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Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

> “How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” Mace posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?”

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.

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Being a stealth jet doesn’t mean you can’t accommodate this problem when training. The F-35 already has radar reflectors which increase radar signature to obscure stealth properties during peace time, having a beacon on top of that isn’t that absurd.

They absolutely do have beacons, called transponders, similar to what civilian aircraft have. Of course they can be turned off in a military jet. The article says the transponder was not functioning because of the electrical malfunction

It has an SSR transponder, but the electrical problem took that out along with most of the other avionics.

> The investigation report said the F-35′s transponder failed as a result of the electrical malfunction

Reading the article before posting comments could help.

Then it must also not have any secure communications, and is thus a fucking joke.

Secure or not, an enemy can still see that there is a constant stream of RF coming from a patch of sky moving at fighter jet speeds, which might warrant some investigation

I mean, stealth is all very well when nobody's ejected. But shouldn't an ejection trigger some sort of beacon? We probably want to find the pilot, after all.

You'd think the military's budget could stretch to a $300 Garmin InReach.

> We probably want to find the pilot, after all.

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/...

You also don't want the enemy to find the plane (crashed or not, peacetime or not, attended or not).

Yep, and you also don't want your enemy to find the crashed plane before friendly forces have the opportunity to destroy it. If an F-35 crashed over foreign soil, an actively transmitting transponder would be a nightmare scenario for friendly forces that intend to scuttle the remains. Nobody wants another RQ-170 incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine...

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Should I be worried?

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