There is a whole science behind checklists like this. Surgeons have been learning this lesson for over a decade now: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2015/08/04/checklist...
Also it is possible that the cover did not restrict air flow until the aircraft entered a cruise flight regime or a certain altitude. Often aircraft will have different intake bypasses for different flight regimes. However, a cover like this SHOULD have a pin and momentary switch similar to lockouts for flight controls. But if the cover was an afterthought, implemented by crews and not the engineers, that may not have been accounted for.
Article states that the pilot attempted to abort takeoff, but ran out of runway on the ship. So, apparently the pilot knew something was wrong pretty soon after initiating takeoff.
edit: grammar
Anything that has a list of lists, and if-else-branches can be really hard to get right. You walk into one wrong branch due to human error, mistakes just multiply from there.
Also the worse thing is- you are confident that you are doing the right thing, while just making more mistakes.
Anyone in charge of this sort of mission critical stuff has to be willing to take it on the chin to ensure safety. If top brass isn't willing to take "safety" as an excuse for a delay or cancellation it's just going to propagate down and cause an accident.
As it should be. If you're just ticking boxes on a checklist of a weapons system responsible for life and death situations, without actually performing said checks, you shouldn't be entrusted with this job. This is beyond incompetence.
“Check for rain cover” isn’t as clear as “Remove rain cover from engine and stow in compartment labeled ‘Rain Cover’.”
One possible engineering solution would be to make the cover out of a material strong enough to keep out the weather, but flimsy enough that if the engine was running it would suck it in and harmlessly shred/burn it.
It is bloody red cover, sorry for the British f word. Just look ! It is strange to have that red thing.
Head rolling needed. Life and death in fighting situation.
Having said all that may be we should have that to baby sit these pilot. And ground crew.
It boggles my mind they wouldn't have put some kind of NFC chips in it at least to chime an alert "check intake cover".
It also is truly strange it couldn't detect the airflow anomaly on spool up, and at least alert the pilot / launch officers.
Could have a pattern embedded for super easy image recognition and a simple computer running continuous recognition of aircraft taking off (I'm sure there's cctv)... There's just so many ways to help prevent such a mistake!
I don't envy the crew explaining this.
But two things can be true:
- Procedures/checklists should have stopped this (and should be the primary way).
- The flight computer should know that air flowing into the engine is unusual when a cover is blocking it.
Also keep in mind that if both are fixed, this would be fixes from two different organizations (the British Navy and Lockheed Martin/F-35B's manufacturing chain).
This happened at peace time. I can imagine during a stressful wartime situation human error is more likely to occur, which is even more reason why computer sanity checks can be advantageous.