If you're familiar with USA military history, the Americans are (were) famous for not doing things by the book for the right reasons, and letting common sense prevail, as well as incentivizing good outcomes.
“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.
That quote was Russian observations on their securing valuable technical information, but lamenting on their inability to overcome their capability gap through spying due to changes in tactics of their "main adversary". In WW2, a major factor for the US Naval success in the Pacific was a change in attack doctrine. Aircraft would attack relentlessly from multiple directions, overwhelming the Japanese defenses. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, when Australian and US pilots mauled a Japanese supply convoy with Bristol Beaufighter aircraft. In the battle, aircraft fake a torpedo run, the ships changed course to align with the aircraft and minimize the attack surface, then they were strafed with the four 20 mm cannons. The air campaign in the Pacific was much more vicious and effective than Europe. One of the pilots quoted
"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.
The major factor in winning the Pacific battles was code breaking the Japanese communications. Doctrine doesn't matter when you know what the enemy is doing or planning.
The problem with code breaking is that you can't benefit from it too much because your enemy will realise you're reading their messages and change their practices.
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.
Onboard radar (cavity magnetron, later adapted to the microwave oven) was another pivotal technology in the battle of the Atlantic.
That is crazy reductive to the point of ignorance. Doctrine does matter. You might know what your enemy is doing but if you fight wrong, even with foreknowledge, you will not win.
For one important example, the battle of Midway was a close thing even with the intelligence they had. Execution matters.
It's probably also in contrast to their previous adversary, the Germans.
In my opinion, the Russians are quite tactically adaptive. The current war has seen tit-for-tat adaptation between both sides. The Russians don't/can't invest resources in not losing personnel. It's not a priority for them.
> In my opinion, the Russians are quite tactically adaptive.
But they aren't. They just added Iranian drones to their arsenal.
The war evolves every day... Russia has upgraded those Iranian drones themselves many times, including just this week introducing a variant with a thermobaric warhead. There is a constant tit-for-tat with electronic warfare devices and drones, with armaments, with how radar stations positions are identified, the routes the drones take to uncover additional targets etc. The tactical play is pretty endless. I'm not sure how you would reduce it to "they bought some drones from Iran."
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You’ve never been through boot camp, huh. Such a person would have an unbelievably unpleasant time until:
- The military sent them home,
- They cracked and sent themselves home, or
- They got over themselves and learned how to be part of the larger whole.
Making it through with those edge opinions intact is not an option.
That wasn't really true during World War II. Some of the most celebrated veterans of that war were anti-authority as hell, doing things like stealing parts of fellow aircrews' planes to rebuild their own, ignoring formation to get better torpedo angles, and running ahead of everyone else in a tank. In Korea that attitude still survived, but only in the air, and by the end of the Vietnam war it had basically been stamped out. The U.S. military since about 1972 is way less lenient than before then, especially as the equipment's gotten more expensive.
> stealing parts of fellow aircrews' planes to rebuild their own
US Army still does that today to some extent (not with planes anymore though). It's not stealing, they're just getting their stuff back.
You should listen to interviews with special operations folks. Navy Seals, Green Berets, Delta Force, etc.
There is a strong culture of do what's needed to accomplish the mission. Even a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" to many challenges.
HN has a curiously strong hatred of libertarians (although also professing to dislike authoritarians?) so it's not surprising the comment got downvoted though.
Why would such a person be anywhere near the front line?
because their family has been doing it for generations and they keep winning
> (...) and they keep winning
That's the textbook definition of survivorship bias. It's like a lottery winner boasting about his winning strategy that everyone else is just not able to learn.
At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning. Statistically someone will win, there are good odds someone will win twice, but the odds of anyone winning 3 times is almost zero.
> At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning.
The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.
The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis. Of course by winning the lottery I mean win a large jackpot - most have smaller prizes that you have high odds of winning many times if you play often enough.
Only if you only play 3 times though (in your previous example). Statistics also are about figuring out what sort of outliers must exist for a process to be fair (true random). For something like a mega lottery with terrible odds, then winning twice is already very unlikely. But for something easy like a coin flip, every N trials should have a run of about sqrt N heads or wins in a row if it is unbiased. For something unlikely like lotto, it is closer to looking at the birthday paradox: the probability of one person winning twice is low; but the probability that there exists a person who won twice is high, at random.
There must be a name for "wrongly assuming everything is random and variables are independent". Like the opposite of the gambler's fallacy.
> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need.
No, you're missing the whole point. Think about the problem about survivorship bias. Imagine you are at a M&Ms factory. You decide you want to assess what's the color distribution of M&Ms by sampling the colors that come out of the production line. You somehow make the mistake of sampling the production line for the peanut core M&Ms right out of the pipe that produces yellow M&Ms. You sample away and after hours you present your findings: 99.9% of yellow M&Ms have a peanut core. Based on your findings, you proceed to boldly claim that having a yellow core is a critical factor in producing yellow M&Ms. You even go as far as to rationalize it, and claim that yellow represents peanuts, and if anyone wants to create yellw-colored candy they need to start by adding peanut to the mix.
I then alert you to the fact that you made a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality. Your answer:
> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis.
You're sampling M&Ms out of the freakin' peanut M&M production line. If you fix your mistake, you'll get all kinds of M&Ms. You do not fix your mistake with higher sampling. Your mistake is that you're unwittingly filtering out an important subset of the problem domain, and proceeded to do a faulty analysis on the subset you picked.
I read the OP differently. I think there can be many angles to a person's identity makeup and they don't always cohere perfectly. A person can have their identity in "entrepreneurial libertarian" while also having it as "someone who comes from a family valuing military service". Humans aren't always perfectly rational when it comes to their different values/tribal identities.
There are a lot of people who join the military while simultaneously "hate authority" for example.
My answer was not touching on the topic of identity. I'm referring to the relationship between cause ad effect.
That is still downstream of the question of “why would someone make such a [seemingly contradictory] decision.” The person you replied to is misunderstanding the OP, which they later clarified.
My point is understanding outcome causality doesn’t necessarily have to even enter the decision.
No I mean more like....
1) why would someone who calls themselves libertarian even join any kind of formalized armed force
2) even if they did, how would the command not realize that clearly such a person is unfit for duty and at best should be confined to some work far away from actual combat
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
It works the exact opposite way.
People from totalitarian shitholes improvise a lot more than people from functioning democracies (because they have to improvise to survive daily life). And they trust their state and follow the rules a lot less (and for a good reason - their state exploits and lies to them to a degree you can't imagine living in a free country).
USA wouldn't send its army to Mexico with 12 hours of fuel telling the soldiers it's exercises. After selling half the fuel and ammo on black market and providing them with faulty non-spec tires so that significant percentage of their vehicles just broke the first week it actually had to drive somewhere.
Russian army did all of the above, on a massive scale. Nobody in Russia was surprised except maybe putin. IMHO he was more surprised that Ukraine was organized than that his own army wasn't.
Think for a while how you'd adapt to living in such a society. One of the first things is that you pretend to do what they tell you and then completely ignore it and do whatever you can to survive. And then to adapt to that - the army has units that shoot at you from behind if you don't want to be a "meat wave" in the next frontal attack.
Army won't provide you shoes your size? Steal. Army won't provide you drones or anti-drone measures? Cope cages and loot Mavics from malls. Etc. In totalitarian countries (and I've lived in one so I'd know) everybody had to learn DIY cause you couldn't trust the economy/country to provide you with the things you need.
Oligarchy and libertarianism is the same system, just looking from POV of rulers vs ruled. When society doesn't work people have to be libertarians. When everybody's a libertarian - oligarchs rule and society doesn't work.
>And they trust their state and follow the rules a lot less
It was my understanding that the opposite was true in Ukraine early in the conflict. Russia suffered high casualties because they still relied on a central command structure and field leaders were reluctant to make decisions without the express validation of their superiors. This led to them being sitting ducks as they waited for confirmation, and resulted in many high level soldiers being killed because they had to travel to the front lines to communicate orders for any effect.
The centralised structure, the lack of trust and selfishness, and the improvisation and ignoring the rules are all connected.
The less people care about rules - the harsher you have to be to enforce them.
The high level officers had to go to the front lines not because foot soldiers were helpless without them. They had to go there because without them the soldiers would ignore the orders to go forward, hide in relatively safer place, start looting and lie in the reports they executed the orders perfectly killing thousands of enemies :)
Remember when Ukraine invaded Kursk region this year? Kadyrov troops that defended the border there said they were "bypassed" by Ukrainians when they "were eating dinner" :)
>the soldiers would ignore the orders
Doesn't that undermine the OP's claim that people in more totalitarian regimes have higher trust in the state and hierarchy?
