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A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

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Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#61

Post by decimalenough »

makeitdouble wrote: post #10
jyunwai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475

Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark.. Did more information come up during the time period ? Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these…

The article mentions that "A small backup display was partially functional, but Del Pizzo had to look down to see it".

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#62

Post by stevage »

renewiltord wrote: post #18

The entire story is pretty interesting, actually. When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while Then the military said the reason they had to dem…

> (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU).

I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are.

The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pilot isn't doing a good job of saying "don't worry about me, let's talk about the plane". He keeps chiming in with these questions about the plane crash that seem to come out of nowhere.

He also doesn't even mention that he's concerned that the plane crash might have injured someone else.

Maybe there's more to this that was edited out.

But I'm not sure what the criticism is: she's supposed to stop asking questions about his injuries, and suddenly ask about a possible plane crash that they haven't had any reports of yet? What would that even achieve?

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#64

Post by computerex »

spoonjim wrote: post #14

It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject. Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes…

In other words to you human lives are worth less than F-35s.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#65

Post by decimalenough »

kelnos wrote: post #30
makeitdouble wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark.. Did more information come up during the time period ? Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these…

He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground. He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell t…

He was not a test pilot! The F-35B entered service in 2015, the incident happened in 2023. He was a squadron commander, in charge of training other pilots to fly the plane.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#66

Post by computerex »

kelnos wrote: post #38
tass wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash. It’s similar to why search and rescue don’t bill you after they’re called - they don’t want to add a reason to hesitate and make your problems worse.

> Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash. Maybe, maybe not. But I do expect that if another pilot finds himself in Del Pizzo's situation, they're going to do a more thorough survey of the plane's capabilities before ejecting. Maybe that's the outcome the Marines is looking for, even if it puts their pilots at risk more often.

You have no real reason to believe that, you are pulling the reasons out of your rear. Read the reports, literally the investigations themselves concluded that most pilots would have ejected and that there was no misconduct.

You don’t know what you are talking about.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#67

Post by motorest »

stevage wrote: post #46
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5. Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations bec…

I feel like in previous reporting I'd seen suggestions that the other pilots had lost confidence in him, and that you couldn't be the leader of a squadron if any of the pilots had any doubts. This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.

> This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.

The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility.

One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior.

This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass.

I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#68

Post by pyrale »

maxglute wrote: post #52
pjmlp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. US has killed the allies trust. Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.

My tinfoil hat theory is perversely US probably wants LESS foreign F35 orders. US accounts for 80% of long term F35 procurement (~2500/3100). Capitalization / replacement of airframes across US forces is at attrocious levels. If anything US better off absorbing 100% of next 20 years of LH production, and get full F35 buy years earlier, i.e. by late 2030 instead of projected 2045s sharing with partners. Especially now…

If we follow your logic, they would still want the orders ; they would simply look for ways to avoid fulfilling them.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#69

Post by decimalenough »

gscott wrote: post #39
mmaunder wrote: post #13

I think there are many other moving parts in this story that aren’t public knowledge.

Mostly the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an airplane that's not ready for prime time yet.

The F-35B entered service ten years ago, in 2015. But there have been continuous upgrades to it, and given that the 2023 incident described in the article started with the HUD (apparently) crashing 3 times in a row, there's plenty of room for improvement.

Re: A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

#70

Post by sneak »

gtsop wrote: post #55
sneak wrote: post #22

Maybe this will start to teach people that being a cog in a giant machine that only pretends to care about you (while really doing everything to put you in service to its own strategic goals of mass murder) isn’t really a great life decision. More high profile stories like this would be great, in my view. The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyover…

> I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them. I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this co…

Yeah, it is something different, but this is a story about a guy who dedicated his life to something, and then lost everything he worked for.

I think the question about “is that something anyone should be working for?” is just as important as “was it fair to the one so working?”.

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