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

Post by lazide » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

RankingMember wrote: post #78

Molitor5901 wrote: post #25

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.

Upon first reading the headline I was thinking it was some sort of test flight. Nope, poor guy was just trying to fly and ended up forced into a high-stakes troubleshooting tree while on a conference call, as if there's not enough on your mind in a fighter cockpit. I don't know how many human-manned gens of aircraft are left, but my first inclination is to think a remote-control fallback option wouldn't be out of lin…

Post by estearum » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

4gotunameagain wrote: post #13

preisschild wrote: post #3

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

[flagged]

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #36

4gotunameagain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydraulic brake fluid is glycol ether based and hygroscopic. Planes usually use mineral based fluids which are not, but heck if I know what the F-35 uses.

Quoting ChatGPT (and after a quick sanity check), The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter uses a specialized hydraulic fluid that’s based on a synthetic ester formulation, not a petroleum-based fluid. Specifically, it uses phosphate ester–based fire-resistant hydraulic fluid (commonly in the MIL-PRF-83282 or newer MIL-PRF-87257 class). Apparently the older phosphate-ester based hydraulic fluids were hygroscopic but I'm not sur…

Post by lostmsu » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #137

scottLobster wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure about that? You should look at the F-35's performance in Israeli hands in their recent strikes on Iran.

For me, that was a moment when I realized that the received wisdom about military things can be just completely wrong. I had considered myself to be reasonably informed about the F-35, and how "everyone knows" it's a boondoggle. I think this started with a long-form article I read in 2013, "How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane": https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-…

Post by nacnud » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #122

airstrike wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I imagine that ejecting at certain phases of these two attempts would not be survivable. "The pilot then tried two “touch and go” landings, where the plane briefly lands, to try to straighten out the jammed nose gear, the report said."