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

cnn.com

411–420 of 440 posts

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

#411
post #223

The article is somewhat sensationalistic. If you read the actual report you will find out that: The pilot was not part of the conference call! What froze was not hydraulic fluid for actuators (in some hydraulic line), but hydraulic fluid in the shock absorbers. The last paragraph of the article and seems to be missing a few words and reads as the investigators blaming the people directly involved, which is essentiall…

If you want to read the actual report, it's not linked from the CNN article, but it's available here: https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/documents/3_AIB%20Report.... Edit: While CNN says the air force blamed the crash on ice in the hydraulic lines, it's obvious that ice can't be legally culpable. The report actually says: > Additionally, the [Accident Investigation Board] president found, by a preponderance of the ev…

>it's obvious that ice can't be legally culpable

well, why not? we need a good politician to make it illegal for ice to form on an airplane, that would fix the whole thing. also, make it illegal to ever get sick. Checkmate, human illness.

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

#412
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article is somewhat sensationalistic somewhat sensationalistic?! The article clearly tries to give the impression the pilot was on the call: > A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with his fighter jet before he ejected Knowing the quality of media these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it CNN just got it really wrong,…

SOF initiates Conference Hotel procedures, FYI. It's a (rarely used) checklist in their book. SOF is the pilot sitting in the tower to liase with ATC and handle emergencies from an ops perspective.

Prepared By: The Boeing Company Field Service Technical Support (Aircraft Information) Aviation Life Support Systems (Crew Rescue Information) Please contact your local Boeing Field Service Office for additional information or copies of this booklet.

Boeing has an emergency response program called “Conference Hotel” (USAF) or called “Conference X-Ray” (USN/USMC) to provide units with engineering and test pilot expertise during airborne emergencies. This 24 hour a day service is available by calling (866)543-5### toll free or commercial (314) 232-9###. Callers may also contact the regional DSN operator at DSN 693-1### and ask to be connected to the Boeing STL operator at (314) 232-9###. It can also be used overseas via long distance phone lines or MARS radio patches. When the Boeing operator answers, callers must identify themselves and request Conference Hotel or Conference X-Ray assistance. The operator will ask for specific information to identify the appropriate Boeing personal to respond. Conference Hotel or Conference X-Ray is available to assist in airborne emergencies only. Do not utilize this capability as a part of pre-mishap drills.

F/A-18E/F Aircraft Crash Rescue; Fire Fighting Information; January 2006

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

#413

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.

Sabotage vs incompetence is a tricky question to balance. The DoD has undergone a lot of controversial leadership changes recently, and it is entirely likely that people have now been promoted beyond their level of confidence.

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

#414
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a very "Don't do this" kind of situation but you can force the computer to switch to a different law by pulling circuit breakers for certain instruments. Typically though it will happen automatically when the computer detects sensor failures. Changing the law of the aircraft is something you REALLY do not want to do. It's a "The Airplane broke real bad, do that pilot thing!" situation. Especially on a fighter…

Ah is this what the "cobra button" is effectively?

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visceral grok: there’s a reason supporting yourself on crutches versus standing sucks; your spine is meant to bear load.

I guess a taser like electro stimulation targeted to get the right muscles to tense up to ease a bit of pressure on the joints might help

But i have no idea

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a low pressure braking region in the brakes. But brakes can get really hot. Passenger brakes can easily get over the boiling point of water. Keep braking long enough and adding enough heat, and they'll get over the boiling point of brake fluid under pressure. Thing is, brake fluid is incompressible. Brake fluid vapor however is very much so a compressible gas. Even more so: the water in the brake fluid ha…

I've gone down the Sonora grade in a Silverado with 22 year old brake fluid. I wasn't towing, but it was very hot out and in general yes the brakes were hot when I checked at around 4000 feet. I wonder if some YouTuber has done some experiment to see just how bad fluid had to get before a typical driver could notice.

have you considered a career as an F35 pilot? :-)

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

#417
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gives strong "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible" vibes! What?

In the Chernobyl TV series, they think they see a high but (short term) tolerable amount of radiation. It was actually just the upper limit of the measurement hardware and the real value was much higher.

And they're told it's the upper limit of the detectors, but choose to ignore that and take 3.6 as the gospel truth actual value.

It's a mockery of Soviet politics and party loyalty, but many of the errors apply to all bureaucracies.

