Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying
marinecorpstimes.com
marinecorpstimes.com
Yes, probably. I suspect you're lacking context on the sophistication and comprehensiveness of their training.
yes, he didn't do anything by the book, but the command still suffered a great deal of embarrassment and loss. there's nothing dishonorable but it's normal to rotate him out of leadership.
https://www.twz.com/the-bizarre-story-of-how-a-navy-f-14-sho...
So, if there is any position where simply “following the book” isn’t adequate to keep one’s job, it kind of makes sense that his was that position.
I'm trying to read between the lines one this one. He's a Colonel and in command. How much flying does he do normally? Is he just keeping up flying to get the flight pay? Just up there flying because he can? Or was this a regularly scheduled training mission?
This wouldn't be the first case of someone flying beyond their actual role. They are never found at fault -- their career is just derailed.
It's staffed by very experienced pilots, often of rank and age past the point where people would normally actually fly planes, whose job is to fly the planes, figure out how they are supposed to be flown, and teach this to everyone else.
On the other hand, there are way too many instances of officer shenanigans only punished by snubbing them on their career path. "he followed procedure" combined with firing gives off these vibes.
Call me cynical, but if there is a lack of trust, it because of a lack of transparency in the past.
I would imagine you update the book on the ground, not mid flight during the emergency.
It wouldn't surprise me if the test pilots serving under him did not respect or trust his judgement, and this is what led to his firing rather than some top-down directive.
google 'for loss of trust and confidence in his ability military' and look at the news tab, every embarrassment to a military group gets thrown that bone.
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 article he was offered follow-on orders of his choice.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...
Flying cutting edge military jets isn't exactly a human right.
In this case, the pilot is still flying. They are just not leading as prestigious and high risk command, because there are doubts that they suitable. There is no new cost, they are just rotating the roster. he will fly elsewhere and a different pilot will take that role.
It is only a loss if you double down thinking that he was the best or only fit for that role.
I think Ukraine is lots of evidence that of how important it is to have air superiority, even at extreme cost. If Russia had gained air superiority as many expected, the war would have been over shortly.
https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
That is 150M USD per plane. However, this might include maintenance costs, which would make it different from most F35 purchases that I have seen. Does anyone know any more specific details?
Even if the flyaway cost of a Grippen is $50 million the number of planes to accomplish the same mission is a lot more, and some of that number will be lives lost. I'm pretty confident it's within half an order of magnitude of F-35 price.
Edit: 5th generation jets are just incredibly expensive. I can't imagine how mad Turkey was when the US bilked them for their F35s, keeping both the jets and the billions Turkey paid.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240202005500/https://ca.news.y...
The cardinal rule for an in-flight emergency is that if the plane is flying, you're OK in that moment, there's no need to panic.
He was fired because as a test pilot, he panicked after the HUD malfunctioned, and ejected from an aircraft with an hour's worth of fuel that was not losing altitude or experiencing any mechanical failures, and did not make even an attempt to verify his primary instruments against the backup secondaries, or to use a functioning backup radio.
He could have used the backup radio to contact the tower to verify his altitude, speed, heading, rate of climb, etc and then get vectored back to reunite with his wingman ,and followed his wingman in for a landing.
Imagine just being struck by lightning, loosing main displays, and being at 1200 feet. All on top of flying in a plane with a reputation for electronic failures.
I'd be concerned too that the plane was about to freak out. 1200 ft isn't far.
In fact, the root of the word "seasoned" means "prepared" and he clearly was not prepared for the events leading to this incident. That through no fault of his own, hence he was not formally disciplined.
The Marines expect someone of his position to perform above and beyond their training. He didn't, so he lost that position with no formal discipline.
That's not quite right. The pilot doesn't have an outside oracle who tells them the truth if their aircraft is beyond saving. They have to make that decision under stressful circumstances and having only partial information about the world. Making that decision, to declare their own previously safe aircraft no longer salvageable in their own head is where the hesitation might happen.
I'm not saying that this was a bad call. The General has much much more information than I do. It is entirely possible that this was so egregious a case, and the plane was so obviously flyable that firing the pilot was the correct decision. I don't know.
What I'm saying is that you can't just say "oh they won't hesitate, because their plane will be unsafe". Because the hesitation (if it happens) happens before they decide that their aircraft is unsafe. Instead they will spend possibly valuable seconds thinking through if they truly have tried everything. If they are perhaps mistaken. If they maybe will lose their jobs because there was something they haven't seen clearly enough, but in the cold harsh light of an investigation will mean that they made a mistake.
Pilots are already heavily biassed against ejections. It is embarrassing, even if it was justified. It is a deviation from the routine. It is potentially deadly, potentially ruinous to their ability to continue flying on health grounds. This might be one more factor now which will bias them against ejecting. I hope the General made the right call.
I do, but perhaps this was meant to be "commensurate".
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.
Or so I was told by a USN pilot.
Shit can and will happen. The only real thing questionable is the damn aircraft.
Do you know how many things have gone wrong with the F-35? [0] It was a shit situation, the book was (unsurprisingly) crap, and you are potentially in a very expensive death trap. The guy choose to live. Honestly, his real mistake may just to have been willing to fly a F-35 in the first place.
[0] https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jet...
We don't know why he was fired, but the logical conclusion is that it was this incident.
And, being the military (and this also happens in big orgs as well), the people above him can fire hime from a post without much issues.
Even if it had been after he got the role I'm not sure it should matter. I'd expect validating and updating "the book" to be a carefully planned and methodical activity, with alternate approaches tested during simulated failure or failures induced under controlled conditions.
Would they really expect a pilot who encounters a failure not under such conditions to decide it is a great opportunity to try out non-book approaches to see how the work?
"Del Pizzo’s “decision to eject was ultimately inappropriate, because commanded flight inputs were in-progress at the time of ejection, standby flight instrumentation was providing accurate data, and the [jet’s] backup radio was, at least partially, functional. Furthermore, the aircraft continued to fly for an extended period after ejection.”"
