I feel like we had a discussion of this crash in the past. Would be nice to find those threads.
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?
My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail". They needed to blame the pilot, and certainly didn't need anyone familiar with the defects of the plane in a prominent command or as a general.
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.
> My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail"
Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets.
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.
Yeah this is both bad but also being heavily misreported: the US can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software effectively disables critical functionality which can effectively render a platform useless.
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.
I think they're saying there might be one, and we no longer trust the USA to believe there isn't one (and I can't really understand why we ever did, USA has been an unreliable ally even before trump).
You made the extraordinary claim that the USA has no kill switch. Where's the proof to your claim?
> can't shutdown hardware remotely, but loss of access to proprietary software
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.)
> the US can't shutdown hardware remotely
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.
What an absurd argument to justify the baseless idea.
American-made systems are present in most western developed military hardware, there might be backdoors or killswitches in any of it.
If true (The sourcing is a tad dubious?), it doesn't need to be a literal kill switch. Withholding software updates can be problematic enough.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/03/09/russian-media-claim...