The report criticizes the pilot for ejecting, but also says he did everything by the book (F35 manual), but the book was wrong. And the pilot should've figured that out? Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the 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.
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!
The F-35B has been operational with the US Marie Corps since June 2015.
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.
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.
And without propulsion, they are just flying rocks. No gliding.
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...
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.
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.
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!"
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)
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Or so I was told by a USN pilot.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
We don't know why he was fired, but the logical conclusion is that it was this incident.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
What does "at least partially functional" even mean?
Either a radio lets you communicate on the frequency you need or it doesn't.
I would imagine you update the book on the ground, not mid flight during the emergency.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes, probably. I suspect you're lacking context on the sophistication and comprehensiveness of their training.
https://www.twz.com/the-bizarre-story-of-how-a-navy-f-14-sho...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The plane is just a poorly designed death trap.
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.
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.
Seen on the lower right part of the center console: https://img.militaryaerospace.com/files/base/ebm/mae/image/2...
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.”
I guess the USMC expected him to try until the very last moment to recover the aircraft.
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'.
See "Aviation Disasters" on TV.