He lost contact with the tower and his wingman, and did not try to use his backup radio.
He lost some primary instruments - the HUD - and did not try to use backup instruments.
If he'd contacted his wingman and the tower he could have verified at least some of his instruments, or followed his wingman in for a landing.
The whole thing is absurd. The guy lost his cool, freaked out, and punched out - and is trying to cover his ass by using the cover-their-ass section of the aircraft manual.
You don't "call your wingman" in that situation, you decide and you do. He didn't believe the plane was flyable, and in those conditions I don't think he had enough time or separation from the ground to make sure.
No, if you read the report, he was on final and, for whatever reason, instead of continuing the landing procedure he decided to change the aircraft mode to vertical landing and this caused the helmet to glitch.
95. Approaching the final approach fix, the MFL made the radio call
to convert the flight to Mode 4 (STOVL) and slow the flight to 150
knots in preparation for the 100-knot slow landing. This was the last
radio call Swede 12 heard from Swede 11. [Encl (17), (19)]
98. MP reported his HMD flickered shortly after converting. Near
simultaneously, a momentary caution displayed in his HMD that he
perceived to be engine-related and then the HMD flickered out. While
MP considered missed approach options, the HMD came back. [Encl (17)]
19. Primary factors contributing to the mishap can be traced back to
event that occurred at 13:32:05. This event induced
failures of both primary radios, the TACAN, and
the ILS. [FF 100, 101, 126-129]
20. Additionally, it is probable that the HMD and PCDs were not
operational for at least three distinct periods. [FF 98, 103, 104,
106, 114, 132-136, 141]Also, this is a STOVL aircraft, and I suspect the procedures are completely different.
Apparently accessing the backup radio is difficult, and even more difficult without the primary flight displays being operational - which his were not.
He wasn't in visual range of his wingman, who was following him.
So the whole "contact your wingman and follow them in for landing" thing seems like a stretch.
What does "at least partially functional" even mean?
Either a radio lets you communicate on the frequency you need or it doesn't.
But he had already been a qualified test pilot--you have to have had that experience for a number of years before you will even be considered for a post like the CO of VMX-1. So this is not a case of an ordinary line pilot doing things by the book but the book was wrong. This is a case of a test pilot, while he did everything by the book, taking an action that cast some doubt on his judgment as a test pilot. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me. My father was a Navy test pilot, and had plenty of stories to tell that were a lot more hair-raising than what seems to have happened here, and he brought those planes back. The one time he did have to eject from a test aircraft, it was doing uncommanded 360 degree rolls and was not responding to flight controls at all, and he got out just in time before it crashed.
> The report said Del Pizzo followed the F-35B manual’s recommendations for ejecting from an out-of-control jet but also criticized the manual’s definition of out-of-control as too broad.
It sounds like the displays blacked out, but radios and flight controls still worked. This is still definitely an aircraft that can land safely.
Maybe if the screens are out the pilot couldn’t rely on that?
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 leaves you without a lot of control.
Whether you can limp along with such backup system depends entirely on what is going on at the time the primary flight displays go dark. In a fighter jet, that display may in some cases just tell you what angle and velocity you are going to die at. Furthermore, in challenging conditions you might have to make a decision very quickly and might not have time tuning yourself into the standby display and its degraded information.
This type of degraded backups exist in many aircrafts - you don't want the pilot of an Airbus you're in to be confronted with the plane dropping to mechanical law, or even direct law if taking off or landing, even if these modes are technically flyable and well documented.
Furthermore, it’s not appropriate to compare the standby instruments with the alternate control law of Airbus airliners. I don't know if the F–35 has anything comparable with Airbus’s alternate law or direct law, but if it does it wasn’t activated during this incident. The pilot did not experience any loss of control of the aircraft.
But I agree with you that a lot of incidents involving Airbus aircraft have been related to alternate law. Pilots get caught out by it all the time, apparently.
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.
Which is all you need. You have the same information in any other aircraft, most only have airspeed and altimeter info. An attitude indicator is of great help when you're flying through clouds so you can check that you're actually flying in level flight - it is pretty weird to find out you're actually flying banked but because you have coordinated flight you don't feel it.
You can keep an otherwise fully functional aircraft in stable level flight using a horizon, but that’s neither interesting nor relevant. This was not a lightweight aircraft cruising above the clouds with nothing around it.
Even if he fucked up severely and needlessly burned an insanely expensive asset at the cost of tax payers, that’s a fuckup from an individual actually qualified for and skilled at flying the thing, unlike everyone at this site.
The whole lot of us would probably have the plane go up in flames before we even got into it.
He only had “basically working” comms, which seems to suggest that it too was degraded, and the instruments referred to as being available is just the tiny artificial horizon display in front of his right knee.
This is not a prop plane. It's a heavy jet which should be almost stalling to land safely. Tower guys can roughly guide you on the course and speed but there would be at least 1-2 seconds lag between the reading, reading and acting. I wouldn't say what you can "definitely land safely" in these conditions.
Seen on the lower right part of the center console: https://img.militaryaerospace.com/files/base/ebm/mae/image/2...
The plane is just a poorly designed death trap.
He also lost part of his displays during conditions with little sight.
So imo the question should be if it would have been possible for him to check if the airplane is really out of control, in a way that it wouldn't cost his life if it was.
He was the commander of VMX-1. They effectively write the book.
"And the pilot should've figured that out?"
Yes. That's the job.
A big factor in this seems to be his overall lack of experience in the F-35 and not flying enough hours to really stay proficient. Highly recommend this analysis by two former naval aviators: https://www.youtube.com/live/g8PBA7k6vP8?si=o2DDBX1XqmM_x1gR
Warfare is chaos; unexpected things happen; the manual is one input but people are expected to take initiative and overcome problems with or without it. It's not extra credit, it's a baseline expectation for the job. Also, this person is a colonel, not a second lieutenant.
