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Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.
This is wild. You can't get away from these zoom calls even as an F-35 pilot.
The F-35 is unstable by design and requires constant adjustments by the computer system to fly. So it is actually impossible to "just" turn the computer off and fly manually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah and the tariffs are still there anyway so I don't understand why we aren't following suite and cancelling those orders.
Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.
Definitely not. Ejecting is very risky. If the plane is possibly fixable you would much rather spend the time trying to calmly debug it to get it back to a point where you can land, rather than risk the possibly career ending physical injuries that can come from ejecting.
You also want to maneuver the plane into an area where it’s safer to crash.
The eject button isn’t the safe way out of every situation.
The other pilot situation you brought up isn’t so simple, either. A pilot who panic ejects before attempting to properly evaluate the situation is a risk not only to themselves but to people on the ground. Flying one of these planes is an extremely rare privilege reserved for a select few who have demonstrated their abilities and judgment to an extreme degree. It’s not a job for life and they can’t risk having someone who has demonstrated panicky judgment occupying one of the few spots that could be filled by a long line of very competent candidates.
Who eats the loss under such circumstances? Government or Lockheed Martin or are these 200 million dollar jets insured ?
Where did they get this 200million figure from? Sounds bogus.
("Total acquisition costs" vs the marginal cost of the next plane can result in a more than 2x difference in how much you think the plane costs)
The flyaway cost of buying one more plane is probably a bit under $100m though.
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So as a pilot you can't override the software to stop it from "thinking that the plane is on the ground" mode? Something similar happened recently with A320 when it didn't want to land on an airfield during emergency unless it was flown in a special mode. But F-35 doesn't have that?
"On the ground" = WoW sensors. WoW sensors have been around a long time (see link). And, humans probably should not have any say about that. If humans could override WoW, then the landing gear could be deployed or retracted when it should not and cause a lot of damage due to human error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS
EDIT: Remembered Airbus exists
The F-35 is unstable by design and requires constant adjustments by the computer system to fly. So it is actually impossible to "just" turn the computer off and fly manually.