>And they trust their state [...] a lot less
You nailed it.
Lack of social solidarity and communal trust has got to be a kiss of death in wartime. Especially when fighting against an opponent who has it in spades. (US in Vietnam, Russia in early days of the war in Ukraine, etc.).
That is all true, except there's another reason people learn to DIY. That is when they have a basically functional government and economy but live in a rural area. The US libertarian ethos stems from a cultural memory of pioneers and farmers that couldn't be served by a centralized state.
Ok, but who acquired the land for them?
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This isn't really clarifying the question of "who acquired the land for them", just acknowledging they (sometimes? often?) had to defend for themselves out there. In the end those settlers purchased deeds to those lands often for very cheap from the US federal government and expected for the federal government to support their Westward movement (which often did happen as well).
They acquired the land from the government and expected some amount of protection provided by the federal government as well.
And even then a ton of that settlement happened after many wars and what not with Native American tribes and groups in those territories.
Without getting into the (worthwhile) details of US expansion, it's important to note that the security provided by the continental and federal governments did not stop raids, and on a scale of services provided relative to dysfunctional present day governments was truly hands-off. There is running water in Aleppo.
This is basically entirely false ... They would only move into settle AFTER the government clears the land of most natives and signed "treaties" with others. Along with mass relocation and government programs to incentivize the settlers like encouraging the military to kill all Buffalo on site or actively salt spring water sources in favour of European deep wells.etc.etc.
These sort of quotes are cute but not really usefull. Probably counterproductive.
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.
It fits perfectly if you look at it from a "balls" standpoint, this pilot ejected for whatever by-the-book reason when his electronics were bad and yet the airplane continued for 11 minutes just on autopilot.
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.
> It fits perfectly if you look at it from a "balls" standpoint, this pilot ejected for whatever by-the-book reason when his electronics were bad and yet the airplane continued for 11 minutes just on autopilot.
> 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.
> Also, the pilot did not "give up", but decided that it is smarter to retreat and save lives instead of going to death.
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.
> There are no such "hyperrational risk calculators", you just mean "someone who would make the same decision as me in this situation".
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.
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> 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
The Byng article is interesting.
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.
Candide. Fun fact (and nothing to do with the article): The country was pissed at Byng. The road to London was lined with pitchfork-wielding yokels for pretty much the first fifteen miles. I don't think he did anything wrong but I can see why, in that atmosphere, he was the bone thrown to appease the dogs.
>I strongly prefer hyperrational risk calculators
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.
> My problem with this take is that humans are very poor risk estimators
Indeed few people have this rare capability, that's why I explicitly named them this way ("hyperrational risk calculators").
I’m somewhat skeptical that they exist, at least in the numbers needed to fill pilot slots. Barring certain neurological disease, I don’t think people are “hyper rational” despite even appearing that way to the outside, or identifying themselves as such. We like to sometimes think of our brains as cold computers but they’re not, and even less so in time-critical situations like flying a damaged aircraft. We’re moreso “hypertationalizers” than “hyperrational”
> I don’t think people are “hyper rational” despite even appearing that way to the outside, or identifying themselves as such.
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.
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> 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.
Rationalism is overrated. It doesn't even help much with making good decisions, especially under tight time constraints and with incomplete or inaccurate information.
People who consider themselves to be "hyper rational" are just obnoxious wankers. I don't take them seriously or trust their judgment.
> 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.
It's been known to happen that airplanes that were unrecoverable, recovered after the pilot ejected due to the massive shift in centre of gravity and the ejection forces. Like the cornfield bomber: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
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.
It cuts both ways.
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.
That is from your point of view.
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.
Sure. But it is a trade off.
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.
Genuine question: have you served in any branch of any military?
Yes. Platoon sgt. mech. inf. No deployment anywhere.
US pilots havent really been engaged in a war against a peer since ww2. It might be true. But we probably shouldnt extrapolate from bombing terrorists in the desert to actually fighting against say China.
The US air force fought significant enemy air forces in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and in the Balkans. Their doctrine has not remained untested since 1945.
The closest wars are the Iraqi and Balkans ware. For the first the vast majority of Iraq air force were destroyed on the ground or fled to neighboring countries, there were rarely any meaningful air to air fights.
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.
Huh? The US was essentially fighting the Soviets in Korea and Vietnam. It was a contentious, significant conflict.
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.
Korea has been in cease fire since 1953. Vietnam ended in 1975. There has been a lot of changes since then. Not only have people studied and tried to learn lessons, but technology has changed significnatly. We have no clue how the current military would approach Vietnam or Korea if they happened today (both sides would be different!)
Regarding these two wars my comment was exactly that.
> 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).
Take Vietnam for instance where the Soviets supplied the Vietcongs with AD systems and at times manned them The Americans lost over 10,000 aircrafts over a 10 year period which is an average of 3 per day.
The US airforce cannot survive the attrition rate that a war with Russia or China would bring.
For completeness most of these losses were UAVs and Helicopters. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_of_the...
> The US airforce cannot survive the attrition rate that a war with Russia or China would bring.
Nuclear exchange by ICBM would destroy most aircraft, their crews, their maintenance crews, and the factories for the replacement. There will be no dogfights.
While 10,000 sounds like a lot, about 25% were accidents, and 75% in combat, so 7,500.
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.
After reading this, I thought the opening music for Top Gun was about to start playing
I imagine this is one reason why the current Ukrainian war is so interesting to belligerents other than the Ukrainians themselves. The US is taking copious notes on what modern land wars could look like, how drones can and can't be used in place of conventional air cover, etc. Ditto the other side, eg the North Koreans.
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.
The American military is world class in every respect, but its weakness the by design lack of integration with civil and intelligence functions.
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.
> Vietnam and Afghanistan are examples of how when faced with overwhelming military might, asymmetric conflict ultimately rules.
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.
> within weeks had significantly degraded Taliban/Al Qaeda's fighting ability
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.
Like what was said… world class military, strategy and tactics.
But… 20 years of grind. Asymmetric always wins.
On the other hand, specifically with China there's nothing to extrapolate from at all really.
Maybe that is more what is happening.
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'.
> US pilots havent really been engaged in a war against a peer since ww2
Maybe Korea, where there were Chinese and Russian-trained and sourced jets?
Still, Korea was >70 years ago.
Those quotes we're almost certainly made up jokes and not assessments of the US military. The first appears to come from an Internet image attributing it to "A Russian Document". The second has no known source and has been variously referred to both the US Navy and Air Force.
But the review found that the pilot did do the right thing and did follow the manual. The definition of, "out of control" seems to be to blame. He's even been cleared to fly again.
It's important to acknowledge he was part of a Test & Evaluation squadron. It's usually part of their jobs to push the flight envelope so that people can define procedures. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the pilot may have been too conservative in their eyes for that purpose.
> The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime
Is not fighting a near peer since WWII 80 years ago, really hate using rubbish to prove a point
He did the right thing. He's alive and well, fired from his command instead of deceased like the other servicemen in the OV-22 and FA-18D.
“Better to die than to look bad” is one of the more toxic sayings associated with military aviation.
Nothing in the incident report suggests the pilot's life was at any point in imminent danger, with the backup instruments functioning, and the plane being flyable.
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).
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I imagine the most straightforward explanation is the correct one - he ejected because he didn't feel safe flying this aircaft anymore. I cannot possibly imagine that any pilot would eject from an aircraft they felt comfortable flying, given that actually ejection is horrifically dangerous and is very likely to maim or kill you, with most pilots unable to return to active duty after ejecting. He wasn't sitting there going "well the plane is flying fine, but the manual says to eject so off I go I guess".
Ejecting from a plane is dangerous. If you have control of the plane then you should be looking to do an emergency landing - there are typically acceptable landing places all over that can get you safely to the ground. I don't know how much control he really had, but it sounds like he had enough to land.
>with the backup instruments functioning
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.
There's a big difference between seeing the report in hindsight and being in that aircraft at that given time, having lost your HUD and electronics a couple times already, not ejected and carrying on for a while before deciding its probably too risky to continue operating the aicraft.
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.
Maybe this pilot did not have the upmost faith in this aircraft.
I'm pretty damn sure he was thiking about the manual when his controls were glitching and decided to eject. Which also carries risk: his helmet and mask were ripped off and he had to drop the seat pan and raft in order not to get tangled in the power lines.
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?
The jet was fine, it kept flying for 64 miles. He probably ejected because there had been a recent osprey crash with causalities and he was scared.
"The jet kept flying for 64 miles" and "the jet was fine" are WILDLY different things.
Yes, for a Cessna or a 737. Not for a modern fighter.