He had a flyable plane with plenty of fuel, a functioning backup radio and instruments he could have verified primaries against or just switched to, and even failing everything else, he could have verified against what the tower saw on radar for speed, heading, altitude, etc...and then asked the tower to get him to his wingman, and then followed his wingman in.
Instead he decided "HUD freaking out, that means I can't trust my instruments, that means I'm in immediate danger! PUNCH OUT!"
Maybe the commandant of the Marines would have liked a better headline, but another way of looking at it is the pilot lost his video server and really needed a functioning screen. I just threw away a video card in exactly the same scenario, and I felt I was troubleshooting far too long as it was. Maybe the commandant wanted the pilot to troubleshoot on the ground? But the computer was not any better after it hit the ground.
This is incorrect. He lost his HUD and the primary flight display, but not the standby instruments. Those are intended as a backup in case the other systems fail, and they did their job and kept operating. You can't use them to fire missiles or keep track of enemy anti–air radar systems, but you can use them to fly the plane, avoid terrain, and land safely. And he didn’t even check to see if they were still working before he ejected.
Isn’t that indicative of what an absolute shitshow of a plane it is?
Different situation, obviously, but at least sometimes immediate ejection is the correct response to "HUD freakout at low altitude in bad weather."
(It was Brian Udell, the details are a little more complicated than I remembered but still. https://www.ejectionsite.com/insaddle/insaddle.htm)
You don't need to be at war for a soldier to prepare for it.
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-i-chapter...
I'm not sure I agree though -- it was a shitty situation all around, missed approach, go around, instrument only conditions, lightning strike that took out the HMD and most of the cockpit displays. That's a real shitshow in a completely fly by wire plane.
In this case the pilot changed from mode 4 (SVTOL for landing) to mode 1 (normal flight) when the ILS system went offline. But because the HUD blinked on and off several times, he didn’t realize that the plane was actually transitioning back to mode 1. He didn’t wait long enough for it to finish, and without his HUD he thought that the plane was unresponsive, so he ejected. But the plane was still flyable, even if it had actually been stuck in mode 4! You probably can’t dogfight in mode 4, but you can certainly fly to your alternate airport and land.
So instead of penalizing him for following his training to the letter, they changed the manual to state that ejecting is the correct course of action if the plane is unresponsive to the pilot’s “pitch, roll, or yaw commands” specifically.
He wasn’t disciplined. But he was penalised. Which strikes me as the right balance given the facts.
There are two kinds of jobs: those where the person’s employment is more important than their work, and those where it isn’t. This is the latter. He’s still getting paid. But he should not have this responsibility. It you’re making excuses after losing a plane when you shouldn’t have, because you were following bad instructions, you should not have an operational command.
After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?
It’s a new plane!
Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering. That’s not appropriate for a mission critical role.
Huh, is that a specific thing for military pilots? Just watched the latest MentourPilot's video and there the french equivalent of the FAA found that the pilots were told to improvise too much, and should have followed the procedures better.
Isn't this a catch22 with hindsight based judgement?
When things really matter the foremost objective is never "follow the rules so your ass is covered", it's to not have a situation where that ass covering is relevant in the first place. Outcomes matter more than preforming according to the book.
The F-35B has been operational with the US Marie Corps since June 2015.
Ultimately pilots are humans, being asked to make split second decisions. A certain percent of the time decisions are going to be bad. That is why we have procedures. In pretty much every other field we recognize that. Ignoring that fact is incompetence on the part of military command.
There are of course situations that cannot be covered by procedures, however this doesn't seem like one of them.
The priority here is combat effectiveness, not job security for pilots.
On top of all this, they found that he didn't follow the correct procedures that did exist!
That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.
Ejecting could save you but send the plane crashing into a city, and that's just one of many scenarios.
If he was flying with instruments in bad weather and felt that he could not trust those instruments that seems like a good reason to eject since you can easily end up in the ground or a mountain. I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not. Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems. That said, there was a real failure that seems to have happened at the worst possible times.
At the end of the day, the bar is set really high for someone in this position.
It seems that a highly qualified marine test pilot is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the airplane's systems
Those 50 hours can be misleading as to his experience with the aircraft.
Pilot switched mode back to normal flight because it was the switch to landing mode is what caused his HUD and PFD to turn off in the first place.
But I served three years in the Swedish army and wasn’t taught to obediently follow command when it makes no sense. I was taught to disobey illegal orders.
I can’t imagine a fighter pilot has so little authority over their actions like you describe.
Aviators are not expected to be checklist-executing drones who "follow protocol." They are expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their aircraft's systems so that they know when to follow procedure, what the procedures are designed to do, and what to do when they have a situation where the existing procedures don't apply or conflict with each other.
In my old community, it was a commonplace occurrence when requalifying in the simulator for instructors to deliberately insert situations involving multiple malfunctions whose emergency procedures conflicted with each other, such that blindly "following protocol" would cause you to die.
The procedures are never finished. They’ll be updated as needed for as long as anyone flies the airplane. The final revision could be a century or more from now, long after the airplane is out of active service. The updates it receives in that time depend on what accidents happen during that time, as well as how the systems change during that time.
First flown in 2006. Introduced 2016.
“ intended to replace a wide range of existing fighter, strike, and ground attack aircraft …”
One aircraft for the navy, marines and air force would save money was the thinking I imagine.
I remember the competition for the design many year ago (there was a Nova tv program) but haven’t been following too closely but it’s had issues filling all the roles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program
B52 projected to last till 2050
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/10/newest-f-35-f-15ex-contr...
It's disappointing to see people post lazy, low-effort comments like this without bothering to do even basic fact checking.
There is no aircraft in history that did not have hiccups during procurement. Even "ol reliable" platforms like the Blackhawk or the F-16 had much worse reputations when they were first introduced.
And without propulsion, they are just flying rocks. No gliding.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when you lose the engine, but unless there is a serious issue, you still have control over the flight surfaces.
Vertical flight mode wouldn't be usable in a situation like this. They only transition to vertical flight at low altitude with the landing site in sight.
