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

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.

The F-35 was designed for export. The F-22 wasn’t and I suspect the F-47 is not either. There are different objectives at work here.

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.

I think at large european industry has more stake in F-35 not being bought, and local planes be used instead.

The internal conflict is that the European planes that exist are nowhere as capable as the F-35.

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.