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"

Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session

It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.

I went to an ejected pilot call when I worked in EMS. Guy was ok but protocol was handle as potential spinal injury. The force of ejecting puts a lot of compression on intervertebral discs and the effect is cumulative so more ejections means more chance of trashing your back.

I'm surprised they don't design the seats such that they pop out two bars under your armpit so that you transfer some of the forces into your shoulder and collar bone instead of just the spine.

Same way car seat belts horribly injure people if they let it rest on their stomachs instead of on their hips.