Pilots eject when the wings are level. If he was facing the possibility of severe uncontrolled roll (or believed he was) then ejecting now before the roll was a good call. At least so far as his wife and children are concerned.
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.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure that flight controls are directly tied to thrust, because it would be the engine that also drives the hydraulic system.
It's like that even on passenger jets. If you lose both engines, you also lose hydraulics (aside from whatever little hydraulic pressure the ram air turbine provides). I would not expect there to be a ram air turbine on a fighter jet, which would mean complete engine failure = complete loss of hydraulics = complete loss of flight controls.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/e...
The aerodynamic properties make both high speeds possible while retaining maneuverability at low speeds tend to lend themselves well to decent (for a jet) glide performance. What they trade off is stability.
See "Aviation Disasters" on TV.
Which makes sense. It was subjective and that is ok.
“As a commander you serve at the pleasure of the commandant,” Del Pizzo said. “It was an absolute privilege to have the opportunity to lead the Marines, sailors and civilians of VMX-1.”
also
“he made the decision to relieve the commanding officer of [VMX-1], due to the unique mission of VMX-1.”
Its always hard to be a the last man in the hierarchy of a big budget project run by idiots.
They always need somebody to fire to 'cya'.
I guess the USMC expected him to try until the very last moment to recover the aircraft.
“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 in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.”
So heavily simplifying things and with 20/20 hindsight this pilot essentially didn't do the right thing, even if through no fault of their own, and apparently in the US Navy you don't get rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This is what keeping incentives aligned looks like.
> The jet had flown for 11 minutes and 21 seconds after Del Pizzo’s ejection, slowly climbing as high as 9,300 feet.
After about 11 minutes, the report said, the jet banked down and started descending to its right, clipping the treetops of a forest along the way before crashing. The report said no one was injured by the crash, but it did damage several trees and crops. The $100 million jet was shredded into pieces and a total loss.
If a car drove at highway speed for 3 minutes without crashing after the driver jumped out, you'd be impressed too.
The question to ask in this case is "would the pilot's presence in the cockpit have made a difference to the possible outcome?".
In my reading of the article the jet could be controlled, and the pilot had access to the backup displays and communication systems. The plane flying such a long distance means the pilot reacted poorly under pressure and did the bare minimum as per the unclear procedures, before catering to his own safety. While not wrong according to the unclear procedure, you want more from someone commanding a squadron.
The pilot could have stayed put at the very least to attempt to mitigate the impact (pun intended) of the eventual crash, if not to actually land the plane using the backup instruments before ejecting to safety. That plane crash could have easily been a tragedy.
I had the same problem in the auto industry. Some times the test drivers were accused of imagining things or sabotaging when the problem could not be recreated.
Even in the follow-up anecdote from the auto industry, a car test driver has vastly different profile than this pilot. They inherently work with untested vehicles and software, where the manual was not yet written. This pilot just followed the broadest interpretation of an existing manual.
He "technically" did well to eject only because the manual was too vague. But at the very least "I could have done more but technically didn't have to" is not what you're looking for in a squadron commander. Which is why he's still allowed to fly (he follows the manual) but not trusted with more than that (because those extras are not in the manual).
Tbf, the article describes them as "basically functioning". As someone with avionics experience, there's a lot of wiggle room in the word "basically" and I'd want to know the details about the remaining functionality before drawing any hard conclusions.
The Navy's contractors should sort out the glitches in their expensive space junk or build UAVs instead. What if this was a real combat scenario instead of an exercise, where the pilot didn't get to call 911 and risked getting captured by ISIS or some other maniacs?
How would that pilot know for certain the aircraft was still flyable? That it technically was at that moment is absolutely not the point, and is only known retrospectively after analysis.
I unfortunately don't have anything to confirm that, but I wouldn't be surprised that the fact that it was an F35 didn't help that man's case, as in losing a cheaper piece of equipment would have been less impactful.
There is 0 people in the US Navy that did service in the 2WW. There has been multiple generations. There is no way there is that much of institutional inertia, if the quote was correct at the time.
Punnishing failure disincentives a lot of things. It has drawbacks.
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?
Yes, maybe he was at low altitude during the descent and found himself feeling in peril but the optics sure doesn't look good when it went on for 11 minutes.
> 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 probability that you will never be capable of flying a fighter jet afterwards, so it also takes quite some balls to make the decision to use it.
Also, the pilot did not "give up", but decided that it is smarter to retreat and save lives instead of going to death. In a a high risk-high reward situation, I strongly prefer hyperrational risk calculators (in opposite to risk avoiders - the common person in society) over hypermasculine risk takers - but I'm a nerd.
So, the only explanation that I have is that the military wants to bully around and show macho behavior.
Ye that goes without saying.
With attrition trench warfare being in fashion again I expect this to get worse.
Soldiers need to feel they are perpetrators, not victims.
It 'takes balls' to wait out shell after shell for the one with your name on it. A conservative risk reward analysis would suggest bailing. People that don't understand the odds of waiting or fragging are preferrable.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byng) and the famous line "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time pour encourager les autres"; the phrase "pour encourager les autres" has entered English to refer to any punishment which is intended to have a strong behavioral effect on the non-punished members of the same class. There will definitely be an element of that here. This guy is being punished conspicuously to remind other pilots that ejecting is a last resort.
> In a a high risk-high reward situation, I strongly prefer hyperrational risk calculators (in opposite to risk avoiders - the common person in society) over hypermasculine risk takers - but I'm a nerd.
There are no such "hyperrational risk calculators", you just mean "someone who would make the same decision as me in this situation".
> the military wants to bully around and show macho behavior
Well, yes, that's kind of intrinsic to the nature of an organization which exists to project force.
No, I don't mean that.
1. I'm not the kind of person who believes that their own judgement is the best and most rational one.
2. I am very convinced these people do exist. For example look at rationalism websites and forums: there you might find some of such people.
---
> Well, yes, that's kind of intrinsic to the nature of an organization which exists to project force.
