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

cnn.com

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

#201

Post by fransje26 »

yellow_lead wrote: post #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.

> I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage [..]

Well, they are doing their tests in production so what else to expect?

https://imgur.com/a/yHM0e5e

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

#202

Post by the__alchemist »

HPsquared wrote: post #121
codyb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session

I wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.

I've never heard of this, but I imagine it would only make sense as a manual override used explicitly for controlled-ejection scenarios. This incident was almost one of those, but turned into an uncontrolled one.

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

#203

Post by Sharlin »

HPsquared wrote: post #121
codyb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session

I wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.

I don't think so. It's a solid rocket motor, there's no modulating such things.

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

#204

Post by dfox »

nacnud wrote: post #169
chasil wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

According to the ejection seat manufacturer [1] there is no minimum height or speed at which the ejection seat can be used, so as long as the aircraft is roughly level then the ejection should be survivable. [1] https://martin-baker.com/ejection-seats/us16e/

The actual report mentions that this was a concern for actually landing the plane (as opposed to touch and go), because there was real possibility that the plane would end up in attitude that can hardly be described as "roughly level".

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

#205

Post by TiredOfLife »

pear01 wrote: post #182
FridayoLeary wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had some pretty advanced anti aircraft systems. Also they are invisible to radar so they were truly surprised attacks coming out of the blue. So yes, it would be.

They said the same thing about the F-117 in 1999. It was shot down by a Soviet era AA. It was said once, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed". The same applies here. Comparing bombing Iran to a conflict with China is delusional, put plainly the capabilities of the aircraft have never actually been tested against a competent peer - when it actually matters.

That F-117 was because it was flying every day for months on the same route at the same time and they lucked out with radar catching the plane during the couple seconds it's bomb doors were open.

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

#206

Post by the__alchemist »

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."

The main times a "0/0" ejection would be expected to be unsurvivable are going really fast (e.g. breaking the mach), and with some combo of high sink rate and high bank.

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

#207

Post by TiredOfLife »

lazide wrote: post #164
haberman wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Iran isn’t really a near peer adversary, however. But I guess that is the F35’s target market? Do you expect it would do as well over Ukraine? Or if there was a spat with China over Taiwan (for example)? It is possible for both things to be true.

Iran runs russian S300 and S400 air defence systems - the best non Nato countries have.

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

#209

Post by foxyv »

freefaler wrote: post #14

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?

That's kind of funny. Most fighter jets have an emergency override for the gear so you can use gravity or maneuvers to drop them to a down and locked position even during hydraulic and electrical failures. I can understand not being able to bring the gear up, but getting the gear down should be very easy.

I wonder if the F-35 has a similar gear override.

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

#210

Post by tempodox »

Apart from the water in the hydraulic system this reads as though there is such a thing as too much automation. The plane being uncontrollable because you cannot convince it it’s not on the ground while it’s actually in the air can only lead to catastrophic results. I’d call that a design bug.
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