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

(www.cnn.com)
279 points Michelangelo11 | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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. gregoriol ◴[27 Aug 25 16:05 UTC] No.45041508[source]▶
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.