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

(www.cnn.com)
279 points Michelangelo11 | 9 comments | 27 Aug 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
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ChicagoBoy11 ◴[27 Aug 25 13:37 UTC] No.45039506[source]▶
Very different scenario, but flying my puddle jumper one of the first times after getting my license, once I took off from an airport in Connecticut and was about to cross a large body of water, my exhaust temperatures spiked really, really high, essentially indicating the engine was seconds from melting. But it didn't.

So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily with the equipment on board I managed a call to the flight school, who put me in touch with the mechanic. I circled above an airport as he pulled up the maintenance logs, we discussed what I was seeing, he noted that there had been a report of a sensor issue that had been squawked, so we concluded I should feel safe to fly straight home.

At the time it felt insanely cool to be able to be doing that WHILE flying the plane. While an unfortunate outcome for this particular pilot, as an elite pilot, part of me thinks when this cropped up part of him was like: "ahh right, this is why I'm top dog"

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reactordev ◴[27 Aug 25 13:46 UTC] No.45039605[source]▶
This kind of stuff happens all the time. Especially if you ignore a controller instruction. They'll have a number for you.

But really there's a ton of small, unmanned airfields (some in peoples backyards!) that have a number you can call to operate things like the runway papi lights. Call to order a burger to go. Or just call to talk to Fred, the owner, to see how his day was.

As long as you can safely operate the aircraft, in the pattern, there's nothing stopping you from using your cell or your radio or starlink to contact ground. Just always make sure you're in communication with any air traffic controllers operating in that space.

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quest88 ◴[27 Aug 25 13:55 UTC] No.45039753[source]▶
As a pilot, your comment sounds like it was from an llm. PAPI is controlled from the radio, not a phone call. Why would you call ground instead of tower if there’s a ground frequency? Order a burger and talk to bob? It sounds like the llm is trying to describe a Unicom frequency and conflating that with contacting an FBO over the radio to arrange transportation, possibly food I suppose too.
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reactordev ◴[27 Aug 25 14:03 UTC] No.45039875[source]▶
I take it you never flew VFR over Nebraska corn…

Yes, papi lights are operated by radio. However, not everyone has fancy radios and only has handhelds, their Nokia phone, or their right arm wave…

It’s not all class C+ out there.

I will point out that PAPI lights as part of a PCL system are operated using mic clicks on CTAF radio. These systems are expensive and sometimes you’re landing in a grass field and just need the runway lights so you don’t run into the trees. You can click your mic as many times as you want, you’ll still be in the dark. The only way is to call Phil…

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1. tsunamifury ◴[27 Aug 25 14:37 UTC] No.45040343[source]▶
It’s interesting now that a side effect of LLMs is that people can say anything outside their experience is just a hallucination. I didn’t realize how the fear of hallucination could enable this level of belligerence.
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2. Sharlin ◴[27 Aug 25 14:45 UTC] No.45040460[source]▶
The goal of information warfare was never to make you blindly trust sources that should not be trusted. The goal is to fill your brain with conflicting information so you're not sure what or who to trust anymore.

In this post-truth era it's strangely apt that confabulation in particular happened to be a major failure mode of our shiny new AI tech. Almost too apt for it to be a mere coincidence…

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3. reactordev ◴[27 Aug 25 15:06 UTC] No.45040744[source]▶
I’m more worried about the young generation taking LLM as fact. Or thinking they are talking to an expert in the field. When an expert will say “Let’s find out!”.

They weren’t taught to think, they were taught to ask.

Taught that there’s only “one way” to live. “One way” to a good paying job. “One way” to go to college. When that’s a lie they tell you so that you conform, pay tuition, or pay restitution.

There’s pilots that operate all over the world. Not everything is FAA approved. Not everything is by the book unless you fly commercial.

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4. thatguy0900 ◴[27 Aug 25 15:31 UTC] No.45041086[source]▶
It's only really a matter of time before open registry forums are completely unusable for normal discussion, whether due to llms or paranoia of llms
5. positron26 ◴[27 Aug 25 15:38 UTC] No.45041170[source]▶
By far the funniest thing to me about post-LLM culture is being told stop using an LLM and to learn English. I'm not sure who failed the Turing test.
6. positron26 ◴[27 Aug 25 16:14 UTC] No.45041628[source]▶
Look, they said this about us using Google. Oh no. The Dewey Decibel System [sic]

And then twenty years later, I'm pretty convinced that the online siloing has worn us down. A lot of us. But the problems that came weren't what the reactionaries were going on about. It never is.

It's been ten years since my friend and I were saying as I was walking out the door, "This whole internet thing, let just.." "...yeah, let's turn it off." There was profound sense of optimism in the early internet. We saw it together, and we knew it hadn't worked out, that it was stabilizing onto a kind of bad trajectory.

I still don't think the optimism was wrong. I think we're in some kind of perverse equilibrium where there are dams exist that, if they did not, would lead to some wildly different world rushing in, like what if you came to realize one day that 9/11 and all its self-inflicted after-effects never happened levels of mass self-transformation.

Someone else brought up surveillance economy, and that's really relevant here and to what I'm doing. I think the ad-economy alone has a lot of perverse incentive that has basically destroyed journalism and the meaning of credibility for now. But the idea of the surveillance economy is right about how the pieces fit together like cursed legos. We have content that is addictive but not entertaining being used to serve us ads for things we don't need.

It's not just that we need to commercialize open source if it will ever reach mass market. We have to better monetize independent media for its goodness and coherence with reality or we're never going to have a shared set of facts in our social consciousness again.

7. BoorishBears ◴[27 Aug 25 17:32 UTC] No.45042511[source]▶
I'm sure everything you just said was said when books came into vogue.

All of it applies after all, to a tee.

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8. reactordev ◴[27 Aug 25 18:06 UTC] No.45042954{3}[source]▶
lol, fair point. Youngsters will never know the hate for cursive Palmer method.
9. tsunamifury ◴[27 Aug 25 18:11 UTC] No.45043014[source]▶
Many argue after they reach sufficient levels of power in society that this is simply a more accurate representation of reality which was never singularly coherent.