I don't think so: you can project force either by
a) gore violence ("hyper-masculinity") or
b) intellectual supremacy
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.
My problem with this take is that humans are very poor risk estimators, and it gets worse as the probability of risk gets lower. I'm willing to bet that even if he made the "right" decision to stay with the craft, he wouldn't have been able to accurately calculate the risk in an after-action-report, even with the benefit of lower stress and an abundance of time.
Indeed few people have this rare capability, that's why I explicitly named them this way ("hyperrational risk calculators").
As I wrote in my parallel answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115831 I do believe that on rationalism websites or forums, it's quite plausible that some of this breed of people hangs around.
---
> I’m somewhat skeptical that they exist [...] in the numbers needed to fill pilot slots.
I think we agree with this weaker statement that I created by using the ellipsis. But, as I wrote,
> In a a high risk-high reward situation, I strongly prefer hyperrational risk calculators (in opposite to risk avoiders - the common person in society) over hypermasculine risk takers
I'd strongly prefer these people - assuming such a choice exists.
People who consider themselves to be "hyper rational" are just obnoxious wankers. I don't take them seriously or trust their judgment.
Personally I wouldn't want to be led by someone that rather hit the ground in a ball of fire than risk the embarrassment of ejecting.
A pilot that eject has at least shown that he has the balls to lose...
Fighter jets fall out of the sky quite often. I don't get why it suddenly is such a big deal with F35. It seems like some hardware fanboyism.
Perhaps the military point of view is they would rather have a leader who takes more risky action and attempts to win the fight for the team rather than one who only prioritizes their personal survival.
I guess it is somewhat futile to reason about the pilot since we don't really know how bad the situation appeared to him. Like, we don't know where he is on the scale, except that we know he is not suicidal.
So just the fact that it continued flying isn't really enough to justify that it was a wrong decision. Like all aviation matters it requires a comprehensive analysis.
Maybe Korea, where there were Chinese and Russian-trained and sourced jets?
The US airforce cannot survive the attrition rate that a war with Russia or China would bring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_of_the...
That's 7,500 aircraft lost over 5.25 million sorties, or 14 lost per 1,000 sorties.
The loss rate was 5 times higher in Korea and 25 times higher in WW2.
And as the other comment mentioned, most were helicopters (5,600) and UAV's (1,000). Only 3,400 fixed wing, manned aircraft were lost.
Nuclear exchange by ICBM would destroy most aircraft, their crews, their maintenance crews, and the factories for the replacement. There will be no dogfights.
For Balkans, there were minimal air activities for Serbian air force. They were up against NATO (not only US) and all of the little opposition they had were using air defence systems which managed to down a couple of Nato air Jets. I wouldn't describe each of these two as significant in any meaningful way. Just to give example on scale. In Balkans, serbian air force had like a dozen modern air craft against ~ 1000 NATO aircrafts.
One can say that the it was a little bit different in Korea and Vietnam but this was much closer to 1945 than nowadays.
Vietnam in particular saw the cost of allowing the SAC/bomber mafia from dominating strategy. The Soviet and Vietnamese pilots were pretty badly mauling the US Air Force and Navy, whose armament and tactics were built around bomber interception.
> One can say that the it was a little bit different in Korea and Vietnam but this was much closer to 1945 than nowadays.
Korean war started almost five years after the end of WWII and Vietnam war is 50 years old now. The two wars in Balkans and Iraq is much relevant in experience compared to the earlier two. And while the soviets provided the Vietnamese with AAA and aircrafts, there were little soviets engagement in the actual fighting (regarding the air).
We've been at 'peace' for too long.
This is making an example for the rest of the team to get ready for things to 'get real'.
One might say, crudely, that US military superiority is based on an overwhelming advantage in materiel, plus troops skilled in the use of advanced weaponry (so that one soldier has the impact of 10, say).
That might work in large scale massed battle against a mid range opponent, but is untested against a true industrial peer like China, and has been shown not to work especially well against highly dispersed, low tech adversaries such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
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 realize that Ukraine is a segment of a larger conflict. The long term influence campaign by the Russians to destabilize NATO and the US has been phenomenally successful. They have managed a brilliant operation in the UK and US to sow chaos internally.
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.
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.
But… 20 years of grind. Asymmetric always wins.
"They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up off the deck of ship; they'd fly all around ... and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realized what I was watching were human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they'd fall in the water."
The Russians have difficulty adapting their tactics on the field. Reviewing the successes of the US battles must be quite different than throwing bodies at a front line.
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 being broken, they thought it literally impossible.
I'm not sure how this played out in the Japanese war. But the point remains. You can't use signals intelligence too much unless it's literally ending the war in a couple of days.
But they aren't. They just added Iranian drones to their arsenal.
Is not fighting a near peer since WWII 80 years ago, really hate using rubbish to prove a point
- 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 offered to lead VMX-1 after all this; key part of the responsibility is improving procedures
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!
So there is serious electrical malfunction and the pilot loses communication and also some of his displays multiple times.
In hindsight we know it wasn't that serious and the plane could have kept flying.
But how can the pilot figure that out, while flying the aircraft? One needs to evaluate decisions based on the information available at the time the decision was made.
>It was the Marines’ third aviation crash in six weeks, following the August crash of an F/A-18D Hornet in southern California, which killed its pilot, and an MV-22 Osprey crash in Australia that killed three Marines.
Looking out the window.
Just to be clear, the pilot had the backup instruments available and functional, and the plane could be substantially controlled (i.e. could be pointed in the pilot's desired direction).
People are using feelings rather than facts to judge this pilot. So they do it differently then they would for example a police or SWAT team member shooting the wrong person under pressure. The same actions would have been judged very differently if chance hadn't kept that plane from crashing into a populated area.
If his plane went towards the ground with mach 1 at 1900 feet impact would occur in 1.5 seconds.
