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

Post by adastra22 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #107

efitz wrote: 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 approx…

Post by adastra22 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

pear01 wrote: post #178

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-…

Do you have any reason to attribute this to the fact they were F-35s? For comparison, how many jets were lost during "shock and awe"? Israel operates with impunity in Iran all the time, often on the ground. I'm not sure the fact they used F-35s is actually relevant here but if you have a source on that it would be interesting to read. Given the state of Iran it is hard to imagine the same could not be achieved with a…

Post by SteveNuts » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

gchadwick wrote: post #146

svieira wrote: post #127

> But those attempts failed to recenter the nose wheel and resulted in both the left and right main landing gears freezing up and not being able to extend fully to attempt an actual landing. > At that point, the F-35’s sensors indicated it was on the ground and the jet’s computer systems transitioned to “automated ground-operation mode,” the report said. And there wasn't a way to override that? I get that "manual mod…

Potentially it happened so quickly the pilot had no way to respond before they lost control of the aircraft and had to hit the eject? Still you'd hope transitions between major operation modes could have some manual confirmation. Is there some essential reason the aircraft has to automatically transition to 'automated ground operation mode' when it thinks landing is complete? Could you not just expect the pilot to pu…

Post by ahartmetz » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

megaloblasto wrote: post #155

crote wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbus is fully fly-by-wire. Without some kind of computer intervention, nothing would be stopping an accidental bang against the flight stick from causing a maneuver violent enough to rip the wings off. An Airbus can operate in three modes. With Normal Law, the airplane will refuse to do anything which will stop it from flying. This means the pilot cannot stall the airplane, for example: the computer will automatica…

How does a pilot switch between the three modes? Just switches on the dash?

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

petertodd wrote: post #104

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"

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.