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

#418
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon first reading the headline I was thinking it was some sort of test flight. Nope, poor guy was just trying to fly and ended up forced into a high-stakes troubleshooting tree while on a conference call, as if there's not enough on your mind in a fighter cockpit. I don't know how many human-manned gens of aircraft are left, but my first inclination is to think a remote-control fallback option wouldn't be out of lin…

Remote control for what? That doesn't really help in the case of a serious mechanical failure. There are probably several more generations of crewed tactical aircraft left. Autonomous flight control software is decades away from being able to handle complex missions and remote piloting can only work when you have secure, reliable, high-bandwidth communication links. The concept of operations for the next few generati…

> Remote control for what? That doesn't really help in the case of a serious mechanical failure.

In my theoretical, the pilot would safely eject as he did here (or possibly before the touch-and-gos) and the remote control would come into play to try and belly land the plane without it simply becoming a fireball immediately after ejection.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve always wondered why weight on wheel modes don’t have more checks, detecting weight on wheels but seeing 150+ Indicated Air speed and RALT is greater then 15ft, maybe issue caution instead of screwing with flight mode.

There's value in simplicity. Every decision that a flight computer makes is based on a leaky abstraction of the world, and it's important to be able to reason about those states without excessive complexity.

If a programmer, engineer, or pilot needs to think about when the aircraft will transition to "on ground" mode, and the answer is "when the weight on wheels sensors say the landing gear is not fully extended", that's simple. You can even extend this to reason about what might happen when the landing gear is not fully extended, or what happens if it does a belly crash-landing with the gear not deployed, or if it hops, etc. Furthermore, it's a perpetual signal, rather than an edge-triggered condition: You don't have to develop and remember and think about a state machine that transitions to the on-ground state, or worry about what happens if the flight computer gets reset, you can check the sensor state at any instant.

Yes, there are a myriad of checks and alternate modes you could do, or information items you could communicate to the pilot - radar altimeters, GPS altimeters, barometric altimeters, indicated airspeed, speed over the ground, weight on wheels, landing gear deployment, accelerometer/gyro/IMU history, stick position, flight model response to control inputs, brake response, ABS wheel speed sensors (if they have those, which I doubt), cameras...the list goes on.

With more data, you can potentially be more accurate if one or more sensors malfunctions. "Aircraft On Ground" could actually mean the aircraft is on the ground, rather than the abstract state that occurs when the weight-on-wheels sensors say the landing gear is not fully extended. But the more complexity you add, the more it gets difficult to understand!

I deal with this all the time - I'm an industrial controls engineer, working with robots and CNCs and assembly equipment rather than aircraft. But the machines still need to reason about the world. It's an important judgement, borne out of years of experience, to decide when you need to have a laser distance sensor or inductive proximity switch that confirms the part is present in the fixture. Sometimes you can reason about it and assert that if the part was in the previous fixture and the machine cycled, it must be in the new fixture, sometimes you need to put together multiple sensors or live information like CNC spindle torque to confirm that you're actually cutting steel. But usually, when you've got an operator or maintenance tech 600 miles away, looking at the machine you programmed 2 years ago, calling on the phone to ask why the machine is stuck on "Step 34: Wait for Part Present in Fixture B, then start CNC job O312" (or conversely, why it's skipping past this check and cutting air if the sensor is covered in swarf) everyone involved in reasoning about this equipment for the next decade would rather it be just a digital part present sensor.

This works in industrial automation where you can demand that the equipment's environment be precisely controlled, I'm less convinced that it will work well in fly-by-wire aircraft or (more pertinent to the average human) in level 3/4 self-driving cars. Simplicity has value, complexity adds cost..but is this cost worth the risk when there's a pilot who now has a thoracic spine fracture or a pedestrian crossing the road? I don't know.

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

#420
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JAS 39 Gripen can land on roads. Might have been a better choice.

Every modern tactical aircraft including the F-35A can land on roads. This isn't a capability unique to the Gripen. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3895003/us-a...

You can, but it will destroy your plane electronics if you can't bring an external cooler fast enough. even with the next gen internal cooler (that won't be in test until 2029, so not installed until like 2035), the jury is still out until it's done.

And Stealth alone is not good enough, not anymore. Radar and optics tech caught up. You still have to load of flares for any CAS or any engagement that will involve fox-2 targeting (which, you know, break your profile and make you visible on old radars), and from what i heard, Thales is confident on its next-gen avionics/optics/radars ability to detect gen5 radar signal, so much so that they clearly focus on future-proofing against EW equipements (that don't yet exist, allegedly).

The future is Stealth+Altitude, or stealth+EW+unmaned, automated drone with similar radar profile, and that's probably when the F35 will probably shine, but until then, i just don't think it's a good plane, not yet.

Also i think fighter planes based on the Growler will probably be better in the future. If a country bought F35 without asking for Growlers, my intuition is that it was a political choice, not an informed/military one (So basically, Australia military, to me, is the only sane country).

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