"The jet was not 100% fine" and "the jet was 100% unflyable" are WILDLY different things.
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.
When an user reports buggy or glitchy behaviour I usually don't write it off as cowardice.
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.
When your software crashes in a house it hopefully doesn't kill the whole family. Comparing the expectations from a pilot and squadron commander to a random user of a random software doesn't do any favors to the pilot and suggests you misunderstand the magnitude of the difference.
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 compared it to test drivers reporting faults in automotive software, not random software running on a pc.
The map is not the territory. Unless you can convincingly explain how your map would have been better in the situation, and together with his apparent dislike of dying would still have had you stick with the aircraft, he shouldn't be blamed.
64 miles sounds quite far, and I've gone quite fast on my motorcycle, but the top speed of the F-35B (that they tell us) is 1,200 mph. At that speed that's just over 3 minutes.
From the article:
> 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.
To shreds you say? Well how were the trees? To shreds you say?
3 minutes is an eternity for something like a jet.
If a car drove at highway speed for 3 minutes without crashing after the driver jumped out, you'd be impressed too.
According to the report, the jet flew for at least 11 more minutes. No one flies fighter jets at max speed unless absolutely necessary.
That's still a decent ground speed of 350 mph! Never gotten my bike to go quite that fast
I assume you also don't go max speed on your bike 99.9% of the time. (EDIT: this depends what kind of bike we're talking about I suppose)
Why else go to the track‽
But it didn't land itself, unlike the cornfield bomber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
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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.
The book said that ejecting is the correct action when the plane is “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“. This simple, straight forward statement turns out to be more ambiguous than they intended. Do you eject if the radio doesn’t change channel? No, that would be silly, even though the plane didn’t respond to your command to change the channel. The plane is still flyable without the radio! Common sense says that you should just land and get the radio fixed. There’s even a whole procedure that pilots have to memorize about how to land at an airport safely even if you have no radio.
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.
> instead of penalizing him
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.
I disagree, penalising people for making mistakes where procedures are bad tends to cover up root causes and causes more problems in the long term.
After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?
The procedures were not bad, they were ambiguous: I think most pilots understand what “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“ means (that they should check if the plane responds to basic controls like pitch, roll and yaw before ejecting), but it leaves room to wiggle out of your responsibility by saying that you misunderstood this statement. And if someone is willing to do that, you might conclude that he is not a good fit for a leadership role...
Lots of armchair admirals in here, but as a former naval officer your answer is the correct one. The pilot should have tried the flight controls, if I had abandoned ship because my displays turned off but we could still control the helm, I’d be drummed out too.
> 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.
> Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering.
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?
Somewhere in the middle. You don't want to turn your brain off and bail out of a perfectly good airplane, but at the same time if the very first step of the checklist says “LAND ASAP” in giant red letters then maybe you should just divert to your alternate and land.
The prime rule, which supersedes all others, is to not have shit go wrong. That's more important than following any of the other rules; if you follow all the other rules, the rules which you think are important because they're written down, but miss on the prime rule, then your ass is in trouble. Even if it doesn't end your career, it will still hurt it.
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.
> Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering
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.
Do you think there is no value in picking pilots that make the correct split second decisions or screening out pilots that don't?
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!
Yup. Some humans make okay split-second decisions. Some make great ones. That this difference is unfair is irrelevant. Nobody should be entitled to be a commander.
>It’s a new plane!
The F-35B has been operational with the US Marie Corps since June 2015.
Which makes it a new plane, considering the same organization flies planes from the 1950s too.
As a civilian, I would have expected that if there's anywhere where you're supposed to follow protocol even if it means expensive mistakes happen, it's the Marines. My mental model of the military, and especially the Marines, is that it's an organization that values discipline and prioritizes following the chain of command.
That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.
A pilot is expected to follow procedure when that's called for but ultimately has full responsibility and can make any call they want. Procedure is never going to cover the range of scenarios you can run against and there's no time to reach out to the chain of command when something goes wrong.
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.
> Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems
It seems that a highly qualified marine test pilot is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the airplane's systems
He has less than 50 hours in that type.
Until you get to actually fly it for real, you read the manuals a few times over, do countless hours in the simulator and so on.
Those 50 hours can be misleading as to his experience with the aircraft.
A stimulator comfortably positioned at FL000 is much more amenable to troubleshooting multiple electrical failures than a tin can balancing on computer-controlled thrust differentiating, 1900 feet in the air well below stall speed.
You are missing the point. Incidents do happen, but you just don't get to fly a fighter jet until you proved in a simulator that you are capable of flying it and troubleshooting it. What the simulator does is to see if you can be entrusted with the aircraft.
Yes, but decades of experience have shown that pilots are far braver and willing to risk their skin in a simulator than they are in the air. And for good reason.
> I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not.
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.
I don’t know about the US marines,
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.
Actually, the US military is successful more because they prioritize on the spot thinking and only deferring to the chain of command in specific circumstances. As much authority is pushed downwards to the lowest level possible. That’s why the military is so effective tactically, though the high level strategy lately has been rough. The war on terror was overall ineffective, for example, but the troops had a ridiculous k/d ratio. Another part of the success is from training. There aren’t many militaries who train as much as the US military.
That's because you're a civilian and you don't understand how Naval Aviation works. Reading straight from the NATOPS manual for my old aircraft: "It provides the best available operating instructions for most circumstances, but no manual is a substitute for sound judgement. Operational necessity may require modification of the procedures contained herein."
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.
That’s true if it’s the same organization doing both things. In the case of aircraft accidents, we deliberately separate out the investigators from everyone else precisely to avoid that problem. The investigators make recommendations for actions that should be taken to prevent future incidents of the same type. Firing the pilot doesn’t accomplish that, so the investigators didn’t recommend it. That doesn’t mean that firing the pilot is inappropriate though, only that doing that wouldn’t prevent future accidents of this type.
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.
I think this comment helps to contextualize the decision in a balanced fashion. If you just read the article probably you come to the conclusion that he should not have been relieved. This helps explain why he was relieved
> It’s a new plane!
First flown in 2006. Introduced 2016.
This project needs scrapped. They tried to make it everything for everyone. Not practical. No danger of retiring the stalwarts anytime soon.
You have a good point in that it was supposed to replace all kinds of aircraft. That was kind of its thing.
“ 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
It's a little too late for that. The JSF program probably should have been cancelled or completely restructured circa 1996. But now there's no remaining alternative. The inventory of legacy AV-8, F-16, and A-10 aircraft are going to be retired no matter what because they're literally falling apart and it's impossible to keep extending their service lives.
> and it's impossible to keep extending their service lives.
B52 projected to last till 2050
B-52s aren't subject to the same stress as fighter aircraft are, that's why they are able to keep flying for so long (among other reasons).
I’d argue that this is exactly who you want testing potentially malfunctioning planes? The alternative leads to jocks crashing into the runway when they desperately try to control a runaway plane.
That’s a good way of putting it.
Were the people who wrote the manual penalized? Should they continue to write manuals?
Fully agree but as usual it was more complicated than this even. Losing controls and instruments in IMC conditions could mean you're straight and level with many minutes to troubleshoot and try things off book, or maybe another attitude like a graveyard spiral towards the deck with seconds to decide. We might not have all the details to armchair fly it.
He didn’t lose the controls _or_ the instruments. He lost his HUD and the primary flight display. But the standby instrument display was still working correctly, and the fly–by–wire system was still accepting input and acting on it correctly. Sure, if those things had failed then ejecting would have been fine. But he didn’t even check them to see if they were still working or not, he just bailed out of a flyable plane.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too many software systems that failed in undetectable ways, and the user was disbelieved. The damn thing is fly-by-wire and if the instruments are failing for unknown reasons, then I could easily believe that the controls started glitching too, and that this isn't reflected anywhere.
Interesting because I'm willing to give the US Marine Corp, which conducted a comprehensive investigation before firing him, the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder how many planes they will lose if they trained the pilots to fly without HUD.
a plane doesn't change a channel of a radio. a plane has a radio which changes its channels. the plane is what flies.
Hopefully thrust as well
Thrust is important but actually secondary to steering. You don’t necessarily bail right away if you lose thrust because you could still be able to glide to somewhere you can land. You might also be able to fix the problem. Of course if you’re already at low altitude or you’re in bad weather then you might not have a lot of time to try such things, but the rest of the time you do.
Fighter planes don't really glide, do they?
They gilde better than the space shuttle and that got deadsticked every time it got flown (well, almost every time).
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.
I'm not a pilot, but a plane can be landed without propulsion.
