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

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

#471

Post by kjellsbells »

josefresco wrote: post #427
Spooky23 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deg…

> within weeks had significantly degraded Taliban/Al Qaeda's fighting ability

I'm not sure whether it was genuinely degraded (eg, Taliban controlled areas giving up their weaponry and not permitting new stocks) or temporarily interrupted (cash buying a temporary cessation in attacks).

I wasn't there so I can't comment but from 15000 miles away Afghanistan looked a lot like Vietnam to me. Maybe not in the Westmoreland mode of body count, but in the failed attempts to win hearts and minds as a counterinsurgency tactic and the difficulty of crossing a cultural chasm in order to do so (and failing). Plus the propping up of local potential leaders that really had no national legitimacy and doomed attempts to localize the war (aka what Nixon once called Vietnamization).

I'm not saying I could have done any better. Afghanistan was and remains a fiendishly unwelcoming place.

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

#472

Post by wbl »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #440
wbl wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't have planned to let Russia see the radar returns then.

Interesting. My understanding is that the US refused to deliver after Turkey bought S-400 systems from Russia, and will still sell the F-35 to Turkey if they stop. Do the systems share radar returns with mother Russia or what exactly is the concern? https://web.archive.org/web/20240202005500/https://ca.news.y...

Bingo. These systems are not packaged goods, but come with services that depend on getting a lot of the data to improve the system, and it's hard to control how they share. An air defense system is part of a network.

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

#473

Post by Stevvo »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #334
Stevvo wrote: post #4

Several light aircraft can land autonomously at the closest safe airport. Would be useful for fighter jets, where there is a much higher risk of pilot incapacitation.

Bullshit. If you lose the engine at low altitude on climb out, there is no hope of banking much less returning. At that point, it's all about looking for a straight road or level field without power lines +- 30 to 45 degrees of runway heading. For other light aircraft that get themselves into unrecoverable situations like deep stalls where there is sufficient energy, Cirrus SR series have parachutes (CAPS) that reduc…

The context is losing a pilot, not an engine on climb out.

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

#474

Post by sirspacey »

tzs wrote: post #174
WalterBright wrote: post #116

My dad was reprimanded for not following orders ejecting when the engine on his F-86 failed. He did the calculations and figured he could make the field, which he did. They said the pilot was far more valuable than the airplane.

Planes were cheaper then. I wonder if the higher costs of today's planes results in any pressure to try to save planes that in your dad's day would have been considered not worth the risk? An F-86 ranged from $180-$580k in 1950 dollars, depending on the model. That's around $2.4-7.8 million now. That's quite a bit lower than the statistical value of human life that is currently used by the government for regulatory a…

An airman I know shared that it cost $10M + to train a pilot by the time they can run missions, which matches the sources Perplexity found on the question. (1)

The number of years the military gets to keep a trained pilot is limited, so that’s also a factor.

The more significant one is that so few people prove to be capable and willing to be fighter pilots. Replacement is not a given.

1 https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-does-it-cost-the-a...

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

#475

Post by InkCanon »

acyou wrote: post #228

If you're familiar with USA military history, the Americans are (were) famous for not doing things by the book for the right reasons, and letting common sense prevail, as well as incentivizing good outcomes. “A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.” “The reason that the American Navy does so well…

Those quotes we're almost certainly made up jokes and not assessments of the US military. The first appears to come from an Internet image attributing it to "A Russian Document". The second has no known source and has been variously referred to both the US Navy and Air Force.

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

#476

Post by chipdart »

bluGill wrote: post #436
chipdart wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning. The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.

The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis. Of course by winning the lottery I mean win a large jackpot…

> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need.

No, you're missing the whole point. Think about the problem about survivorship bias. Imagine you are at a M&Ms factory. You decide you want to assess what's the color distribution of M&Ms by sampling the colors that come out of the production line. You somehow make the mistake of sampling the production line for the peanut core M&Ms right out of the pipe that produces yellow M&Ms. You sample away and after hours you present your findings: 99.9% of yellow M&Ms have a peanut core. Based on your findings, you proceed to boldly claim that having a yellow core is a critical factor in producing yellow M&Ms. You even go as far as to rationalize it, and claim that yellow represents peanuts, and if anyone wants to create yellw-colored candy they need to start by adding peanut to the mix.

I then alert you to the fact that you made a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality. Your answer:

> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis.

You're sampling M&Ms out of the freakin' peanut M&M production line. If you fix your mistake, you'll get all kinds of M&Ms. You do not fix your mistake with higher sampling. Your mistake is that you're unwittingly filtering out an important subset of the problem domain, and proceeded to do a faulty analysis on the subset you picked.

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

#477

Post by arghwhat »

db48x wrote: post #294
arghwhat wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case the F–35 has three independent displays that can all redundantly display the same information This is not true. The standby display is just a tiny artificial horizon by the pilot's right knee, so when HUD and primary display is out, all you're left with is your speed, altitude and attitude. This cannot in any way or form be considered "the same information" as the primary flight display of an F35B, and…

The standby display is only “tiny” in comparison to the primary flight display, which is a 25” LCD panel. It’s actually the same size as the artificial horizon in most general aviation planes. The information shown on it was not degraded in any way. The accident investigators concluded that the pilot could have and should have relied on it to fly the plane. He just didn’t. Furthermore, it’s not appropriate to compare…

As said elsewhere, it’s not that a plane can be kept in level flight with an artificial horizon that matters. As with the airbus pilots, it’s the surprise - especially when it happens in already stressful situations.

In this case we’re also dealing with an instrument SVTOL landing in terrible weather which cannot be flown with just an artificial horizon, repeated electrical failures in a short timespan, a disbelief that the aircraft correctly reverted from SVTOL to winged flight mode with all relevant instruments to confirm out - as the site says, “extremely challenging cognitive and flight conditions”. And, a manual that says if the aircraft goes out of control at low altitude, you must eject.

At a high altitude cruise it could have been flown just fine by the horizon while things get diagnosed and possibly diverted to a landing suite suitable for the remaining equipment.

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

#478

Post by sznio »

bumby wrote: post #462
ajuc wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The centralised structure, the lack of trust and selfishness, and the improvisation and ignoring the rules are all connected. The less people care about rules - the harsher you have to be to enforce them. The high level officers had to go to the front lines not because foot soldiers were helpless without them. They had to go there because without them the soldiers would ignore the orders to go forward, hide in relati…

> the soldiers would ignore the orders Doesn't that undermine the OP's claim that people in more totalitarian regimes have higher trust in the state and hierarchy?

>And they trust their state [...] a lot less

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

#479

Post by HPsquared »

wkat4242 wrote: post #468
jalla wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major factor in winning the Pacific battles was code breaking the Japanese communications. Doctrine doesn't matter when you know what the enemy is doing or planning.

The problem with code breaking is that you can't benefit from it too much because your enemy will realise you're reading their messages and change their practices. For this reason the allies had to let convoys be hit sometimes, because they couldn't always be too suspiciously at the right place at the right time. Luckily the German confidence in Enigma was so high that their top leaders ignored reports of enigma bein…

Onboard radar (cavity magnetron, later adapted to the microwave oven) was another pivotal technology in the battle of the Atlantic.

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

#480

Post by HPsquared »

bluGill wrote: post #436
chipdart wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning. The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.

The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis. Of course by winning the lottery I mean win a large jackpot…

There must be a name for "wrongly assuming everything is random and variables are independent". Like the opposite of the gambler's fallacy.
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