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F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

cnn.com

41–50 of 440 posts

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#41
F-35 is a boondoggle.

$200M for one fighter plane is insane.

If the USA ever had to go to war with this weapon, a huge number of them would be offline at any given time, and every single airframe loss would cause a huge dent in overall combat power.

I don’t understand why our military and political leaders keep trying to buy ridiculously overpriced Swiss Army knife weapons (lots of flexibility but great at nothing) instead of mass producing combat knives (only good for one thing but great at it and lots of them).

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#43
> Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.

I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#44

Switzerland, if they want something they can fly for air policing is forced to buy the F35 at what every price the US feels fit (even though the contract with Lockheed states a fixed price, naive politicians and consultants found out the hard way). Of course the CHF to USD conversion is fix at a shit rate from many years ago and from what I understand there is no way around that because the SNB did the conversion bac…

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Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US can (effectively) shut down F35s remote.y

A scary proposition considering what the US is rapidly becoming

Purchasing F35s is paying tribute to the empire so it doesn't come down on you harder with tariffs and compliance burdens. It's not meant to actually be useful.

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#46
post #42

Article reads like they are still blaming pilot, like what else he/she was supposed to do?!

> It said if the conference call participants had referenced the 2024 maintenance newsletter, “they likely would have advised a planned full stop landing or a controlled ejection instead of a second touch-and-go” that eventually led to the conditions that caused the crash, the report said.

I guess the engineers on the call didn’t get the memo about those pesky TPS reports.

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#48
post #42

Article reads like they are still blaming pilot, like what else he/she was supposed to do?!

Always blame the user...

No downside if you are wrong. The people who actually run complex systems have no political power. If you get away with it then you might be able to avoid expensive changes.

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#49
post #8

This is wild. You can't get away from these zoom calls even as an F-35 pilot.

Am I the only one thinking that it's time for something like an R2D2? Presumably it could get into some crammed spaces and thaw things out of needed. I'm sure it's a stupid idea, BTW, but a fun one )

Re: F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

#50
post #6

Who eats the loss under such circumstances? Government or Lockheed Martin or are these 200 million dollar jets insured ?

The government issues bonds to pay for this and the federal reserve prints money to buy the bonds. Its FREE money!!!

The view that GP seems to subscribe to is that, when you insure something and need to make a claim on that policy, the insurance money is free.

That's not any more true.

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