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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

#421

Post by rightbyte »

pjc50 wrote: post #367
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It fits perfectly if you look at it from a "balls" standpoint, this pilot ejected for whatever by-the-book reason when his electronics were bad and yet the airplane continued for 11 minutes just on autopilot. > How would you expect a pilot that gives up so "easily" to lead other men into a high risk-high reward operation when he gives up himself so easily? If you use an ejection seat, there is also a given high pro…

> Also, the pilot did not "give up", but decided that it is smarter to retreat and save lives instead of going to death. The thing is, millennia of military culture is devoted to training people out of simply avoiding fighting by running away, or even fear of death, because otherwise it can't function and those who run away endanger others by doing so. I'm reminded of Admiral Byng being court-martialled ( https://en.…

The Byng article is interesting.

I have this theory that military officers are mainly evaluated on how many of their soldiers that die or go missing. It is the easiest hard number to make a metric off. Easy to verify. The more soldiers an officer can kill, the better he seems.

Obviously admirals had a harder task since sunk enemy ships is easier to count. And Byng had witnesses from land. He should have sunk 3 or 4 ships, in hind sight.

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

#422

Post by know-how »

Y_Y wrote: post #270
zeusk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Govt. says we're at war. https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-i-chapter...

I feel like terrorism is about to give up and come to the negotiating table though.

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

#423

Post by know-how »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #109
derekp7 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good, except the next pilot facing a potential loss of aircraft will probably hesitate (worrying about getting shafted), and keep trying to recover the craft until it is too late. Then you have a crashed plane, and a dead pilot. People make better decisions when there is precident for a no-fault management style.

That might make sense if you valued the life of a pilot more than an F-35, or even a large number of F-35s, but at the end of the day, that simply isn't true. Sometimes you will save the jet, sometimes you will lose both. Military policy is not "better safe than sorry". There is some number of jets, perhaps less than 1, where it is better to have a dead pilot than an unnecessarily crashed plane.

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

#424

Post by walrushunter »

Aeolun wrote: post #221
hluska wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loss of trust and confidence is huge in military (and adjacent) circles. Many of these roles involve ordering others into situations that are likely fatal. There’s no boilerplate involved. Trust and confidence are immense in command roles, particularly in a role like CO of a trust and evaluation squadron. It’s also important to note that the Marine Corps itself did not lose trust in Colonel Del Pizzo - as per this ar…

I think that’s just to make the shafting a little bit softer. You are still being shafted for valuing your own life over an expensive airplane.

That plane is significantly more valuable to the American people than his life is. That plane cost the entire federal tax bill of 1000 senior software engineers. If he's not willing to risk his life to keep it in the air, he shouldn't be flying it.

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

#425

Post by nradov »

dotancohen wrote: post #419
nradov wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wings were generating lift and not stalled. Changing the flight control mode doesn't imply that the aircraft was in vertical flight.

Going from mode 4 to mode 1 on the F-35B (I don't know about the AV-8 family) has a significant portion of the flight below stall speed. I don't think that we know at what portion of the flight this happened. And that's an insignificant detail in the rest of the post anyway, a nuance that does not invalidate the rest of the points made in the post you are replying to.

We do know at what portion of the flight this happened. It's right there in the report. The airplane was in stable forward flight, not stalled. You did not make any valid points.

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

#426

Post by ARandomerDude »

stavros wrote: post #278
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jet was fine, it kept flying for 64 miles. He probably ejected because there had been a recent osprey crash with causalities and he was scared.

"The jet kept flying for 64 miles" and "the jet was fine" are WILDLY different things.

Yes, for a Cessna or a 737. Not for a modern fighter.

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

#427

Post by josefresco »

Spooky23 wrote: post #383
kjellsbells wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine this is one reason why the current Ukrainian war is so interesting to belligerents other than the Ukrainians themselves. The US is taking copious notes on what modern land wars could look like, how drones can and can't be used in place of conventional air cover, etc. Ditto the other side, eg the North Koreans. One might say, crudely, that US military superiority is based on an overwhelming advantage in mate…

The American military is world class in every respect, but its weakness the by design lack of integration with civil and intelligence functions. Vietnam and Afghanistan are examples of how when faced with overwhelming military might, asymmetric conflict ultimately rules. The anti-colonial movements in India, Ireland and other places underlines that. I think what Ukraine demonstrates is that we collectively don’t real…

> Vietnam and Afghanistan are examples of how when faced with overwhelming military might, asymmetric conflict ultimately rules.

Afghanistan was an evolution in American military strategy. Post 9/11 the Americans did what no one thought was possible - They (using the CIA and then JSOC) infiltrated Afghanistan secretly, forged alliances (bribed) with local militias/tribal leaders and within weeks had significantly degraded Taliban/Al Qaeda's fighting ability.

The world (and Al Qaeda) expected cruises missiles and "death from above". That they got was "death from within AND above". Whether this was a positive development for the US military is up for debate, but it certainly wasn't the traditional "big military pound small military with might" approach until later in the war.

It's the 20+ year long occupation which failed and clearly, like Vietnam or Afghanistan for the Soviets, or Russia's current efforts to destabilize, American patience is shorter than the enemies will to fight.

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

#428

Post by ics »

afruitpie wrote: post #239
ics wrote: post #57

Brief summary and my understanding of why this occurred: - Pilot ejects, survives while losing very expensive plane - The crash is Marine's third in several weeks, the other two having fatalities; leads to a safety stand down across the entire corps - Investigation concludes that ejection was unnecessary and so fault of the crash is on the pilot, however adding that the procedures written were overly broad - Pilot is…

> The crash is Marine's third in several weeks Should be “the Marines’ third.” I don’t mean to be a stickler, but for a moment I thought this one pilot was crashing a plane a week!

I meant to type Marine Corps' but seem to have clipped it before saving, too late now. One pilot crashing thrice in a week would be quite the feat though!

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

#429

Post by walrushunter »

DeathArrow wrote: post #324

So a piece of iron is more important than a human life? They should say so before recruiting pilots.

A 110 million dollar fighter jet is worth an order of magnitude more than a human life, yes. And that doesn't even mention the potential for civilian casualties from the plane crashing.

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

#430

Post by Supermancho »

hgomersall wrote: post #243
Supermancho wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems like a false equivalence. When a ship sinks, It seems that way, but that's a subjective stance. This is during a time when ships were the armies of the time. It's not complicated to understand that 250 men were worth less than a ship for the purposes of late 1700s warfare. Dying for a sinking ship was a heroic thing, in that it was an attempt to hold on to an immense power for their country. How many untold m…

Trained and capable seaman were very valuable. It took many years to train someone in the proper functioning of the ship, and given that many raw recruits were typically whomever was rounded up on the streets of Portsmouth at midnight, the quality of the input varied wildly. I'm fairly confident the British navy had huge difficulty manning their ships properly.

> I'm fairly confident the British navy had huge difficulty manning their ships properly.

"very valuable" compared to a ship? Not so much.

> It took many years to train someone in the proper functioning of the ship

I'm not sure where you get this from. Many duties on ships could be successfully crewed by children^. Crew were commonly pressed into service, in lieu of volunteers and proper enlisted (transferred, et al). Debtors looking for debt-forgiveness, were a particularly fruitful source. Slaves were sometimes used. Training was on the job. Operational sailing circa 1800, wasn't particularly sophisticated. It was danger-prone.

^https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1044940/Diary-18th-...

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