The pilot left that to chance and chance made it that nobody was killed. At the very least you can recognize this was a failure of the pilot especially when the plane was realistically flyable, and backup instruments were available, in line with his training. In line with that overly broad definition of "uncontrolled flight" he ignored the backup instruments and punched out before attempting alternatives.
> a malfunctioning plane
The report called the aircraft flyable. The manual being overly broad on what's an "out-of-controlled flight" means he was not derelict in his duties but ejecting from a flyable aircraft (and leaving it to crash at the whims of randomness) was a mistake.
> If his plane went towards the ground with mach 1 at 1900 feet impact would occur in 1.5 seconds
But it wasn't, he wasn't in the middle of the crash, some instruments malfunctioned, the backups were working (they're there to be used in case the primary fails or else the designers would have bothered to put backups). The plane flew another 64 miles which took substantially more than 1.5s.
The "well technically" argument works less as the stakes go higher, and even less when dealing with a squadron commander. The plane flew, the instruments worked, and the pilots are trained for this. The report recognizes this.
(And if you're going the speed of sound on a landing approach, something has already gone way off the rails).
The standby instruments were working and falling back to them in the event of a primary flight display failure is part of the training
> Despite the investigation finding Del Pizzo followed the proper procedures and was not derelict in his duties,
But you say he did not follow proper procedure. Is the article wrong about that?
And no need to worry about loosing talented people due to circumstances outside of their control (and preventing other from even consideringto join) - they attract bad luck and that is more dangerous in the long term!
The hypothesis is "the captain was to blame". If this is true but you reject it (type I error) you will probably loose another ship. If this is false but you reject it (type II error) you need to find another qualified captain (which, depending on the field might or might not be a problem).
My guess is that there are more pilots/captains trained that planes/ships.
The line between luck and skill is blurry. The captain's job is to avoid the preconditions for failure. Maybe that means a different route, maybe that means scheduling such that you're awake for the sketchy stuff. Yes, all of this is subjective and has tradeoffs, that's why it's skilled work people take years to develop the skills for.
Sure. He was at 1900 feet and in a climb when he ejected. I can understand it’s nerve wrecking to trust your backup instruments in this situation, but it’s not like ejecting is a completely safe zero risk option either. That jet could have come down anywhere.
This coverage does a poor job of conveying whether he could tell that the craft was climbing, though evidently it was. A crucial detail in his situation was whether the vehicle was responding to his control directions and whether its trajectory was upward, hence without an immediate threat of crash. There is a faint indication that he should have known that his aircraft was in fact climbing and that, as a consequence, he was going to have time to problem solve.
It sounds like the group he led is tasked with establishing the limits of and determining the norms for the operation of the various craft they fly. This suggests that a greater spirit of discovery and exploration of the letter of the rules was in order than he happened to exhibit on that occasion.
He had that command taken away, not his flight privileges, because the shortcoming he exhibited was indicative of his personal unsuitability for exploring the limits of his vehicle and the policies for its operation — in short for doing that particular, exceedingly demanding job. He gets his choice of other posts, but not continuing that crucial and complicated role for which he evidently did not have the right stuff. No shame. Peter Principle avoided. Everybody did the right thing, including his commanders.
They said the pilot was far more valuable than the airplane.
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 analysis, which is $13.1 million.
An F-35 is something like $80-$110 million. Even if we add the cost of training for the pilot, which Google tells me is $10.1 million for an F-35, to the statistical life value we only get $23.2 million which is only 21-29% of the cost of the plane.
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cd2a1348e...
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...
1. know the optimal glide speed. Since the jet was traveling much faster than that, he pulled up the nose to trade excess speed for altitude.
2. trim the airplane for optimal gliding
3. push the nose down to maintain optimal glide speed
4. work the math on altitude, air pressure and sink rate to get distance traveled
This was long before calculators (1950s) so he had to know the formulae and the figures. I read one of his certification tests for flying jets, and you had to know an awful lot.
When I was at Boeing I was told that one of the engineering marvels on a jet was the mechanical computer that managed the engine, reducing it to a single lever for the pilot.
P.S. ejection seats were new in those days, with bugs that could injure or kill the pilot. He figured it was safer to glide the bird in.
Cirrus flight instruction uses the military statistic that historically military aviators have had a really strong negative bias to ejection during training compared to in combat. Part of the rationale was that of course ejecting during combat is easy to save face, whereas in training far more pilots would try to save a rapidly eroding flight. The lesson for Cirrus pilots was that CAPS is there to save your life, and this attitude of "but I can make it" really is just a strong predictor for killing yourself in an otherwise saveable situation.
Here, it is acknowledged he followed the procedures, but there's an implication that he could have reasoned his way into realizing it wasn't as serious as he thought. Well, to acknowledge he "did everything right," but it wasn't right enough, and therefore negatively impact his career, doesn't bode well for other pilots who'll find themselves in his situation. Of course the one asterisk is to all of this is if you fundamentally believe that at this particular job all this reasoning should inherently not apply.
Acknowledging this to be the case might help people to understand why they're demanding perfection even if it's risky for the pilots.
Reading between the lines, he flinched, and while that was in line with the manual, the manual wasn't good enough, and as someone below said: the position from which he was dismissed was one where they evaluate, criticize and extend the manual. Ejecting too soon wasn't a failure of due diligence, but it disqualified him from a position where "in line with the manual" isn't good enough.
I'm not trolling and please don't bring the politics and ideology here. I am asking factually. (I'm here because I prefer to avoid those things and as a result can be ignorant of them.)
This is speculation on what the future will be, not our current reality. In the War in Ukraine, reliance on cheap drones has more to do neither sides ability to achieve air superiority due to AA systems. Introduce stealth and/or effective SEAD tactics (suppression of enemy air defense) into that mix, and the situation changes very quickly. For a recent example, see the Israeli strikes on Iranian air defense systems.
The future is more likely to be hybrid, where drones, and "loyal wingman" data-linked with manned systems are used to get the best of both worlds. The F35's sensor suite and data-link capability are designed for that.