Not these fighter planes. They literally need both the propulsion and an active flight computer to fly stably. Without the flight computer, they are uncontrollable. Think balancing a pencil on your finger - if your finger is immobilized or loses control, that pencil will fall almost immediately. The plane's controls are much more complex and unforgiving.
And without propulsion, they are just flying rocks. No gliding.
No. As long as it has electrical power and the flight controls are working it can remain stable and glide even with a complete engine failure. Of course the glide ratio is fairly low but it's totally possible for a skilled pilot to make a dead stick landing provided there's a suitable site nearby with acceptable weather conditions.
He was transitioning the aircraft from mode 4 (STOL) to mode 1 (normal flight) when he made the decision to bail. The wings were not generating lift - without computer control the aircraft could have rolled severely.
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.
The wings were generating lift and not stalled. Changing the flight control mode doesn't imply that the aircraft was in vertical flight.
Going from mode 4 to mode 1 on the F-35B (I don't know about the AV-8 family) has a significant portion of the flight below stall speed. I don't think that we know at what portion of the flight this happened.
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.
We do know at what portion of the flight this happened. It's right there in the report. The airplane was in stable forward flight, not stalled. You did not make any valid points.
> No. As long as it has electrical power and the flight controls are working it can remain stable and glide even with a complete engine failure.
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.
Nope. While it's true that the F-35 lacks a ram air turbine (RAT), it does have an auxiliary power unit (APU) that can power the flight controls, avionics, and electro-hydrostatic actuators as long as fuel remains. It also has a battery that can power critical systems for a few minutes when all else fails.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/e...
Is that true for those fighter planes? From a cursory investigation it seems like they’re not very flyable at low speeds without being in vtol mode.
Every plane has what is called a stall speed, which if you go below it it loses its ability to stay in the air. Above that, even 1kt above, the plane will still fly. Also, to make sure you can fly the longest possible distance to have time to troubleshoot any issues, planes also have what is called best glide speed. If you maintain that, you’re golden.
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.
That depends what you mean by "low". The F-35B (like any fixed-wing aircraft) is perfectly well flyable down to stall speed, and below stall speed it doesn't fly at all. For the conditions described, stall speed would probably be something close to 120kn (exact performance parameters are classified). (Some fighters can use thrust vectoring and other aerodynamic tricks to retain a limited amount of post-stall maneuverability but that doesn't really apply in this case.) In an engine failure situation, pilots are trained to trim the aircraft to the speed that will give the best glide ratio and that's going to be well above stall speed.
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.
At least one concept of it is that officers (and NCOs and maybe others) are expected to succeed when the 'book' is insufficient. Following the manual is not nearly enough.
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.
This and the fact that he didn't make the slightest attempt to work around it.
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!"
The article states he was at 1,900 feet in heavy rain with nonfunctional instument panels. He was there, he's got the experience, and he ejected (which is dangerous too).
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.
> with nonfunctional instrument panels
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.
>> However, the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”
The interesting thing here would be to find out what "basically" means in that context.
Probably functional enough that a veteran pilot would know how to operate the plane
There's a story of a fighter pilot, flying on instruments on a rainy night, who noticed his altimeter was reading level, artificial horizon level, but his speed was climbing even with the throttle steady. He immediately pulled the ejection handle, having correctly deduced that both altimeter and artificial horizon were were broken and he was plummeting towards the Atlantic. The plane impacted a few seconds later.
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)
While those cases do certainly exist, this was not the case here, he had time to troubleshoot and determine if his backup instruments were working or not.
> HUD freaking out, that means I can't trust my instruments, that means I'm in immediate danger! PUNCH OUT!
Isn’t that indicative of what an absolute shitshow of a plane it is?
Eh, it was struck by lightning. It lost several non–critical systems as a result. Both the HUD and the primary flight display turned off and came back on a few seconds later. Both showed numerous error messages and warnings when they came back on. Both failed a second time before he could read or understand all of the warnings. It was certainly suboptimal, but not necessarily indicative of a poorly designed or engineered aircraft. The report had several recommendations that were redacted; probably at least one of those was recommending specific fixes to make the display systems more reliable in the event of a lightning strike, or to make them recover more gracefully.
How was the pilot impacted by the lightning? Maybe he had a few systems shaken up as well
I wasn't aware we were at war.
Train like you fight, because you will fight like you train.
You don't need to be at war for a soldier to prepare for it.
US Govt. says we're at war.
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-i-chapter...
I feel like terrorism is about to give up and come to the negotiating table though.
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I'm not sure the last time we were not at war, unfortunately.
In peacetime, the military organizes, trains and equips for wartime.
He was, and was fired from his role as, commander of Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1 (VMX-1), which exists largely to validate and update “the book” for the rest of Corps.
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.
Also note that he wasn't fired specifically due to ejecting -- he was fired "for loss of trust and confidence in his ability to execute the responsibilities of his command." And the investigation was completed back in January, so before he assumed command of the squadron.
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.
that's the same boiler-plate reason they give for every firing due to an embarrassing mishap.
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.
Loss of trust and confidence is huge in military (and adjacent) circles. Many of these roles involve ordering others into situations that are likely fatal.
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...
I think that’s just to make the shafting a little bit softer. You are still being shafted for valuing your own life over an expensive airplane.
That plane is significantly more valuable to the American people than his life is. That plane cost the entire federal tax bill of 1000 senior software engineers. If he's not willing to risk his life to keep it in the air, he shouldn't be flying it.
seems reasonable to me. If someone lost a 110 million dollar asset in a questionable way, I wouldn't have trust and confidence in their ability either.
Flying cutting edge military jets isn't exactly a human right.
That's all well and good, except the next pilot facing a potential loss of aircraft will probably hesitate (worrying about getting shafted), and keep trying to recover the craft until it is too late. Then you have a crashed plane, and a dead pilot. People make better decisions when there is precident for a no-fault management style.
No, because he was not fired for ejecting from an unsafe aircraft, which is what you're claiming would be the situation where the pilot would hesitate. He was fired because the General didn't feel he'd shown the judgement and skill commiserate with his station.
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.
> No, because he was not fired for ejecting from an unsafe aircraft, which is what you're claiming would be the situation where the pilot would hesitate.
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.
> commiserate with his station
I do, but perhaps this was meant to be "commensurate".
kinda makes you wonder about his opinion on the overall reliability of the F-35 if he made that call.
From what I read that seems plausible given the pilot was a seasoned test pilot; so it seems odd he was just being panicky.
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.
2000 hours isn't all that seasoned, and he had less than 50 hours in that type. He was accomplished all right, but not what one would call seasoned.
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.
Why are people in other threads saying that he was some sort of expert or that he lost an expert position because of this?
This.
That might make sense if you valued the life of a pilot more than an F-35, or even a large number of F-35s, but at the end of the day, that simply isn't true.
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.
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Precisely, the next pilot will not bail out so quickly, saving a $100M plane. Encouraging pilots to exhaust all options before they eject is the entire point.
Back in the day, a carrier deployment w/o the loss of an aircraft was considered subpar because it was taken as evidence of not pushing the boundaries enough.
Or so I was told by a USN pilot.
On the other hand, the USMC has invested considerable time and effort in training this person to operate the F-35. Replacing him with someone else will take time and money. For the organization that invested all that into him to say ‘nope, we don’t want you to fly these things any more’ is itself a massive waste of resources.
Sure, that makes sense as a waste if you are operating under the assumption that they have no questions of ability and are simply being railroaded, and will never fly again.
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.
He's certainly a highly trained Naval Aviator, but he had very little time in the F35.
He was fired from command, not stripped of his wings.
And now you've created yet another layer of FUD for all future pilots.
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...
Ehh. While I understand your point, I think we should also ask ourselves if it’s reasonable for a fighter to cost $110m a pop.
The customer demands the best, because if they do not have it the adversary will have it, and that is unacceptable. Even given that 110 million (assuming current 2024 dollars) is pretty cheap: the Grippen comes in at around that based on Brazilian purchases and is much less capable, being a 1990's design.
Woah, I could not believe this post, until I looked it up. Wiki says: <<On 24 October 2014, Brazil and Sweden signed a 39.3 billion SEK (US$5.44 bn, R$13 bn) contract for 28 Gripen E (single-seat version) and eight Gripen F (dual-seat version) fighters for delivery from 2019 to 2024 and maintained until 2050>>
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?
I'm not really sure what maintenance costs over that period in a contract look like: certainly getting them down to a number introduces a bunch more risks for someone (inflation etc), and not having them has other risks. Getting numbers here is sadly hard, and I agree my comparison might be not apples to apples.
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.
The wikipedia page lists 9 digit flyaway costs for other Gripen versions, so even if it includes some support, the bulk of the price is the jet.
