Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?
So they fire the guy, and promote someone else that can be relied on to say that the F-35 has no more defects than any other plane had at this point in the program, and we can trust the US military industrial complex to deliver the F-47 in a similar fashion.
At the same time, you send a message: eject when your plane is misbehaving and you'll end your career. Sure, there's a risk that someone won't eject when they should, but there's also a chance that you'll be able to cover up another malfunction when the pilot nurses the plane back to base.
Did Pizzo say anything disparaging about the F-35? I doubt it. But when you've got billions of dollars of revenue/potential embarrassment on the line, you don't take chances.
Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
Did more information come up during the time period ?
Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
The software mess from F-35 would it be even worse without the standard, or has the existence of the standard hardly improved the coding practices as usually gets told.
Not that the answer to this philosophical question solves the issues for everyone affected by the F-35 software problems.
US has killed the allies trust.
Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.
It's disgusting but it's not that hard to figure out how it happens.
Sure. My point is it does become small enough to fail if its effective price to taxpayers doubles due to allies cancelling orders.
> remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets
Source?
He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell the plane to switch modes from STOL to regular forward flight. He didn't see if pitch, yaw, and roll flight controls were being respected, and it doesn't seem he tried to use the backup radio, or the backup instruments, other then glancing at them.
But I don't think he made a terrible decision! Ultimately he's still alive, he healed from his injuries, and no one else was hurt, and that's a good outcome in my opinion. But maybe his judgment in a crisis situation isn't good enough for the command position he was given. He did lose a $165M piece of equipment, one that he very well may have been able land safely, and while I would never place that above the lives of actual humans, it does matter. And that's really what the three reports said: many other pilots probably would have done what he did in that situation, but he should have taken more time to ascertain whether his plane was flyable or not, even if that would have put him at further risk.
Maybe he would have been fine continuing to be a test pilot under the command of someone else's test group, but maybe his superiors decided that his actions showed he wasn't the kind of person they wanted in command. I dunno; I've never been a Marine (or any kind of military officer), so I don't know either way. But I suspect most of us here haven't, and don't really have expert knowledge on how these sorts of things are supposed to work.
Up till now, there was no demonstrated risk of this happening - but that's a broken trust which won't be repaired for generations, if ever.
Even today, with all this talk around NATO, there’s a massive U.S. military presence at NATO bases across Europe.
These forces are, in effect, under U.S. control, stationed in countries like Germany and Italy. And if Germany suddenly decided it wanted them gone - well, it’s not their call.
TL;DR: Life on the empire’s periphery might be comfortable, but you don’t get to choose your enemies - and you still have to pay your dues, or else.
Whether actual kill switches exist is unknown. But if you were a European country, would you take the chance of buying fighters from a country threatening to invade multiple of your allies based on their assurance that the rumors about kill switches are nothing but unsubstantiated rumors?
But everyone viewed this kill switch as a way broader than HIMARS, and rightfully so.
It will be foolish to assume that the USA has the capacity to turn HIMARS targeting capacity off, literally incapacitating the system which was built in the 90s, but somehow won't be able to kill switch a F35... This is disingenuous.
No country should trust their national security on the whims of one guy sitting in the White House, that can decide to side with the enemy and make your jets stop working because of disabled services.
Are you sure about this?
It takes a lot of time and hours to get a pilot to the point they can probe the edges that test pilots do. The whole goal is to actually keep them alive so their experience and observations can be used. And that just compounds. So while they fly maneuvers and situations that would absolutely overwhelm me as a 300 hour private pilot in my Tecnam, my feeling is that even at that point they fly at less relative risk than I do. They are experts in mitigating, and preparing for risk.
There are old pilots and bold pilots. I do not believe that being a test pilot is a mandate that forces one to transfer to the bold club.
The F-35 is technically capable but even that is subject to export controls despite being purpose-built for export. A lot of European companies have a large stake in the success of the F-35 in its various versions because they are building it for European customers.
The result is that the F-35 computers are being “upgraded” (lol) to the same compute power as a first-gen Apple Watch… starting this year and finishing who-knows-when.
Meanwhile the F-16 which is “not as important” has already been upgraded with the same kind of chips as modern GPUs and has orders of magnitude more performance than the “flying computer” the the F-35 was supposed to be.
Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already.
How do you imagine that will work? The US may have to lower the price more than they can afford to. Some countries have already cancelled their F-35 orders. You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
At our most charitable, we ought to recognize that in a democracy elected officials are plucked from the ranks of the general public. The qualifications for office are that you are the most popular person in the room, not the smartest, or the most professional.
Not the typical mindset of someone wanting true superiority through military power. Makes you think twice.
The F35 is expensive, keeps the defense apparatus going, and ultimately gets paid for by other countries. F22 barely reached production, so F47 will be interesting.
Rolls-Royce builds the LiftSystem for the F-35B variant.
Martin-Baker builds the ejection seats for all F-35s.
Leonardo builds the wing sets.
Rheinmetall is planning to build fuselage for a large number.
Kongsberg developed the Joint Strike Missile meant to be carried inside the fuselage to maintain stealth profile while engaging targets at long ranges.
That gives him a window of what? 1-3 seconds maybe? To "test" if controls were working
I find it refreshing, however, that the "we are the evil empire now" idea is getting out of the closet. Call a spade a spade.
While the European defense contractors may promise a comparable plane, they have a poor track record of delivering such a thing anywhere close to the near future.
[0] https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/den...
The unfortunate reality, which the US is exploiting, is that Europe would struggle to produce an equivalent of the nerfed F-35, never mind one that hadn’t been nerfed. As a consequence, the US can sell nerfed F-35s all day. There aren’t many alternatives currently. 4.5 gen aircraft aren’t competitive in a serious conflict and everyone knows it. Even the US has to contend with that reality.
