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

(www.cnn.com)
278 points Michelangelo11 | 7 comments | 27 Aug 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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yellow_lead ◴[27 Aug 25 12:24 UTC] No.45038691[source]▶
> Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.

I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.

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airstrike ◴[27 Aug 25 13:29 UTC] No.45039409[source]▶
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"

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codyb ◴[27 Aug 25 13:44 UTC] No.45039579[source]▶
Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session
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1. HPsquared ◴[27 Aug 25 13:53 UTC] No.45039701[source]▶
I wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.
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2. borlox ◴[27 Aug 25 14:25 UTC] No.45040175[source]▶
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.
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3. the__alchemist ◴[27 Aug 25 14:56 UTC] No.45040578[source]▶
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.
4. Sharlin ◴[27 Aug 25 14:56 UTC] No.45040583[source]▶
I don't think so. It's a solid rocket motor, there's no modulating such things.
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5. Tuna-Fish ◴[27 Aug 25 15:53 UTC] No.45041356[source]▶
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.

6. LorenPechtel ◴[27 Aug 25 19:50 UTC] No.45044268[source]▶
I believe the only relevant factor is airspeed.
7. HPsquared ◴[27 Aug 25 22:36 UTC] No.45046190[source]▶
Car airbags are basically that, and they have different levels of deployment (on a much lower budget).