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.
Shouldn't have planned to let Russia see the radar returns then.
Interesting. My understanding is that the US refused to deliver after Turkey bought S-400 systems from Russia, and will still sell the F-35 to Turkey if they stop. Do the systems share radar returns with mother Russia or what exactly is the concern?
https://web.archive.org/web/20240202005500/https://ca.news.y...
Bingo. These systems are not packaged goods, but come with services that depend on getting a lot of the data to improve the system, and it's hard to control how they share. An air defense system is part of a network.
I think that is a fair question. Cheaper would obviously be better, but unless or until they are cheap, they are not disposable.
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...
A 737-MAX10 costs more, and it's almost all empty space.
A supertanker costs more and it’s just empty tanks.
That's what everybody in the military gets fired for. It's just boilerplate for public consumption.
We don't know why he was fired, but the logical conclusion is that it was this incident.
The ejection was months before he got the role at VMX-1.
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?
> The ejection was months before he got the role at VMX-1.
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.
From the article:
"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.
> did not try to use his backup radio.
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.
he was at very low altitude, struck by lightning, in a completely glass cockpit plane.
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.
He was doing an instrument landing at the time. When the ILS switched off, he automatically aborted the landing as trained. This is a go–around, so you apply TOGA thrust, point the nose up, level the wings, raise the gear, and climb to 4000’ or whatever is the correct altitude for the TOGA procedure at the airport you are at. He was already 1200’ above the ground and climbing when he ejected. He was in a perfect level climb, he just wasn’t looking at his standby instruments and so he lost situational awareness for a few seconds. Glass cockpit or not, the standby instruments and fly–by–wire system were completely reliable in spite of the lightning.
> He was doing an instrument landing at the time. When the ILS switched off, he automatically aborted the landing as trained.
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.
The redacted version of the report does not state that there was any causal link between switching to SVTOL and the failure of the HMD. Only that the HMD happened to fail shortly after he switched modes:
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]That's definitely not what happened and not what the report says.
Also, this is a STOVL aircraft, and I suspect the procedures are completely different.
> * and the [jet’s] backup radio was, at least partially, functional*
What does "at least partially functional" even mean?
Either a radio lets you communicate on the frequency you need or it doesn't.
That seems reductive in an advanced stealth fighter that has frequency hopping, anti-jamming comms system using computer controlled phased array antennas. The F35 has at least 11 different types of comms systems (VHF x4, UHF x2, HAVEQUICK, SINCGARS, Link-16, etc). So a lot of functionality can be lost without basic unencrypted radio comms goes down.
Plus this idea of "updating the book" makes it sound like this was some sort of experimental aircraft where they still have to finalize the manual. This is a production aircraft, over 1000 were built, it is deployed in 30+ countries.
It's still officially in development, hasn't passed its validation tests yet.
huh? Commercial aircraft updates its manual all the times
This feels political face saving considering it was the third class A mishaps the Marines had in 6 weeks, the other two being fatal.
I would imagine you update the book on the ground, not mid flight during the emergency.
100% pure speculation:
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.
In any other squadron, you'd have a point... but it's the VMX-1.
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.
I'm not familiar with VMX-1 and will take your word on it. This may be exactly as appears.
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 can't imagine any military pilot flying for the pay. They fly because it's their very identity. Being grounded is worse than being fired or even jailed.
He didn’t have that job until a year later.
Yes, but I guess command decided he wouldn't be a good fit to lead others because of his past experience which as not yet know when he was assigned to be the CO of VMX-1.
His past experience was known when he took that assignment. It was considered by all before he accepted it. That doesn’t mean his boss can’t fire him, but let’s not pretend that it wasn’t a complete reversal of what had previously been decided.
What is not clear is if this report was available when he got the job or not. Because "he crashed a plane unde difficult conditions" without additional context might be fine and then 5 months later the report comes out and it is not fine for him to be the CO of that unit.
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.
That's not correct. He decided that the aircraft was out of control because his primary displays went out at low altitude - the manual says eject if out of control below 6000 ft. But in fact the plane was still flying and responding to controls just fine.
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
That's not what the report is alleged to have said. This news story alleges that he executed proper emergency procedures, but for the WRONG emergency. It alleges he ejected per the procedure for out-of-control flight when what he actually (allegedly) had was partial electrical failure with operable standby instruments. Which is not a situation mandating immediate ejection.
When a modern aircaft like this has an electrical failure I would feel very uncomfortable.
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.
If his standby instruments were operable, the answer to that question is likely "yes." Having not flown a STOVL aircraft, the only part I can't speak to is whether his thrust vectoring/lift fan was in an unknown configuration, and how that plays into things. But generally out-of-control flight results from a spike in angle of attack at low speeds leading to aerodynamic stall and departure, and modern fly-by-wire aircraft are highly resistant to this.
> And the pilot should've figured that out?
Yes, probably. I suspect you're lacking context on the sophistication and comprehensiveness of their training.
Fighter pilots are extremely highly trained individuals. While data is scarce for the exact dollar cost - an F-22 pilot costs roughly 11 Million USD to train, pilots are expected to use judgement and be capable of dealing with high pressure/ambiguous outcomes.
The fact that he chickened out of flyable F35 is floating in the air. I don't imagine how he could continue to work with such baggage in the eyes of colleagues. Retiring is sad, but the better option.
Yes. And pilots are harder to replace than planes. The manual will say "if in doubt, punch out". Being in doubt is the issue: should he have been able to figure out he was safe in the time it took to eject? There is the question, and it is a question of training, not moral character.
That’s why they have reviews of these items. Ultimately, a fighter pilot is piloting a very expensive and very dangerous aircraft, if they can’t use good judgement - then they can’t be trusted to operate the aircraft. As an example, a us navy pilot mistook a training exercise for a live fire mission and shot down a us Air Force jet. Mistakes were made in the mission setup, but critically - the pilot should have used judgement to change the mission parameters rather than execute what he believed to be the order.
https://www.twz.com/the-bizarre-story-of-how-a-navy-f-14-sho...
as harsh as it sounds, the point is that as the commander: "the buck stops here"
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.
If only big tech CEOs were held at the same standards…
You are trying to say only the one at the top is safe from rotation to cover for blunders?
I don't think it says exactly that. It says he still had backup instruments and good flight controls and ejected from a flyable plane. If that were strictly true, they'd be well within standards to fire him.
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.
The pilot should have figured it out especially since all the controls were working. It’s like he ejected from a $100 million aircraft because one of the screens went out.
FTA: VMX-1 is in charge of assessing the Corps’ aircraft and helping develop and refine tactics, techniques and procedures to fly them in combat successfully.
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 timeline is kind of awkward: he was selected for the position in 2022, the crash happened in 2023, and he assumed command in 2024.
I doubt that the job is to figure out updates to the book when an unplanned failure occurs over a heavily populated civilian area.
That was his job later.
> Del Pizzo’s F-35B malfunctioned and its primary displays and communications cut out as Del Pizzo was attempting to land through rain at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina. However, the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”
> 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.
That really, really depends on what conditions you are flying under. This is not a naturally stable aircraft flown at relatively low speeds far away from any obstacle, and it is not being flown from a couch with a gamepad.
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.
The flight control software was not malfunctioning. He had instruments and communication capability that would have let him land an otherwise flyable aircraft.
Again, a very easy judgement to make when you’re not the one strapped to the rocket in what the documents describe as “challenging conditions” as your displays you were flying after go dark.
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.
I've been strapped to such a rocket in such challenging conditions with even worse remaining operable equipment more than once.
The radios did not work. One was out, the other was “basically functional.” At 2000 feet, while in VTOL mode, how long do you have to figure out if your backup radio is “basically functional”? And to evaluate whether the standby flight display was working properly? And to figure out whether the plane is accelerating up and out of VTOL mode like you told it to or heading toward the ground?
The F35 does not have a dedicated radio control panel. It's a menu driven operation through a multi function display. More damningly these electrical overload failures are known on the platform.
The plane is just a poorly designed death trap.
> This is still definitely an aircraft that can land safely.
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.
Interesting detail in TFA is that the pilot had converted to the plane's short take off and vertical landing mode, but instead carried out a missed approach procedure when his helmet-mounted display malfunctioned.
What do you mean by "instead"? Would you have expected the pilot to guess where the runway is without his instruments? He was flying in IMC. Meaning he couldn't see where he was going.
I’ve never flown an F35. From what I understand they’re basically rockets that “fly” because of software that makes micro corrections several times per second.
Maybe if the screens are out the pilot couldn’t rely on that?
