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.

Ironically every time someone proudly assert the existence of F-35 C++ coding standard [0], I am not sure if they actually understand the impact.

The software mess from F-35 would it be even worse without the standard, or has the existence of the standard hardly improved the coding practices as usually gets told.

Not that the answer to this philosophical question solves the issues for everyone affected by the F-35 software problems.

[0] - http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

One fun thing about “too big” projects like the F-35 is that the project management overheads cause a kind of recursive overhead, like the rocket equation, but applied to technical outcomes instead of orbital velocity. Any change isn’t “just” the change, it now has to got through review boards, subcontractors, liaisons, integration reviews, etc…

The result is that the F-35 computers are being “upgraded” (lol) to the same compute power as a first-gen Apple Watch… starting this year and finishing who-knows-when.

Meanwhile the F-16 which is “not as important” has already been upgraded with the same kind of chips as modern GPUs and has orders of magnitude more performance than the “flying computer” the the F-35 was supposed to be.

Weep for the poor C++ developers forced to shoehorn modern software into a computer that isn’t yet as powerful as a battery-powered consumer device most people have upgraded three times already.