ needed?
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close combat" .....
And the F-15's design slogan was "Not a pound for air to ground". Guess what it's being used for now?
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Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 steer…
What Scoundreller meant is that if most of the controls are lost, then the few controls remaining could still be used to intentionally destroy the plane as much as possible. For example, the elevator (to control the pitch) might be the last working control, and it could be used to intentionally nosedive the plane after ejection.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#327Earlier 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…
If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have chosen to buy it? Consulting this next page, I count 8 countries besides the US that have taken delivery of F-35s, plus many that have ordered it, but not yet taken delivery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... The UK for example currently has a fleet of 32, and Australia has 50.
Because they are buying USA weapons, not the weapons that fits what their country needs.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/fighter-jet-purchase--...
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close combat" .....
And the F-15's design slogan was "Not a pound for air to ground". Guess what it's being used for now?
Same with the F-16, which started life as a skunkworks project that prioritized dogfighting but is today heavily used for close air support and bombing.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#329An 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.
The real question IMO is whether the 6th generation fighters (Next Generation Air Dominance program in the USA) are making the right design trade offs. They are projected to be bigger, more expensive, and ordered in fewer numbers than even the F-22. Are we better off with fewer but more advanced super weapons, or with many more cheaper weapons? In the era of UA/RU war where few-thousand-dollar drones are spanking mul…
Unfortunately there is no alternative. In order to be relevant in a potential conflict with China around the first island chain, NGAD must have a size and fuel fraction similar to the F-111. It will probably also need a second crew position to manage the workload including controlling "loyal wingman" type disposable drones. There's just no way to do that on the cheap.
Small, cheap drones have been effective in Ukraine because the ranges are so short. The battle space in the South China Sea is completely different.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#330This sounds too ridiculous to be true. I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a gambit to flush out an intelligence leak rather than an inability to find their own $160M plane.
Or a new marketing campaign from Lockheed Martin - 'stealth technology so good, even we can't find it'.
Meanwhile the loony tune demographic has decided that it flew to China on Biden's orders.