No, the screens are a separate system from the fly–by–wire computer. You don’t throw your desktop computer out of a window just because one monitor goes out. You use the other monitor to order a replacement from IT or Newegg or whatever. In this case the F–35 has three independent displays that can all redundantly display the same information: the HUD in the pilot’s helmet, the primary display, and the standby display. The standby display is smaller and below the primary display in the cockpit, but it is designed to keep working even when everything else doesn’t. Their whole purpose is to be the backup in case the other displays fail.
> In this case the F–35 has three independent displays that can all redundantly display the same information
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.
The standby display is only “tiny” in comparison to the primary flight display, which is a 25” LCD panel. It’s actually the same size as the artificial horizon in most general aviation planes. The information shown on it was not degraded in any way. The accident investigators concluded that the pilot could have and should have relied on it to fly the plane. He just didn’t.
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.
As said elsewhere, it’s not that a plane can be kept in level flight with an artificial horizon that matters. As with the airbus pilots, it’s the surprise - especially when it happens in already stressful situations.
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.
> ... all you're left with is your speed, altitude and attitude.
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.
Have you flown a modern fighter jet while suddenly your helmet integrated flight displays and navigation went out and you had to reorient yourself and rely entirely on nothing but your knee-mounted false horizon mid-maneuver, while attempting instrument landing under - and I quote - “extremely challenging cognitive and flight conditions” where you due to repeated electrical glitches have lost faith in the aircraft and in particular its ability to transition back from SVTOL to regular flight operation? Because that was the situation that you claim was fine.
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.
Setting correct pitch and power using the standby instruments should be enough then?
Seen on the lower right part of the center console: https://img.militaryaerospace.com/files/base/ebm/mae/image/2...
Do you know what CFIT is?
The problem seems to be a pilot from AZ unaccustomed to flying in heavy rain with insufficient practice using the backup instruments.
The pilot is from Atlanta, GA. His assignment to VMX-1 in Arizona happened after the investigation as noted in the article.
I read the whole article and from what is described, VMX-1 is where the best pilots of the USMC evaluate aircraft. Which I take it they are test pilots and are expected to perform much better than "standard" pilots are required to.
I guess the USMC expected him to try until the very last moment to recover the aircraft.
The fact that the plane was able to fly over 60 miles after he ejected kinda proves that ejecting wasn't really needed.
But it doesn't proof that it was possible for the pilot to know this.
Which is why he still has the job as a pilot. He followed an overly broad procedure so wasn't derelict in his duties but ejecting from a flyable plane was considered a mistake. He was a squadron commander so the expectation of assessing a situation even under pressure and with limited information is a lot stronger.
This seems to be less about fault and more about perception
Many, many airplanes and lives were saved by pilots not following the book.
See "Aviation Disasters" on TV.
>>Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the plane.
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'.
The technical reason was “for loss of trust and confidence in his ability to execute the responsibilities of his command” which is not related to him following the book or if the book is right or wrong.
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.”
Yeah, PR and politics was going sideways in light of having all those crashes stacking up on their record. Someone needed a write-off.
This is why books like Catch-22 were written.
Brief summary and my understanding of why this occurred:
- 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
> The crash is Marine's third in several weeks
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!
I meant to type Marine Corps' but seem to have clipped it before saving, too late now. One pilot crashing thrice in a week would be quite the feat though!
Yep. The statement is utterly wrong and profoundly misleading as it stands.
That would be hilarious if it were the case.
> The investigation report said the F-35′s transponder failed as a result of the electrical malfunction
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.
And as a bit of context it's mentionned at the end that:
>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.
But I don’t think THIS dude flew all these planes?
You mean, could he be from among the three plus one who died in previous crashes? Seriously doubt it.
No, but 3 crashes in 6 weeks looks bad, and he was the only one that survived. That makes him a prime candidate for under-the-bus throwing by leadership.
It would have stated "the Marine's" (singular third-person) in that case, not the plural third-person "the Marines'".
> But how can the pilot figure that out, while flying the aircraft?
The standby instruments were working and falling back to them in the event of a primary flight display failure is part of the training
The article says this
> 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?
> One needs to evaluate decisions based on the information available at the time the decision was made.
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.
1900ft in a climb is a lot better than 1900ft at idle coming in to land.
If a ship's captain is asleep, as he logically must be some of the time, and the officers on watch crash the ship into a reef, that captain's career is over even though by normal civilian standards it might be surmised that he did nothing wrong. Even if he's got the receipts to prove he trained his men properly according to the book and they passed all their tests. Civilian intuition about blame doesn't really apply.
Oh, so you need people who are lucky ?
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!
There are some situations where you try to reduce type II errors (false negative) even if you increase type I errors (false positive).
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.
I hate this sort of "everything that requires subjective judgement is luck" trope that is pervasive on HN and similar parts of the internet.
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.
There are all kinds of subtle factors which may allude quantification, but which nonetheless matter because they contribute to outcomes which matter. When things really matter you can't afford to ignore these factors just because you can't pin them down. So yes, you favor those who are "lucky".
> But how can the pilot figure that out, while flying the aircraft?
Looking out the window.
So you're in a thing going close to the speed of sound, the thing starts malfunctioning, you look out the window, think "ahh the weather is nice, therefore the machine will probably not kill me" and keep flying? How does that thought process go?
And the weather wasn't nice - "A pilot who ejected from a malfunctioning F-35B in heavy rain over South Carolina last year..."
Pilots are trained to fly without instruments. Even in inclement weather conditions.
> the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”
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.
He didn't kill someone. He bailed out of a malfunctioning plane with little time to decide.
If his plane went towards the ground with mach 1 at 1900 feet impact would occur in 1.5 seconds.
> He didn't kill someone.
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.
You more or less described standard operating procedure for operating a malfunctioning aircraft. That's why training starts with the eyes of the pilot and instrument-only flying comes later.
(And if you're going the speed of sound on a landing approach, something has already gone way off the rails).
it was rainy so at 1,900 feet he was probably in a cloud
[dead]
I see this discussion as failing to touch on two main points.
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.
It all makes sense, but it must have a chilling effect on any military aviator reading this who finds themselves in a position to consider doing the same.Z
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.
Is this just the consequences of rapidly ballooning costs of modern fighter jets? At a tenth of a billion dollars each, there's not much room in the budget for what are even understandable aircraft losses. If I'm not mistaken nothing else is nearly as expensive except the B2. In some ways, losing one of these things is getting pretty close to losing a naval vessel.
Acknowledging this to be the case might help people to understand why they're demanding perfection even if it's risky for the pilots.
I'm already surprised that they are not looking at the number, realizing that pilots cost much less to train than planes to build, and draw conclusions from there. The army has been more cynical in the past.
It's not that he could have reasoned his way to not ejecting, it's that the standby instruments were still functioning, and are there for just this moment. He could have continued without ejecting based on that alone.
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.
My dad was reprimanded for not following orders ejecting when the engine on his F-86 failed. He did the calculations and figured he could make the field, which he did.
They said the pilot was far more valuable than the airplane.
Planes were cheaper then. I wonder if the higher costs of today's planes results in any pressure to try to save planes that in your dad's day would have been considered not worth the risk?
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.
I look at, say, the war in Ukraine, where they have a fresh supply of planes from allies, but their roster of pilots is diminishing. In this situation the pilot is far more valuable than the plane. And probably always the case during war when aircraft production is at a maximum.
An airman I know shared that it cost $10M + to train a pilot by the time they can run missions, which matches the sources Perplexity found on the question. (1)
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...
Out of curiosity, is there a source for the "statistical value of human life" at $13.1 million ?
“HHS Standard Values for Regulatory Analysis, 2024” [1]
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cd2a1348e...
The procedure was to:
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.
When I did my flight training on a CAPS-enabled airplane, they showed us footage and stats from the military to say that there was a clear bias towards "saving" planes, especially in training, and that it led to more fatalities than if folks stuck by the book. Thought it was super interesting, and definitely helped to cement the attitude of using the resources of the plane by the book, which, (I think sadly), this guy is being punished for.
Has this become a politicized, viral, ideology thing? I keep seeing this story pop up in several places, but it doesn't seem like its impact merits the attention.
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.)
Something I think about in stories is "how strong is the emotional hook."
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.
Not to mention that the military lost the location of the jet after he ejected and they asked the public to give tips on its location. It was missing for like a day before they found it.
Lots of tweets to the effect of "how tf do you lose a $100m fighter jet??"
