371–380 of 440 posts
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This is completely wrong. B2 bombers only dropped the MOAB on the nuclear enrichment sites. Israel used F35s to bomb Iran at will. Iran didn't shoot down a single plane.
They dropped the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), not the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB).
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Of note to readers not familiar with hydraulic fluid, it is hygroscopic: >Passenger safety requires that in commercial airplanes hydraulic actuators be powered by fire-resistant hydraulic fluids. As a downside, such fluids are hygroscopic which means that these tend to accumulate humidity from the environment https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9040/8/4/131
The hygroscopic nature of hydraulic fluid is there for the same reason it is in car brake fluid- it's better to evenly distribute water throughout the fluid, than to have it accumulate in a low point
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The report actually says it could have landed. A week later, another F35 at the same base had the same problem, it landed with its nose gear 6 degrees off center and the pilot barely noticed. Basically, Lockheed Martin engineers told the air force to attempt re-centering with touch-and-go landings, but didn't realize that this could mess with the weight-on-wheels sensors and cause it to switch flight modes.
Not being able to do a touch-and-go without crashing afterwards seems like a significant flaw in the aircraft. Isn't there an arrested-landing equipped version of the F35? Could this same problem happen with a bolter?
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I went to an ejected pilot call when I worked in EMS. Guy was ok but protocol was handle as potential spinal injury. The force of ejecting puts a lot of compression on intervertebral discs and the effect is cumulative so more ejections means more chance of trashing your back.
I'm surprised they don't design the seats such that they pop out two bars under your armpit so that you transfer some of the forces into your shoulder and collar bone instead of just the spine. Same way car seat belts horribly injure people if they let it rest on their stomachs instead of on their hips.
2) Think your shoulders could take it?? It's IIRC ~15g.
I do think they probably could make a gentler ejection mode as the seats are built for the worst case. The lower your airspeed the longer you have to get high enough to clear the tail and thus less acceleration is needed.
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I guess trashing a couple hundred million dollars is a occasionally considered an issue tho looking at how contracts have traditionally been funded you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t
It’s a massive issue - crashes are investigated and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to lose their jobs if they deviate from procedures. A few years back, a Marine Colonel was relieved of a prestigious command after being found to have ejected too early: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...
> 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.
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Also isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?
Not with modern Martin-Baker seats. IIRC since 2000, something like 800 ejections have happened, of which one lead to a fatality, which was caused by improper maintenance to the seat. (Martin-Baker was chastised for not warning maintainers of the specific risks of overtightening certain bolts above printed spec.) When Russians were still flying planes deep over Ukraine, they have something like a 50% fatality rate on…
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The hygroscopic nature of hydraulic fluid is there for the same reason it is in car brake fluid- it's better to evenly distribute water throughout the fluid, than to have it accumulate in a low point
That's actually a really cool way to deal with that problem!
Or if you leave a barrel of hydraulic fluid outside until it is partially water and it's not easy to notice when you are handling it.
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I wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.
When you're chosing to egress because the plane stops to know where it is or where it isn't, would you want it to decide how fast to eject? Chances are that the ejection system won't get reliable data to decide on in these situations.
> 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.
In a good engineering and a safety culture, a death should never be considered the mistake of a couple individuals. Mistakes are always because of a process failing.