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

It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject.

Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.

Implicit in this view is that a pilot’s life has a cash value and that value is something less than “hundreds of millions of dollars” or a single digit multiple thereof.

The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD.

He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled.

How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.

The only thing such a policy leads to is losing pilots, either by them not ditching when they should or them leaving a toxic work environment.

I think you’ll find that the cost to train pilots is also substantial. Mostly pilots have 100-1000s of hours to be “combat ready” at many $1000s/flight hr. Google says around $10M for F-35 pilot.

Better to follow protocol and eject. The link is a story where a good pilot followed protocol but still got screwed over.

The cost of the pilot will always be less than the cost of the plane. So why provide the capability to eject in the first place? Presumably you get better pilots when they know a problem with the plane doesn’t mean death for them or their career.

It is absolutely bad practice to throw away a $25 million investment because of a single mistake (that was not a mistake in this case).

Don't throw good money after bad.

Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash.

It’s similar to why search and rescue don’t bill you after they’re called - they don’t want to add a reason to hesitate and make your problems worse.

10m for new pilot. This guy was a full bird instructor with 1000s of hours. Probably closer to 30 or 50 million.

> Eject and lose your career means more pilots will crash.

Maybe, maybe not. But I do expect that if another pilot finds himself in Del Pizzo's situation, they're going to do a more thorough survey of the plane's capabilities before ejecting. Maybe that's the outcome the Marines is looking for, even if it puts their pilots at risk more often.

Not just that, but training pilots takes time, and getting them the experience they need to be seasoned pilots takes even more time. While you can certainly put a dollar amount on the cost of that training and experience, it's harder to quantify how much it's worth to have a trained, experienced pilot right now, vs. a new one that's starting from scratch and won't be at the same level for years.

The alternative solution, using planes that don't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, seems easier

In other words to you human lives are worth less than F-35s.

You have no real reason to believe that, you are pulling the reasons out of your rear. Read the reports, literally the investigations themselves concluded that most pilots would have ejected and that there was no misconduct.

You don’t know what you are talking about.

Yes. There is a finite $ value on a human life from a government point of view.

For your loved ones it is infinite.

But for a government with X funds and Y lives to save, there has to be a price.

If someone ejects on every little problem, you spend billions more on that and billions less on some other life saving initiatives.

Putting aside the bad ejection survival stats.

This angle doesn't make much sense in the context of a weapon

I think the plane is only $136M in the context of the overall program and it's projected number of planes built over the program lifespan.

The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.

Yes, governments will assign a value to human lives for making decisions.

Dans ce pays, il est bon de tuer un pilote de temps à autre, pour encourager les autres.

Of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve objectives.

First of all, the F-35's job is to kill people, let's not get overly moralistic here, but of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve military objectives. If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is asked to choose between losing 20 enlisted privates in a training accident vs. losing 20 B-2 bombers which one is he going to choose?