It’s possible. But note that there has been a lot of criticism of the F–35 since the inception of the program because it’s a multi–role fighter–bomber jack–of–all–trades that tries to satisfy everybody. Partly this is a political problem. Combat airplanes are expensive to design and need political approval. So you have to get every branch of the military to sign on to the project simultaneously, otherwise you’ll never even start. Therefore the thing has to be a ground–attack bomber for the Army, because they want to replace the Warthog. And it needs to be a VTOL for the Navy, so that they don’t have to build a supercarrier for it. And the Marines need X, the Coast Guard wants Y, the Girl Scouts really rely on Z, and on and on and on. And of course it goes without saying that you had better be able to mount any and every weapon system ever designed to the thing.
And it has to be Stealth.
>it needs to be a VTOL for the Navy,
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).
Fair enough :)
A lot of that criticism ended up being quite muted after the plane ended up being wildly successful after being put into service. It also ended up being much cheaper than the competition for many of allies that bought it as well.
Not to say that there weren't many issues with the program, but it seems like a lot of those requirements panned out.
Hating the F-35 in general has been a thing for the Anti-American crowd, mainly driven by western peaceniks who don't see a point in military might (largely depleted now) and the pro-Russia/China/etc crowd who need it to be shit so their fighters can seem competent. As is usual the latter "inform" the former.
Criticism of the F-35 is not politically polarized -- critics exist on a broad political spectrum. "Western peaceniks" and "pro-Russia/China/etc" are a small subset.
Or that F-35 failed its goals. Double the price. 50% more expensive than estimated operational cost. Its 3x the price to operate than a F16. Planes are obsolete technologies, should have invested in drones/loitering munitions. In 10 years, its all going to be drones.
> Planes are obsolete technologies, should have invested in drones/loitering munitions. In 10 years, its all going to be drones.
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.
What is the use case for a manned missile taxi anyway?
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
There’s also the pro-Boeing crowd.
> Hating the F-35 in general has been a thing for the Anti-American crowd mainly driven by western peaceniks
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.
I personally don't like the F35 because I think it looks ugly. And I don't trust ugly planes.
On the other hand, it they would have made it look as sleek and beautiful as the F22...
It being dysfunctional is a convenient stick for this crowd to beat it with, but I wouldn't discount the issues. The U.S.'s allies aren't exactly thrilled with it.
> The U.S.'s allies aren't exactly thrilled with it.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine and the European countries prioritized defense, the F-35 seems to win every competitive bid.
Not any other realistic stealth options. China has the J-20 and Russia sort of has the SU-57 but that has seen limited production.
So it's far better than anything anyone else has built.
That doesn't mean anyone is thrilled with it.
Is it dysfunctional though? There have been issues with it (landing gear and helmets come to mind), but they don't seem to be out of the ordinary for fighter jet development. As for allies, they keep ordering F-35s (or at least trying to) so it seems like they're at least fine with it.
To be clear, it is hated by many pro-Americans and some of its other customers as well, primarily for its cost (over runs).
Hey taxpayer! You don't like the estimated $1.5 trillion going to Lockheed Martin for their hunk of junk F35? Then you're just like Forbes, Bloomberg, the Washington Post and the other anti-American ChiComs who are saying all this because "they need it to be shit".
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.
Your post is his point
How does the GP represent anti-Americans or peaceniks?
Do you think that any criticism of the F-35 project is acceptable?
Yeah absolutely, when it's based in actual fact. The F-35 project is a fantastic example of how out of control defense projects can become, it's parts sourcing in partner nations is questionable when those partner nations are liable to go procure S-400, parts commonality between A, B, and C is pretty terrible for three jets that are supposed to be variants, the list goes on.
One could imagine an unpiloted F-35 flying 65 miles in a random direction before crashing itself is probably more of a safety issue than an issue of idiology
The plane could have crashed into a populated center, taken out a neighborhood, etc. I imagine the pilot's priority is to stay with the aircraft and not bail at the first sign of trouble or until they can no longer control it and are sure it will crash in an unpopulated area.
This was a major story that people have been wondering what the explanation was. The most advanced fighter jet going “missing” over America, pilot landing in someone’s backyard, taking hours to find crash site, learning it was flying on autopilot before crashing etc.
Any story with an explanation would draw attention
It has a political component because of the cost. The military must be accountable to the taxpayers when they incur losses. We don't have tolerance for unlimited crashes and the reasons or blame must be assigned.
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".
Anything that makes the US look bad is sticky around here.
Until this thread, I've never heard that and didn't notice it. People criticize government all the time, everywhere (unless censored), if that what you mean.
This reminds me of how in the 18th century, captains in the Royal Navy wouldn't call to abandon ship because that would have career-ending consequences. So there were cases like HMS Tribune in 1797, where it is claimed that only 12 of the 240 seamen survived because the captain Scory Barker, even having ample time, was effectively prohibited from abandoning the vessel. Four survivors who escaped early were seen as mutineers, whereas the 228 that died and 8 that survived on the ship have been heavily commended in history for their discipline.
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.
Comparing going down with the ship to dying for a cause seems like a false equivalence. When a ship sinks, the outcome is more or less the same whether people are onboard or not: in either case the ship will sink. The only difference is whether or not the passengers / crew survive.
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.
> seems like a false equivalence. When a ship sinks,
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.
Trained and capable seaman were very valuable. It took many years to train someone in the proper functioning of the ship, and given that many raw recruits were typically whomever was rounded up on the streets of Portsmouth at midnight, the quality of the input varied wildly. I'm fairly confident the British navy had huge difficulty manning their ships properly.
> I'm fairly confident the British navy had huge difficulty manning their ships properly.
"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-...
Sailing circa 1800 was certainly danger prone, but it was also very sophisticated. Manoeuvring a three mast ship of the line takes multiple synchronised actions involving hundreds of men, at least a significant fraction of whom need to know what they are doing.
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...
> When a ship sinks, the outcome is more or less the same whether people are onboard or not: in either case the ship will sink
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.
dying in the line of duty is still weirdly seen as good leadership
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.
Here is a military.com article with more information on the crash:
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.
I know someone who was in the air force.
He told me they are more likely to hire you if you have a bunch of speeding tickets.
'nuff said.
> “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.
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...
> Web browser administration
Should I be worried?
During military conflict, preserving lives of valuable and highly trained personnel has been paramount for USA. With a huge amount of resources and manpower available to the US, effectively the entire western world, materiel is essentially replaceable but pilots and crew are extremely finite.
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.
There's too many comments here making assertions that seem to be based on misreading the article.
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.
When articles like this are posted, I'm always surprised to learn the majority of HN commenters are pilots.
The JAGMAN (confidential legal investigation) and MIR (open, no blame aviation investigation) on this have been beaten to death by the retired military flying community on Youtube.
I think it is grossly unfair what happened to the pilot. He followed orders, followed procedure, followed the damn manual. Wholly inappropriate response by the marine corps. I can only assume that it got political and the brass got embarrassed.
I can understand this reaction normally but VMX-1 appears to be some sort of test division? I imagine it’s fair to say this guy isn’t test pilot stuff if he panics and ejects the second the book says he can.
It’s not like he stopped being a pilot if I understand it right.
Wow, that's a tough situation. It’s clear he followed the procedures, but it’s crazy how something like this can still impact a career. Hopefully, he finds a new path forward after all his years of service
On reading the incident report it becomes apparent that the flight display system contributed significantly to this incident, not just in failing, but also by its design. It reminds me a lot of the collision incidents in the Sea of Japan, where touchscreen displays were implicated. In this case, among other things, losing the PCD meant losing the backup radio. From page 35 of Pt. 1 of the incident report:
>"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.
as I read it the issue is command of VMX-1 which does test and evaluation. the commandant is saying he doesn't think this guy is a kick ass test pilot. test pilot is role which involves a lot more skills and expectations and to be the commander of the squadron everyone should think you are the next Chuck Yeager (USAF, yes I know)
That’s exactly how I read this: did the Marine general staff think, on review, that this guy had “the right stuff” to lead their test pilot division? Nope.
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.
(also seems weird that a $100M airplane can't figure out how to land itself if the pilot ejects ...)
> “As a commander you serve at the pleasure of the commandant,” Del Pizzo said
I think us software engineers should remember the same :P
Relieved because he wasn't Yeager enough for the job.
You landed a nice pun.
Launched and landed.
Standards and Evaluation pilots are almost like test pilots.. They are expected to stick with their aircraft perhaps a little longer than normal. However, if a pilot has no outside reference to the horizon (the rain storm he was in), and his sensors/instruments are deemed unreliable, I would have done the same thing. Its one thing to lose a jet, which can be replaced - its another to lose a pilot where countless hours of training have been invested ... Sucks for him, but at least he is still flying and gets the pick of the littler for his next assignment. I would assume he will do another tour and then retire. People will be "funny" around him going forward and he will not enjoy the camaraderie that he has grown used to in the Corps.
