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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

#211

Post by cjbgkagh »

ux266478 wrote: post #91
meindnoch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did they get this 200million figure from? Sounds bogus.

F-14D unit cost was ~$74 million in 1988. Adjusting for inflation that's ~$202 million in 2025. It's not that unreasonable for an American fighter jet, honestly.

The F-14 is twin engine, 40% more plane and can fly faster. Also the F-14 was considered expensive.

My main disappointment with the F35 is that it could have been a lot cheaper with modern design technology and manufacturing. That and the software is needlessly buggy. I had a friend working on F35 at a time I was working on software quality research, when I discussed the possibility of applying the research to F35 he let me know that bugs were seen as a cash cow and he would be working on bugs on the F35 until he retires. He was right. And now we have stuff like this happening.

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

#212

Post by TiredOfLife »

HPsquared wrote: post #136
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…

Now they've made a lot of them, the cost per unit is actually kinda reasonable as these things go. Still way way more than drones though.

But manned planes don't have to keep thousands of kilometers of fiber optics cable on board.

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

#213

Post by potato3732842 »

Everyone in these comments making quips about software is missing the elephant in the room, where the heck did that water in the hydraulic system come from? Pretty much any hydraulic fluid for outdoor use will suck up a lot of water so as to prevent situations like this so this clearly isn't a teaspoon or even cups of condensation problem.

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

#215

Post by drdo »

keepamovin wrote: post #173
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

It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.

Even if the ejections happened with no fault on your part?

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

#216

Post by shawabawa3 »

keepamovin wrote: post #173
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

It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.

Also isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?

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

#218

Post by fransje26 »

estearum wrote: post #160
shrubble wrote: post #94

If a third of the hydraulic fluid was water, it was like that meme video of the woman who added washer fluid to the car’s oil - no way was that going to work properly.

I'm surprised no one is mentioning this, and the fact the article says this is the second of such incidents... I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it would appear to be a very effective method of sabotage... Simply putting some water in the hydraulic fluid container destined for an F35 is an extremely high risk-adjusted ROI for any saboteurs.

> very effective method of sabotage.

No need for sabotage on the F-35. It's perfectly capable of destroying itself without any third-party interference.

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

#219

Post by pear01 »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #205
pear01 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and they did that because of the same arrogance alluded to in my quote.

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

#220

Post by zhengyi13 »

codyb wrote: post #99
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"

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've been told that ejections are violent enough that pilots can end up permanently shorter. A short bit of searching turned up this case study of two pilots' injuries/outcomes:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9453365/

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