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

> 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.

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"

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.