Similar case from soviet era:
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.
C.W. Lemoine, who is a former military pilot, did a fairly detailed video going through the mishap report:
Several light aircraft can land autonomously at the closest safe airport. Would be useful for fighter jets, where there is a much higher risk of pilot incapacitation.
Not sure you want the stealthy $80 million dollar plane packed full of restricted electronics and bombs to land at an insecure airport full of civilians.
Also: in air refueling and carriers mean the plane may not be anywhere near a safe airport.
Mostly these jets fly above NATO countries where nobody is going to fuck with it. I guess such a system would get turned off when flying somewhere unfriendly.
Better to have it shred itself in some random cornfield or big box mall parking lot? I guess that is a sort of built-in self-destruct mechanism…
Generally, yes. Better to destroy dozens of aircraft than let an adversary discover a vulnerability that compromises all of them. Of course the ideal would be to not have a problem in the first place, but by the point you're considering having a pilot eject that's out the window.
Bullshit. If you lose the engine at low altitude on climb out, there is no hope of banking much less returning. At that point, it's all about looking for a straight road or level field without power lines +- 30 to 45 degrees of runway heading. For other light aircraft that get themselves into unrecoverable situations like deep stalls where there is sufficient energy, Cirrus SR series have parachutes (CAPS) that reduce the horizontal vector to almost 0 and the vertical component to about 17 mph / 25 ft/s / 7.6 m/s. CAPS isn't deployable < 500' AGL, so if the terrain is unforgiving on a failure on takeoff, there's no safe recovery option except a rough "landing".
The context is losing a pilot, not an engine on climb out.
It’s probably decent policy to simply fire any pilot who ejects. The cost of training a pilot is much lower than the cost of an aircraft and it will make people really think hard about whether they need to eject.
Maybe he didn't have the stick-and-rudder skills needed to ace that emergency; he's not like Sullenberger. But he prioritized saving his own life over that plane, and that's the real, unspoken problem.
You shouldn't be flying an F-35B if you can't fly it without the HUD (assuming functional flight controls).
There are no steam gauge backup instruments in the F-35 and there is no HUD either, everything relies on the HMDS and the MFD. If the MFD happened to not work, that would be fatal because (almost) everything depends on it because it's like a almost like a Tesla console. GFL piloting an F-35 without an MFD in IMC.
https://www.codeonemagazine.com/images/media/Front_Office_01...
So a piece of iron is more important than a human life? They should say so before recruiting pilots.
A 110 million dollar fighter jet is worth an order of magnitude more than a human life, yes. And that doesn't even mention the potential for civilian casualties from the plane crashing.
I'm amazed by the volume of opinions on this matter.
If you've never been a military pilot, I don't think you can give a qualified opinion on this incident.
Surely, other opinions can have relevance. Do you think an aerospace engineer can have no opinion? What about an avionics tech that works on display and comms systems? What about an aviation safety officer or a commercial pilot? These are all people with relevant perspectives.
Sounds like Colonel Del Pizzo let himself become a child of the magenta line[1].
(if you haven't seen this amazing talk, you should definitely give it a watch)
in any situation where you "serve at the pleasure of" another person. you can literally be removed for any or even no reason at all. the person who decides to discontinue your service might themself have to answer to someone else, but you're still out of a job.
it might not be right or fair, but that's not necessarily a disqualified in the military.
It’s unfortunate neither the Navy nor the Air Force want anything to do with the close air support role. The Marines are the smallest arm of the US military but they “do it all”, except tanks, they got rid if they’re Abrams some years ago.
The USAF has done, and continues to do CAS as an important mission.
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 he'd lost the ability to see, the cockpit warnings were blaring, the flight manual says to eject in that situation, but he's supposed to trust the instrumentation and fly it anyway. He lost his command without technically doing anything wrong.
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.
There’s got to be some sort of backstory here we’re missing.
Even if there was the military has a way of making these sorts of head scratching authority decisions all the time. There’s plenty of appeal to the rulebooks and process but it’s ultimately a human choice, very political, very high levels of (sometimes arbitrary) standards.
I couldn’t imagine being middle-aged regularly zooming and through the sky at speeds I’ve only come close to hearing of in razor commercials for a living.
This was a cry for help.
49 years of age strikes me as pretty old to be piloting an F-35B. Even civilian commercial pilots have to retire at 65.
Seems like the root cause was that the pilot was a human. A UAV would have been less expensive and less of a media fiasco to lose.
This incident brings up a lot about the complexity and high stakes of military aviation
Yeah I mean bailing on a plane that keeps going for 10+ more minutes was never going to be a good look
The problem here is that when you make the call to get out, you don't know that.
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.
Just trim it out. Everything is a wing if you are fast enough.
Thrust to weight solves most known problems!
Don't forget the Cornfield Bomber! The pilot ejected from this F-106 (a single-seat, single-engine all-weather interceptor) after passing through 15,000 feet in a flat spin - and the plane promptly exited the flat spin and proceeded to a soft landing in a farmer's field.
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!
Not in hindsight, no.
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).
> VMX-1 is in charge of assessing the Corps’ aircraft and helping develop and refine tactics, techniques and procedures to fly them in combat successfully.
> What sucks for the pilot is he followed procedure
He was the commander. He defines those procedures.
In other words, he was a rather experienced pilot in that airframe and knew it better than most pilots should.
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.
From the article:
> 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.
The crash happened in September of 2023. He was made commander of VMX-1 in June of 2024.
The time-line was roughly…
Offered command of VMX-1
Months pass
Crash plane
Months pass
Take command of VMX-1
Months pass
Loses command of VMX-1
Flat spins can get resolved by the CG adjustment from ejection: the famous cornfield bomber.
It's far more likely to have been the "equal and opposite" reaction to the ejection seat departing shoving the nose down that solved the spin. Shifting the CG aft won't improve your chances of departing from a flat spin. Various airframe designs have corner cases that they can't escape normally - delta wings are a bit prone to a flat spin, and you can get a T-tailed configuration into a "deep stall" where the disrupted airflow from the wings is blanketing the tail such that you cannot get the nose down with aerodynamic controls. The correct action is to avoid entering such conditions.
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.
In case anyone was wondering, he sent 109 million dollars into the great beyond.
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Sounds like he panicked and didn’t try long enough to exhaust his options before ejecting. The right call for the demotion
He was at 1900 feet and could not be sure in which direction the plane was going.
If the plane would fly towards the ground with mach 1 it would have hit it in 1.5 seconds.
The pilot had a justifiable lack of faith in the aircraft and didn't care to be the next pilot victim.
Yes, as the old saying goes “better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”
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.
There was exactly 1 (one) fatality involving F-35s. In Japan air force, attributed to the piloting error.
I'm sure had the pilot not ejected and the plane crashed, we'd all be calling it pilot error for not ejecting when in this situation, when the book called for ejecting.
The book didn't call for ejecting from a controllable plane. As per the fine article, the commander referred to a chapter that was not relevant for the situation.
This Number Of Fatalities On Any Other Platform Not Being The F-35 Will Shock You [link] !!!
For those downvoting you, the "justifiable lack of faith" here, above and beyond what was enumerated in the article, is that at the time this happened there had been two fatal F35 malfunctions/crashes in the preceding six weeks. I don't blame the pilot for not wanting to become another statistic.
Per the article, the other crashes weren't F35s. They were a "F/A-18D Hornet in southern California, which killed its pilot, and an MV-22 Osprey crash in Australia that killed three Marines."
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.
Somehow I missed that. Thanks.
64 miles the school bus sized rocket flew before crashing into some suburb.
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.
It takes 10 minutes to fall 2000 feet? Then why do the instructions say eject if you’re below 6k?
Normally such instructions say to eject if you're out of control below some specific altitude that the ejection system is known to be capable of operating within.
the un-written rule is that you wait to eject until the plane is coerced into over the sea instead of residential for navy and marine pilots.....dying if required...
Another F-35 fiasco. Shocker.
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There is no such thing as "human error."
Think about it - a single plane costs anywhere from 1/8 to 1/10 of a billion dollars. Anyone flying one should try pretty darned hard to save it.
I would hope that there's more to it than money. Loss of a plane can have a wider impact, but surely the gear is the expendable part. This isn't Warhammer 40k.
Nobody is saying that people are expendable. I'm saying that if you're responsible for a machine that costs as much as 250 families' homes, you should know that that machinery and you should try damned hard to make it work. After all, that's what everyone else does in every non-military airplane because you can't eject from non-military airplanes.
He really wanted one of those Bremont watches that they only sell to people who have ejected using one of their seats.
