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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

#201

Post by zeusk »

llm_trw wrote: post #147
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,…

I wasn't aware we were at war.

US Govt. says we're at war.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-i-chapter...

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

#202

Post by datavirtue »

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.

Yeah, PR and politics was going sideways in light of having all those crashes stacking up on their record. Someone needed a write-off.

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

#203

Post by kamaal »

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.

>>Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the plane.

Its always hard to be a the last man in the hierarchy of a big budget project run by idiots.

They always need somebody to fire to 'cya'.

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

#204

Post by YZF »

bsimpson wrote: post #194
bawolff wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, penalising people for making mistakes where procedures are bad tends to cover up root causes and causes more problems in the long term. After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?

As a civilian, I would have expected that if there's anywhere where you're supposed to follow protocol even if it means expensive mistakes happen, it's the Marines. My mental model of the military, and especially the Marines, is that it's an organization that values discipline and prioritizes following the chain of command. That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.

A pilot is expected to follow procedure when that's called for but ultimately has full responsibility and can make any call they want. Procedure is never going to cover the range of scenarios you can run against and there's no time to reach out to the chain of command when something goes wrong.

Ejecting could save you but send the plane crashing into a city, and that's just one of many scenarios.

If he was flying with instruments in bad weather and felt that he could not trust those instruments that seems like a good reason to eject since you can easily end up in the ground or a mountain. I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not. Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems. That said, there was a real failure that seems to have happened at the worst possible times.

At the end of the day, the bar is set really high for someone in this position.

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

#205

Post by datavirtue »

gm3dmo wrote: post #196
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, becaus…

> It’s a new plane! First flown in 2006. Introduced 2016.

This project needs scrapped. They tried to make it everything for everyone. Not practical. No danger of retiring the stalwarts anytime soon.

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

#206

Post by not_a_bot_4sho »

neilv wrote: post #87

There's too many comments here making assertions that seem to be based on misreading the article. Too many to respond to individually. Please, especially if one is criticizing someone else's judgment, one should show the good judgment of getting one's facts straight.

When articles like this are posted, I'm always surprised to learn the majority of HN commenters are pilots.

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

#207

Post by datavirtue »

Teever wrote: post #126
KennyBlanken wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because he was not fired for ejecting from an unsafe aircraft, which is what you're claiming would be the situation where the pilot would hesitate. He was fired because the General didn't feel he'd shown the judgement and skill commiserate with his station. The cardinal rule for an in-flight emergency is that if the plane is flying, you're OK in that moment, there's no need to panic. He was fired because as a tes…

kinda makes you wonder about his opinion on the overall reliability of the F-35 if he made that call.

This.

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

#208

Post by db48x »

bawolff wrote: post #188
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, becaus…

I disagree, penalising people for making mistakes where procedures are bad tends to cover up root causes and causes more problems in the long term. After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?

That’s true if it’s the same organization doing both things. In the case of aircraft accidents, we deliberately separate out the investigators from everyone else precisely to avoid that problem. The investigators make recommendations for actions that should be taken to prevent future incidents of the same type. Firing the pilot doesn’t accomplish that, so the investigators didn’t recommend it. That doesn’t mean that firing the pilot is inappropriate though, only that doing that wouldn’t prevent future accidents of this type.

The procedures are never finished. They’ll be updated as needed for as long as anyone flies the airplane. The final revision could be a century or more from now, long after the airplane is out of active service. The updates it receives in that time depend on what accidents happen during that time, as well as how the systems change during that time.

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

#209

Post by left-struck »

echoangle wrote: post #11
talldayo wrote: post #3

> “How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” Mace posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?” This sounds like a potent critique of 5th generation fighters but it's quite not. The F-35 is meant to be lost - it can't even use standard Link 16 because it reveals too much of it's presence to enemy fighters. The idea of it lackin…

Being a stealth jet doesn’t mean you can’t accommodate this problem when training. The F-35 already has radar reflectors which increase radar signature to obscure stealth properties during peace time, having a beacon on top of that isn’t that absurd.

They absolutely do have beacons, called transponders, similar to what civilian aircraft have. Of course they can be turned off in a military jet. The article says the transponder was not functioning because of the electrical malfunction

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

#210

Post by Gud »

bsimpson wrote: post #194
bawolff wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, penalising people for making mistakes where procedures are bad tends to cover up root causes and causes more problems in the long term. After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?

As a civilian, I would have expected that if there's anywhere where you're supposed to follow protocol even if it means expensive mistakes happen, it's the Marines. My mental model of the military, and especially the Marines, is that it's an organization that values discipline and prioritizes following the chain of command. That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.

I don’t know about the US marines,

But I served three years in the Swedish army and wasn’t taught to obediently follow command when it makes no sense. I was taught to disobey illegal orders.

I can’t imagine a fighter pilot has so little authority over their actions like you describe.

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