F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

This is wild. You can't get away from these zoom calls even as an F-35 pilot.

I bet, once the gear malfunctioned, Clippy popped up on the screen and suggested to call support.

Hey, all Clippy ever wanted to do was help.

Am I the only one thinking that it's time for something like an R2D2? Presumably it could get into some crammed spaces and thaw things out of needed. I'm sure it's a stupid idea, BTW, but a fun one )

At least it wasn't Bonzi Buddy telling jokes to lighten up the mood.

I think the call was only 10 minutes long. For 40 minutes the pilot was just waiting for the next available representative.

I'd pay a lot of money for a zoom premium version that has a real eject button.

40 minutes realizing they need to update Zoom, updating Zoom, then trying to figure out why their mic isn't working.

Especially if it connects to the chairs of other participants.

Randomly

First he had to wait for the other engineers to update product on their Jira tickets.

That would give the term 'chatroulette' a totally different vibe.

That might explain why the computer thought it was on the ground while it was flying

I was told there is so much automation on those planes, the pilot does little flying. I always assumed they were kept busy going through their compliance trainings.

It's a fun idea. Though it would have to be a really small R2-D2 that could work from the inside.

The fictional R2-D2 had a big advantage of being in vacuum so it could work from the outside, without disturbing the airflow, and without having its work disturbed by the airflow.

Envisage what happens at 900km/h in atmosphere, if R2-D2 tries to lift up an exterior wing panel to troubleshoot a blocked line?

Well... aircraft maintenance doesn't work like that.

Even car maintenance doesn't work like that anymore. There's almost nothing you can do just by crawling around and messing with the parts there.

That gave me an idea of 6 person chats that go down to 2 for dating.

It would be funny if the reason the call was 50 minutes was because they were using the free version of Zoom, and the meeting ended automatically.

(I'm aware Zoom meeting limit is 40 minutes)

Here you go:

https://zoomescaper.com

Clippy never sold my data. Clippy never forced me to update when I didn't have time. Clippy never advertised things to me. Clippy never lied to me. Clippy didn't take hundreds of watts of power to provide incorrect answers.

Clippy was an assistant, built to help me solve problems I didn't understand, and built to help computer illiterate people use their computers more effectively and was made out of genuine expressions of making their product better for more people.