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.

It’s bizzare to think that high command in the US is that shortsighted.

True. However, did you notice the emojis used in relation to the leaked Huthi attack? It’s difficult to place confidence in individuals wielding significant power when they conduct themselves like adolescents.

This doesn’t feel fair. The standards we have for how elected officials conduct themselves is very different from what we expect from non-political career civil servants, General Officers, and the like.

At our most charitable, we ought to recognize that in a democracy elected officials are plucked from the ranks of the general public. The qualifications for office are that you are the most popular person in the room, not the smartest, or the most professional.