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Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

marinecorpstimes.com

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Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#131

Post by Teever »

some_random wrote: post #85
mmooss wrote: post #77

Has this become a politicized, viral, ideology thing? I keep seeing this story pop up in several places, but it doesn't seem like its impact merits the attention. I'm not trolling and please don't bring the politics and ideology here. I am asking factually. (I'm here because I prefer to avoid those things and as a result can be ignorant of them.)

Hating the F-35 in general has been a thing for the Anti-American crowd, mainly driven by western peaceniks who don't see a point in military might (largely depleted now) and the pro-Russia/China/etc crowd who need it to be shit so their fighters can seem competent. As is usual the latter "inform" the former.

Do you think that any criticism of the F-35 project is acceptable?

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#133

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #103
mmooss wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one concept of it is that officers (and NCOs and maybe others) are expected to succeed when the 'book' is insufficient. Following the manual is not nearly enough. Warfare is chaos; unexpected things happen; the manual is one input but people are expected to take initiative and overcome problems with or without it. It's not extra credit, it's a baseline expectation for the job. Also, this person is a colonel,…

This and the fact that he didn't make the slightest attempt to work around it. He had a flyable plane with plenty of fuel, a functioning backup radio and instruments he could have verified primaries against or just switched to, and even failing everything else, he could have verified against what the tower saw on radar for speed, heading, altitude, etc...and then asked the tower to get him to his wingman, and then fo…

The article states he was at 1,900 feet in heavy rain with nonfunctional instument panels. He was there, he's got the experience, and he ejected (which is dangerous too).

Maybe the commandant of the Marines would have liked a better headline, but another way of looking at it is the pilot lost his video server and really needed a functioning screen. I just threw away a video card in exactly the same scenario, and I felt I was troubleshooting far too long as it was. Maybe the commandant wanted the pilot to troubleshoot on the ground? But the computer was not any better after it hit the ground.

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#135

Post by throwaway2037 »

wbl wrote: post #118
master_crab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh. While I understand your point, I think we should also ask ourselves if it’s reasonable for a fighter to cost $110m a pop.

The customer demands the best, because if they do not have it the adversary will have it, and that is unacceptable. Even given that 110 million (assuming current 2024 dollars) is pretty cheap: the Grippen comes in at around that based on Brazilian purchases and is much less capable, being a 1990's design.

Woah, I could not believe this post, until I looked it up. Wiki says: >

That is 150M USD per plane. However, this might include maintenance costs, which would make it different from most F35 purchases that I have seen. Does anyone know any more specific details?

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#136

Post by imglorp »

db48x wrote: post #119
synapsomorphy wrote: post #7

The report criticizes the pilot for ejecting, but also says he did everything by the book (F35 manual), but the book was wrong. And the pilot should've figured that out? Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the plane.

The book said that ejecting is the correct action when the plane is “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“. This simple, straight forward statement turns out to be more ambiguous than they intended. Do you eject if the radio doesn’t change channel? No, that would be silly, even though the plane didn’t respond to your command to change the channel. The plane is still flyable without the radio! Common sense says that y…

Fully agree but as usual it was more complicated than this even. Losing controls and instruments in IMC conditions could mean you're straight and level with many minutes to troubleshoot and try things off book, or maybe another attitude like a graveyard spiral towards the deck with seconds to decide. We might not have all the details to armchair fly it.

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#137

Post by JumpCrisscross »

db48x wrote: post #119
synapsomorphy wrote: post #7

The report criticizes the pilot for ejecting, but also says he did everything by the book (F35 manual), but the book was wrong. And the pilot should've figured that out? Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the plane.

The book said that ejecting is the correct action when the plane is “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“. This simple, straight forward statement turns out to be more ambiguous than they intended. Do you eject if the radio doesn’t change channel? No, that would be silly, even though the plane didn’t respond to your command to change the channel. The plane is still flyable without the radio! Common sense says that y…

> instead of penalizing him

He wasn’t disciplined. But he was penalised. Which strikes me as the right balance given the facts.

There are two kinds of jobs: those where the person’s employment is more important than their work, and those where it isn’t. This is the latter. He’s still getting paid. But he should not have this responsibility. It you’re making excuses after losing a plane when you shouldn’t have, because you were following bad instructions, you should not have an operational command.

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#138

Post by wbl »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #135
wbl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer demands the best, because if they do not have it the adversary will have it, and that is unacceptable. Even given that 110 million (assuming current 2024 dollars) is pretty cheap: the Grippen comes in at around that based on Brazilian purchases and is much less capable, being a 1990's design.

Woah, I could not believe this post, until I looked it up. Wiki says: > That is 150M USD per plane. However, this might include maintenance costs, which would make it different from most F35 purchases that I have seen. Does anyone know any more specific details? Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen

I'm not really sure what maintenance costs over that period in a contract look like: certainly getting them down to a number introduces a bunch more risks for someone (inflation etc), and not having them has other risks. Getting numbers here is sadly hard, and I agree my comparison might be not apples to apples.

Even if the flyaway cost of a Grippen is $50 million the number of planes to accomplish the same mission is a lot more, and some of that number will be lives lost. I'm pretty confident it's within half an order of magnitude of F-35 price.

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#139

Post by db48x »

mmooss wrote: post #77

Has this become a politicized, viral, ideology thing? I keep seeing this story pop up in several places, but it doesn't seem like its impact merits the attention. I'm not trolling and please don't bring the politics and ideology here. I am asking factually. (I'm here because I prefer to avoid those things and as a result can be ignorant of them.)

It’s possible. But note that there has been a lot of criticism of the F–35 since the inception of the program because it’s a multi–role fighter–bomber jack–of–all–trades that tries to satisfy everybody. Partly this is a political problem. Combat airplanes are expensive to design and need political approval. So you have to get every branch of the military to sign on to the project simultaneously, otherwise you’ll never even start. Therefore the thing has to be a ground–attack bomber for the Army, because they want to replace the Warthog. And it needs to be a VTOL for the Navy, so that they don’t have to build a supercarrier for it. And the Marines need X, the Coast Guard wants Y, the Girl Scouts really rely on Z, and on and on and on. And of course it goes without saying that you had better be able to mount any and every weapon system ever designed to the thing.

And it has to be Stealth.

Re: Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying

#140

Post by julianeon »

mmooss wrote: post #77

Has this become a politicized, viral, ideology thing? I keep seeing this story pop up in several places, but it doesn't seem like its impact merits the attention. I'm not trolling and please don't bring the politics and ideology here. I am asking factually. (I'm here because I prefer to avoid those things and as a result can be ignorant of them.)

Something I think about in stories is "how strong is the emotional hook."

This one is great! A guy fighting his controls, weighing the risk to his life, a Top Gun-style commander of a squadron, ejecting (well, an hour) before the plane explodes.

It scores low on the "relevance" scorecard, but it's off the charts in terms of human interest, and I think it's climbing due to the latter.

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