Does it have the agency to fire at will or does it need to confirm all attacks?
Edit: i guess in high EW environments where you need fast delivery
Your rant is almost as inspiring as the Palantir CEO's flag waving speeches where he rants against the anti-America crowd who question why their tax dollars are flowing to his company.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine and the European countries prioritized defense, the F-35 seems to win every competitive bid.
I hadn't noticed that at all. Could you give some examples?
What I've seen is budget hawks on all sides, meme-following mobs, competing defense contractors, and anyone politician looking for an easy target of 'corruption', etc.
There are legitimate criticisms, including of the one-design-for-all concept, which we can see is not being repeated; sustainment issues, including maintenance; readiness; relevance in the era of missiles with longer range than F-35 fuel tanks, pushing bases and carriers out of range.
On the other hand, it they would have made it look as sleek and beautiful as the F22...
That's a separate argument on specifically who should be blamed here or whether blame was properly assigned. But we can't just crash our most expensive jet and throw our hands up saying "whelp, that sucks".
And it has to be Stealth.
The US Navy does not operate the VTOL variant: they don't need to. The US Marines and the British and Japanese navies operate the VTOL variant (because they don't have supercarriers).
Not to say that there weren't many issues with the program, but it seems like a lot of those requirements panned out.
This one is great! A guy fighting his controls, weighing the risk to his life, a Top Gun-style commander of a squadron, ejecting (well, an hour) before the plane explodes.
It scores low on the "relevance" scorecard, but it's off the charts in terms of human interest, and I think it's climbing due to the latter.
Lots of tweets to the effect of "how tf do you lose a $100m fighter jet??"
Any story with an explanation would draw attention
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...
There are two interesting additions in this version:
1.) A discussion on spatial disorientation.
2.) Comments by the Colonel’s wife, who discussed how they uprooted their lives in Virginia (almost a year after the crash) after being assured that the crash would not impact his command. Three months after getting to Yuma, there was an “oops sorry” and they removed the Colonel from command. However, they did offer him his choice of a next assignment.
Modern practices are different, there is now a lot more emphasis in not needlessly risking lives, especially when abandoning vessels is done by the book. But dying in the line of duty is still weirdly seen as good leadership - call it bravery, honor, commitment to the cause, gumption, etc. We mostly praise those who do, rarely criticize them for maybe sacrificing themselves and others unnecessarily. But I would think we wouldn't threaten people who don't put themselves at unreasonable risk with career consequences anymore. I guess this ejection is an example of modern marines acting with 18th century principles.
P.S. The historical record on Royal Navy's informal code of conduct in the 18th century is a bit limited. I think what I say is not disputed by many historians, but there is some room for debate.
Fighting for a cause, on the other hand, generally requires that people sacrifice themselves. If no one is willing to die, then the fight is very unlikely to be successful. Being willing to die (and sometimes dying) has the ability meaningful change the outcome.
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 millions have died to defend a parcel of land? The value of trying to save a ship is contextual, equating to defending your country, even in the face of insurmountable odds.
"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-...
This is an interesting read on the general question of manning the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2cf9a3d-daf2-446b-88c8-41...
They needed to know how to do relatively straightforward tasks (many of which were unpleasant) when directed. Same as any other structured military force or industrial line. It was not sophisticated for the vast majority of sailors. Skills varied to be sure.
Debating soft terms like skillful, sophistication, and value will not definitively answer the question of a calculation. We look to other signals, like culture. The culture was such that the ships (including weaponry and anything else worth salvage) were more valuable than manpower by virtue of the historical figure sentiments. I have not seen a compelling contradiction.
The more difficult question is when a ship is on the brink of sinking. Then, having people on board can make a difference: the extra weight can make it sink, or actions by those people (pumping, plugging holes, closing doors) can prevent it from sinking.
For the captain, the difficult thing is to figure out whether a ship is destined to sink or not.
The captain being the last person off a sinking ship is a naval version of "lead from the front". The captain going down with the ship is a probable consequence of following that ideal.
This sounds like a potent critique of 5th generation fighters but it's quite not. The F-35 is meant to be lost - it can't even use standard Link 16 because it reveals too much of it's presence to enemy fighters.
The idea of it lacking an active tracking beacon isn't really that surprising to me. There is no "Find My" for fighter jets, sorry.
You'd think the military's budget could stretch to a $300 Garmin InReach.
You don't want the enemy to find the pilot.
That's why pilots carry these, which they can use when it's operationally safe for them to do so.
https://gdmissionsystems.com/products/communications/radios/...
Should I be worried?
Reading the article before posting comments could help.
Too many to respond to individually.
Please, especially if one is criticizing someone else's judgment, one should show the good judgment of getting one's facts straight.
>"a. Discussion: MP experienced a failure of COM-A and COM-B. The Backup Radio was still functional; however, with a PCD failure, MP would have been unable to change frequencies via the PCD. The F-35B has radio knobs as an alternative; however, they are notoriously unreliable. Most pilots resort solely to changing frequencies via the PCD. This increases pilot workload and decreases situational awareness because pilots must access this feature via a drop-down menu which covers half of one portal. Changing frequencies this way is especially difficult in high workload situations such as when flying formation and/or in instrument meteorological conditions. The F-35 is also equipped with a voice activated communication control system that has not functioned since 30P05 software was installed."
Wow. So, when losing main coms, the pilot could not easily change to the backup radio in a timely and safe manner, to, say, tell his wingman to take the lead. He couldn't use voice commands, which should have been there, but oh well. The PCB was down, but even if up it is cumbersome to access the backup radio. The knobs weren't "reliable", per report. It is legit hard to understand how this is possible in such an advanced and costly aircraft. I'd think that the Commandant of the USMC has bigger fish to fry than the pilot. Oh, and I'd love to see the recommendation but it is redacted.
It’s not like he stopped being a pilot if I understand it right.
