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.

> 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.

No such kill switch exists, the US stopped providing electronic warfare intelligence that made the jets more survivable. The stoppage of all military aid was significantly more damaging.

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.