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

I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that conclusion.

The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"

Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session

Ejections are pretty rough, and occasionally career or even life ending. So there would be a lot of pressure on the engineers to try to avoid it. Plus, this plane is very expensive. The cost is multiple times the average lifetime earnings of a typical person. It's not entirely wrong to say that they were attempting to save the life's work of multiple people.

I wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.

I imagine that ejecting at certain phases of these two attempts would not be survivable.

"The pilot then tried two “touch and go” landings, where the plane briefly lands, to try to straighten out the jammed nose gear, the report said."

When you're chosing to egress because the plane stops to know where it is or where it isn't, would you want it to decide how fast to eject? Chances are that the ejection system won't get reliable data to decide on in these situations.

According to the ejection seat manufacturer [1] there is no minimum height or speed at which the ejection seat can be used, so as long as the aircraft is roughly level then the ejection should be survivable.

[1] https://martin-baker.com/ejection-seats/us16e/

It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.

Also the now-pilotless aircraft could potentally kill people on the ground when it crashes. If this had happened in a more populated area it very likely would have.

I've never heard of this, but I imagine it would only make sense as a manual override used explicitly for controlled-ejection scenarios. This incident was almost one of those, but turned into an uncontrolled one.

I don't think so. It's a solid rocket motor, there's no modulating such things.

The actual report mentions that this was a concern for actually landing the plane (as opposed to touch and go), because there was real possibility that the plane would end up in attitude that can hardly be described as "roughly level".

The main times a "0/0" ejection would be expected to be unsurvivable are going really fast (e.g. breaking the mach), and with some combo of high sink rate and high bank.

Even if the ejections happened with no fault on your part?

Also isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?

I've been told that ejections are violent enough that pilots can end up permanently shorter. A short bit of searching turned up this case study of two pilots' injuries/outcomes:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9453365/

I went to an ejected pilot call when I worked in EMS. Guy was ok but protocol was handle as potential spinal injury. The force of ejecting puts a lot of compression on intervertebral discs and the effect is cumulative so more ejections means more chance of trashing your back.

I would expect if the aircraft were level at 50 ft above the ground, flying inverted, an ejection would not be survivable.

It depends on why and your medicals. There's not hard limit of 2.

I think it's about health concerns

Your spine doesn't care why an ejection happened.

I assume it's what they meant with "as long as the aircraft is roughly level"...

I'm surprised they don't design the seats such that they pop out two bars under your armpit so that you transfer some of the forces into your shoulder and collar bone instead of just the spine.

Same way car seat belts horribly injure people if they let it rest on their stomachs instead of on their hips.

That might also be influenced by the situation which necessitated the ejection. Ejecting in optimal conditions could have a 0.1% fatality rate (not a real statistic), but cases of ejecting from a disintegrating plane at 100 feet probably aren't as safe.

I guess trashing a couple hundred million dollars is a occasionally considered an issue

tho looking at how contracts have traditionally been funded you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t

These things are rocket powered and deploy in milliseconds. That sounds like a great way to exit the plane without your arms.

Not a bad idea at face value but as opposed to seatbelts it introduces additional complexity that has to handle every eventuality including G forces from any direction, and still function perfectly. Probably has failure modes that increase injury risk. But this isn't a bad line of thought to go down, ultimately.

Not with modern Martin-Baker seats. IIRC since 2000, something like 800 ejections have happened, of which one lead to a fatality, which was caused by improper maintenance to the seat. (Martin-Baker was chastised for not warning maintainers of the specific risks of overtightening certain bolts above printed spec.)

When Russians were still flying planes deep over Ukraine, they have something like a 50% fatality rate on ejection, but that might be exacerbated by Ukrainian locals often finding the ejected pilots before any military force does, and people getting bombed have historically not liked the people flying the bombers much. When a pilot on the ground has a lot of bruises and a snapped neck, it's often hard to identify whether that happened during the ejection, during the landing, or after. And even when the cause was clearly violence, the emergency services might not be overly interested in blaming anyone or anything but the seat.

The forces involved would only pop your shoulders and not provide any support for your back via your underarm. And the speed the bars would need to come out at, might end up inside your chest cavity. The ejection seats are a last ditch save from certain death. I’d take the loss of an inch or two to my height than the alternative.

Many seat types have multiple distinct motors for redundancy reasons. Even if there are not, you can adjust the effective output of a solid rocket motor by modifying the nozzle configuration, and Martin-Baker has an expired patent on this.

... but even if the seat in question was able to adjust the ejection thrust (which I don't think it was), this particular situation involved ejection really close to the ground, which calls for maximum thrust.

The pilot could eject at mostly any time, not if the plane starts spinning uncontrollably though. Also, the plane can become very dangerous to what may be on the ground: if the pilot looses control and must eject it may not always be in a safe place to crash. Or even worse, the plane may continue to fly some distance and crash at a very different place than expected. So yeah, very stressful for everyone involved.

It’s a massive issue - crashes are investigated and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to lose their jobs if they deviate from procedures. A few years back, a Marine Colonel was relieved of a prestigious command after being found to have ejected too early:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...

1) It's too fast.

2) Think your shoulders could take it?? It's IIRC ~15g.

I do think they probably could make a gentler ejection mode as the seats are built for the worst case. The lower your airspeed the longer you have to get high enough to clear the tail and thus less acceleration is needed.

Note that that was the third review. The first two exonerated him--the real problem was his helmet wigged out. His plane was actually flyable but it was lying to him. And the rule was if the plane is not responding properly to pilot commands below 6,000' AGL eject.

And note the situation over Ukraine. There are systems like the Patriot--you do not want to be above the horizon to one of them. But so long as you're some distance from the launcher and stay very low the Patriot can't see you. But that puts you very much in danger from stuff like a Stinger and when one finds your engine you're going to go in very, very fast.

I believe the only relevant factor is airspeed.

Car airbags are basically that, and they have different levels of deployment (on a much lower budget).