A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475

Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark..

Did more information come up during the time period ?

Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.

He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground.

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.

> He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk.

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 article mentions that "A small backup display was partially functional, but Del Pizzo had to look down to see it".

He was not a test pilot! The F-35B entered service in 2015, the incident happened in 2023. He was a squadron commander, in charge of training other pilots to fly the plane.

He was 700 feet off the ground and descending

That gives him a window of what? 1-3 seconds maybe? To "test" if controls were working