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

cnn.com

101–110 of 440 posts

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

#101
post #24
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when the Danish Airforce use F35s.

Which still makes Greenland safe. If neither side can get off the ground or convince their planes that they're in the air.

You understand that the Danish Airforce is Greenland's Airforce right? The Danish military is the official military of Greenland with an explicit agreement between the home rule parliament and the Danish Defence. Other than that all Greenlanders are danish citizens and are the danish state is obligated to defend them.

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

#102

These planes are huge pieces of shit. No country should be spending money buying these from the US / Lockheed Martin.

What should they be buying instead? The other available multi-role fighters that would all get blown to pieces by an F-35 before they knew what hit them?

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

#103

Very different scenario, but flying my puddle jumper one of the first times after getting my license, once I took off from an airport in Connecticut and was about to cross a large body of water, my exhaust temperatures spiked really, really high, essentially indicating the engine was seconds from melting. But it didn't. So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily wi…

This kind of stuff happens all the time. Especially if you ignore a controller instruction. They'll have a number for you.

But really there's a ton of small, unmanned airfields (some in peoples backyards!) that have a number you can call to operate things like the runway papi lights. Call to order a burger to go. Or just call to talk to Fred, the owner, to see how his day was.

As long as you can safely operate the aircraft, in the pattern, there's nothing stopping you from using your cell or your radio or starlink to contact ground. Just always make sure you're in communication with any air traffic controllers operating in that space.

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

#104

> 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.

I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that conclusion. The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"

Ejections are pretty rough, and occasionally career or even life ending. So there would be a lot of pressure on the engineers to try to avoid it. Plus, this plane is very expensive. The cost is multiple times the average lifetime earnings of a typical person. It's not entirely wrong to say that they were attempting to save the life's work of multiple people.

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

#105

> 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.

“I vibe coded that part, but all the tests passed”

How do you think they wrote the tests? ;)

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

#106
post #8

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

I'd pay a lot of money for a zoom premium version that has a real eject button.

Especially if it connects to the chairs of other participants.

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

#107
post #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) i…

The Air Force's F-35A variant has an "average" flyaway cost of $82.5 million for the jet's 15th, 16th and 17th production lots.

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/10/newest-f-35-f-15ex-contr...

The F-35 base model is around $80 million, rising to the highest known price of $109 million per unit for the F-35B vertical takeoff and landing variant.

And then there's this:

"The flyaway cost for the F-15EX Eagle II is approximately $90 million for each aircraft in the program’s second production lot, about $7.5 million more than the newest price for an F-35A"

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay a lot of money for a zoom premium version that has a real eject button.

Especially if it connects to the chairs of other participants.

Randomly

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

#109

But why was there water in the hydraulic system in the first place?

[flagged]

Cold War era planes also had a lot of problems. The YouTube channel “not a pound for air to ground” has some great content about planes from that era, and reliability was sometimes absurdly poor.

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

#110
post #8

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

I think the call was only 10 minutes long. For 40 minutes the pilot was just waiting for the next available representative.

First he had to wait for the other engineers to update product on their Jira tickets.
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