Obviously, it is a gamble, to wit the current administration, but I'm sure, on election day, most voters of the USA thought that the current president would do the best job. Many learn now they were mistaken, but this happens. That's the beauty of democracy, we can vote the incompetents out.
Or why Europeans didn't insist to get same version (probably no leverage). Well any next armament purchase by Europe thats smarter than a lead bullet should have full code delivery with all build processes. Still not 100% perfect scenario but least minimum acceptable.
Some general's wet dream of dogfights in Maverick's style are modern day fantasies. What those planes are used for are just lobbing glide bombs or shooting missiles. Their biggest enemy is on ground. Sure, small radar signature helps massively but that's not enough. Otherwise US would send 500 F-35 into North korean airspace and wipe out most of its military... not going to happen.
You made the extraordinary claim that the USA has no kill switch. Where's the proof to your claim?
By what mechanism is this mediated? Because that sounds awfully similar to a kill switch in terms of the end result. Analogy by way of enterprise software: "We didn't remotely disable the software you purchased from us. Rather our server simply refuses to service your requests which happen to be required for the software to function." (Evil laugh from man with goatee immediately follows this statement obviously.)
I agree with the assertion that there's no proof of a full killswitch based on known past events, but the above quoted statement is also a lot more definitive than I'm willing to be.
With a fighter jet as dependent upon electronic support systems as the F35 and which is sold around the world why wouldn't you put a highly classified backdoor killswitch into it just in case?
The idea that such a killswitch might exist is one that could have always reasonably been pondered, what's new is any/all non-US "Western" governments having to seriously entertain the idea that they would end up in a situation where the US would have a reason to use it against them.
Greenland has always been an ally, if for safety reasons the US needs more military presence on the island they could have just asked for it and it would most likely have been approved.
There is zero reason to use force, but if the US would take such steps I wouldn't be surprised if Europe starts replacing the dollar as reserve currency. This could trigger other nations like China to follow. This move would hurt the US economy way worse than the current trade war does.
American-made systems are present in most western developed military hardware, there might be backdoors or killswitches in any of it.
I don't think you can conclude that when neither of the belligerents has the capability. As Gulf War shows, training and capabilities (including stealth) do enable SEAD/DEAD to an extent that unlocks air superiority.
I don't think it was a matter of leverage, but more of a blind trust in US Institutions, and denying the reality of their collapse.
No one would have believed at any point in the last 80 years that the US would be threatening to invade and annex Canada or Greenland, all while having a group of protected billionaires promoting the collapse of the European Union, the rise of nazism and the protection of a Russian autocratic regime.
In hindsight, the project was (as expected) over budget etc. I wish our government(s) had given that money to European fighter jets instead. There's a chance the US will remote disable the jets that have been put into service now, or withold service / spare parts.
USA has air superiority only against 3rd world countries, and even then, history shows that air superiority has never won any war.
Air superiority alone doesn't, but it's a massive force multiplier.
You might be surprised by what kind of functionality can be squeezed out of "weak" CPU when programmers know how to work on hardware with limited resources.
“Good” and “evil” are moral constructs that haven’t played a meaningful role in documented geopolitics since at least the 4th century BC.
There’s a well-known quote often attributed to Hastings Ismay that captures NATO’s original purpose. I won’t paste it here as it might come off as a bit harsh, and I’m not trying to drag this discussion out further.
> That's a fantasy, unless you think Germany is occupied by the USA. But that's not the case.
Circling back to Germany—I honestly can't think of a more humiliating moment for any NATO member than this[^1]. Sure, Mr. Biden was more aesthetically pleasing than Mr. Trump but take a moment to consider the symbolism and the signals sent to ally nations. Regardless of media narratives, the events of September 26, 2022, marked a turning point that fundamentally altered Germany’s economic path and future. It was a hostile act on a massive scale, and its consequences are undeniably real for the country.
I guessed you meant that that one case proves something about air superiority or Iran having an advantage over USAF, so I responded with a historical parallel.
What does surprise me is a $110M plane that is being upgraded at the low-low-cost of a mere $300K each to this: https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-i...
Yes, that "High-Performance Integrated Core Processor" is pulling 4.5 kW to produce as much computer power as a typical PC in the late 1990s!
The "1 ATR SHORT" version lists 2 modules and takes 300 Watts, so 450 Watts would line up perfectly for the "1 ATR LONG" which takes 3 modules. 4.5 kW doesn't make a lot of sense here.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/03/09/russian-media-claim...
Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies. Very doable.
Talk of the Chinese being invited in by Canada or Mexico is precisely as much of a casus belli as Ukraine saying "please let us join NATO so Russia won't invade us!". Canada already has reason to fear invasion regardless, as Trump keeps talking about annexing them.
It didn't work out well for Russia, which is currently experiencing in Ukraine much what the US itself experienced in Vietnam. Or indeed in Cuba (Bay of Pigs) the year before the nuclear missiles which were much closer to a real casus belli.
Which is why military alliance discussions aren’t conducted in public. The series of announcements would be e.g. Xi visiting Ottawa for trade talks and then announcing that Canada is under its nuclear umbrella.
> Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies
Which is why they’ve sought external security guarantees. Now that America is threatening invasion, its security guarantees are diluted. So you need someone else; the only option is China (unless the EU beefs up).
Problem is, China might be happy to see the US invade Canada, because then they can finally take Taiwan. And that's the real danger of Trump's foolish aggression: by weakening American's alliances, he's giving China more space to assert itself and take what they want.
I'm showing my age here, sorry. It is a play on something Ronald Reagan said about another empire.