The plane situation sounds shitty in the extreme, and an F-35’s electronics fritzing sounds, um, real bad, and sadly, not shocking, but the Marines’ elan and doctrine at its core involves dealing with stuff like this successfully, in the field, with little support. I imagine that the people around him felt fairly similarly, and so, end of story. He won’t be moved up to general staff, he’ll get some fine deployments until he decides to head out, which given his age, he’s opted out of a couple times, it’s fine, and he’ll be fine. Just, unfortunately, like you say, he wasn’t Chuck Yeager when it came down to it.
I think us software engineers should remember the same :P
Also: in air refueling and carriers mean the plane may not be anywhere near a safe airport.
On 4 July 1989, a pilotless MiG-23 jet fighter of the Soviet Air Forces crashed into a house in Bellegem, near Kortrijk, Belgium, killing one person. The pilot had ejected over an hour earlier near Kołobrzeg, Poland, after experiencing technical problems, but the aircraft continued flying for around 900 km (600 mi) before running out of fuel and crashing into the ground.
They can just make another plane. Yes, it's 100 million dollars. But when you print dollars and the entire western world serves to make these jets (2% of GDP), the pilots are going to be the limiting factor. I think every aspect of the plane's production can simply be fairly rapidly scaled up, except for the pilots and the forgings.
What also hurts is damaging the plane's reputation. That is costly beyond calculation.
https://www.codeonemagazine.com/images/media/Front_Office_01...
it might not be right or fair, but that's not necessarily a disqualified in the military.
(if you haven't seen this amazing talk, you should definitely give it a watch)
Edit: I will clarify. USAF multirole fighters (And the A-10) train to, and execute CAS in combat regularly. Even bombers do from time-to-time.
So glad I didn't join the military, and instead work in an industry where leadership doesn't make bad decisions oh wait.
Anyway, it's a good thing it's super easy to replace elite, highly decorated pilots oh wait.
If you've never been a military pilot, I don't think you can give a qualified opinion on this incident.
Any aerospace engineer could credibly comment on the avionics. Any pilot could comment on basic emergency procedure compliance. Any ATC could comment on route planning.
But, no one aside from another military pilot could judge the totality of that military pilot's judgment on that day.
The same would apply to subjects like emergency trauma, combat, firefighting, an all professional athletic competitions.
This is central to the claim about the airworthiness of the aircraft. (And FWIW, aerospace engineer is generally not the same as someone who works on, or designs, avionics. The latter are typically more aligned with electrical engineering.)
>no one aside from another military pilot could judge the totality of that military pilot's judgment on that day.
I think this is being needlessly constrained. I would take the opinion of someone familiar with the specific comm/nav avionics of the F35 than, say, a military pilot that has never flown that airframe. I may even prefer an avionics tech’s opinion over that of the pilot, depending on the pilots technical knowledge. Given what we know about human psychology and memory, I don't even know if that specific pilot can give the most accurate representation of what was going on in the cockpit. A pilot can give great insight into crossing aspects, like human factors engineering, but they are not always the best at understanding the full system. It’s like when you talk to a high-level race car driver and find out they don’t actually know much about automotive engineering; sometimes their job doesn’t actually require that to perform at a high level.
I do agree with your overall sentiment though. All it takes is coming across a HN thread about something you're actually well-versed in to understand these types of forums are saturated with comments with more confidence than sense.
You learn that "the hard way" during even basic private pilot training. Black boxes are essential.
You're also correct on an EE background for avionics. Ask me how I know. ;)
Likely the same way I do ;-)
This was a cry for help.
He told me they are more likely to hire you if you have a bunch of speeding tickets.
'nuff said.
If the plane would fly towards the ground with mach 1 it would have hit it in 1.5 seconds.
What sucks for the pilot is he followed procedure and at the time had no way of knowing whether the craft would remain stable or totally brick and spiral any second (rendering a procedural ejection even more dangerous).
> What sucks for the pilot is he followed procedure
He was the commander. He defines those procedures.
And still decided that the successful outcome of the flight was in doubt based on the condition of the airframe and systems failures, in the middle of the situation. He survived. Working as intended, as far as I'm concerned.
> Over the next 25 years, Del Pizzo became an experienced combat pilot with more than 2,800 hours in the cockpit, 32 hours of which were in the F-35B.
It's the other way around, he has relatively little experience in this particular airframe.
Offered command of VMX-1
Months pass
Crash plane
Months pass
Take command of VMX-1
Months pass
Loses command of VMX-1
A rocket blasting off from the nose, meanwhile, is not subject to the same constraints, and will force the nose down enough that the plane can obviously, in at least a few conditions, recover controlled flight.
There's no shortage of "planes that can no longer maintain flight" according to all sorts of standards continuing to do so - a few that come to mind were a B-36 that had several engines fail and several others unable to make full rated power, was unable to hold altitude, and so the crew bailed out. The plane somehow managed another 200 miles before crashing.
There was that F-15 that lost a wing from a midair collision, and the pilot landed safely - because neither the pilot nor the instructor could tell exactly what was missing, and the escaping fuel vapor hid the extent of the damage from other planes in the flight. After landing with one wing, even the manufacturer didn't believe that the plane could fly in that condition.
You have to make what is, often, a split second decision based on incomplete information, and after the Air Force lost a wave of pilots trying to save aircraft that could not be saved, the training switched around to "When in doubt, eject."
Anyway, it's pretty easy to quarterback it from after the fact, but a highly trained pilot decided, based on everything he knew, that the plane couldn't be saved, ejected, and survived. Yes, there are consequences to that action, but if he stayed with it and was wrong, there would be far more terminal consequences.
And it was truly a soft landing - the plane's engine was still running after coming to a stop, and the aircraft was returned to service!
The decision to relieve him was made with the benefit of having much more data and time to make a decision available to them than the pilot had.
Imagine if someone accidentally fired a tomahawk missile in South Carolina for some reason by procedure.
The operator had 10 minutes to cancel but instead acted prematurely.
I dont blame someone if they were to get scared and bail, but I also dont blame the marines if they dont want people like that flying their 110 million dollar jets.