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

(www.cnn.com)
279 points Michelangelo11 | 6 comments | 27 Aug 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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1. chasil ◴[27 Aug 25 13:54 UTC] No.45039722[source]▶
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."

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2. nacnud ◴[27 Aug 25 14:29 UTC] No.45040231[source]▶
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/

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3. dfox ◴[27 Aug 25 14:56 UTC] No.45040587[source]▶
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".
4. the__alchemist ◴[27 Aug 25 14:57 UTC] No.45040602[source]▶
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.
5. jefftk ◴[27 Aug 25 15:07 UTC] No.45040759[source]▶
I would expect if the aircraft were level at 50 ft above the ground, flying inverted, an ejection would not be survivable.
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6. palata ◴[27 Aug 25 15:23 UTC] No.45040967{3}[source]▶
I assume it's what they meant with "as long as the aircraft is roughly level"...