The Marines lost an F-35 fighter jet this weekend. It didn’t just crash. They couldn’t find it for days. As I write this, the debris field has apparently been found northeast of Charleston. Here’s the story so far.
Per Forbes, the F-35B Lightning II was flying near Charleston, SC on Sunday afternoon when an undescribed “mishap” occurred. The pilot ejected safely after the “mishap,” but then the military couldn’t find the $80 million jet.
How can the Marines lose a fighter jet? The story brings to mind images of Bond villains scooping up unsuspecting military planes from a giant aircraft, but the truth is probably more mundane.
The F-35 is designed to be stealthy, which means that primary radar that reflects off the aircraft skin is of limited use. Beyond that, domestically most air traffic control radars are secondary radars, which track aircraft through use of a transponder. The ATC radar sends a signal and the transponder on the plane sends a reply. For some reason, the transponder on the missing plane was not working. This could be related to the “mishap” that led to the pilot’s decision to part ways with his jet.
A big question in my mind is why the airplane kept flying after the pilot punched out. It isn’t common for military aviators to leave an airplane that isn’t in imminent danger of crashing. We don’t know why the pilot ejected but he probably thought he had no choice.
Having said that, there have been cases of airplanes that stubbornly refused to crash after their pilots left. In one example from the Cold War, a Soviet jet flew 500 miles after its pilot ejected in 1989. The plane ultimately crashed into a house in Belgium, killing one person.
If the autopilot was engaged, the plane would probably either fly its last heading or follow a preprogrammed course until its fuel ran out. We don’t know how much fuel was on board, but the F-35 has a range of about 1,000 miles. With the last known position near the coast, the odds are pretty good that the plane could have ended up in the ocean. If it had, it would have been very difficult to find. Remember Malaysian Flight 370?
The military is pretty tight-lipped, especially when the story is embarrassing, so we may never know the full story of the errant F-35, but we can be thankful that it apparently went down without causing additional damage or loss of life.
please let the pilot be male
please let the pilot be male
please let the pilot be maleReport
Lauren Boebert:
“This is what happens when the military is so woke they allow transponders in jets.”Report
It’s a stealth fighter. You aren’t supposed to be able to find it.Report
The conspiracy theories have begun.
There are some good’uns.Report
I said elsewhere yesterday that I’m willing to make a small wager that the root cause will be a software error. I note just in passing that one of the Marine Corps’ spokespeople has mentioned that possible reasons for the incident included “hardware or software failure”.Report
The CEO of the company in charge of the software has declared that his software had nothing to do with it.
This strikes me as more likely than the “small arms fire” theory that bounced around. (I mean, it’s not *IMPOSSIBLE* to make a shot from 2000 yards away… it’s just that the people capable of making such a shot are exceptionally rare and mostly in Canada).Report
I didn’t say anything about hacked; just an ordinary bug somewhere in the eight million lines of code that run on the F-35. Note that of the F-35 variants, only the F-35B used by the Marines has a software-controlled ejector seat.
Anyone who guarantees that there is no sequence of real-time inputs, including possibly faulty sensors, that will cause the software to fire the ejector seat when it’s not appropriate is a fool.Report
He’s denying that it’s his software at all. Vigorously!
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It never would have occurred to me to consider the company that provided Lockheed Martin with the RTOS and an ADA IDE as the source of a software bug. I’m betting it’s code that runs in application space, or whatever the equivalent is in an F-35.Report
We’ve got a lot of stuff that we used to be good at and we’re not good at it anymore.
It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that it’s true here too.
But a bug in the application space strikes me as the happiest outcome.
Maybe pilot error. Maybe crew error. (I mean, we had one of the Thunderbirds in a field around here a few years back.)Report
Aye. Who would have anticipated the outcome of the first launch of the Boeing Starliner? After the capsule failed to reach the proper orbit, a manual source code inspection found two bugs. The one that caused the orbit problem, and a second, patched in the orbiting capsule, that would have caused the capsule’s destruction when reentry was attempted.Report
Ah, the F-35, the airplane that no one actually wanted and various issues delayed for years, mostly because they decided that having one aircraft that can do everything is a good plan.Report
Good news! It was due to bad weather.
I looked in the story and it said:
So I went to a map of South Carolina and saw where Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion were and looked for the closest city to that and guessed that it was either Manning or Santee or Moncks Corner. So I went to Wunderground and looked up the weather for September 17th for Manning.
Cloudy. High of 79, low of 61. O inches precipitation.Report