91–100 of 440 posts
Who eats the loss under such circumstances? Government or Lockheed Martin or are these 200 million dollar jets insured ?
Where did they get this 200million figure from? Sounds bogus.
So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily with the equipment on board I managed a call to the flight school, who put me in touch with the mechanic. I circled above an airport as he pulled up the maintenance logs, we discussed what I was seeing, he noted that there had been a report of a sensor issue that had been squawked, so we concluded I should feel safe to fly straight home.
At the time it felt insanely cool to be able to be doing that WHILE flying the plane. While an unfortunate outcome for this particular pilot, as an elite pilot, part of me thinks when this cropped up part of him was like: "ahh right, this is why I'm top dog"
So as a pilot you can't override the software to stop it from "thinking that the plane is on the ground" mode? Something similar happened recently with A320 when it didn't want to land on an airfield during emergency unless it was flown in a special mode. But F-35 doesn't have that?
> unless it was flown in a special mode. What fresh hell is that... reboot, jam F8 just as the "Airbus" logo shows up, and then select "Boot in safe mode"?
An Airbus can operate in three modes. With Normal Law, the airplane will refuse to do anything which will stop it from flying. This means the pilot cannot stall the airplane, for example: the computer will automatically correct for it.
With Alternate Law the pilot loses most protections, but the plane will still try to protect against self-destruction. The plane no longer protects against being stalled, but it won't let you rip the wings off.
With Direct Law all bets are off. Controls now map one-to-one to control surfaces, the plane will make no attempt to correct you. All kinds of automatic trimming are lost, you are now essentially flying a Cessna again. The upside is that it no longer relies on potentially broken sensors either: raising the gear while on the ground is usually a really stupid idea - until the "is the plane on the ground" sensors break.
So no, a "Boot in safe mode" isn't as strange as it might sound at first glance. It significantly improves safety during day-to-day operations, while still providing a fallback mechanism during emergencies.
The F-35 is unstable by design and requires constant adjustments by the computer system to fly. So it is actually impossible to "just" turn the computer off and fly manually.
Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.
Ejecting from an airplane is no joke: 18g of force leaves 20-30% with spinal fractures, and ejection seats have an 8% mortality rate[1] It seems to me that continuing flight with inoperative/damaged landing gear while you discuss alternatives with engineers is the safest option. Burn fuel, make a plan, let people on the ground mobilize to help, and eject when you've tried what you can and it truly becomes the safest…
This is wild. You can't get away from these zoom calls even as an F-35 pilot.
I think the call was only 10 minutes long. For 40 minutes the pilot was just waiting for the next available representative.
> 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.
I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that conclusion. The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"
Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.
Ejecting from an airplane is no joke: 18g of force leaves 20-30% with spinal fractures, and ejection seats have an 8% mortality rate[1] It seems to me that continuing flight with inoperative/damaged landing gear while you discuss alternatives with engineers is the safest option. Burn fuel, make a plan, let people on the ground mobilize to help, and eject when you've tried what you can and it truly becomes the safest…
Its the last resort, lesser of 2 evils situation, not some cool trick hollywood may make you believe.