If it's going to crash (and can't autoland, which it probably shouldn't attempt even if it could if something ejection-worthy happened), might as well obliterate the thing in a safe place.
By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point.
Autopilot isn’t an all knowing AI that is better at dealing with emergency than a pilot. In the region of flight that involves a pilot ejection, especially in a plane like the F-35, the “autopilot” that would be created that could successfully scout a target area that was safe to crash in, eject the pilot, then somehow move the plane to that area with the canopy off the plane and the degradation of control that would involve, plus the million issues that could have caused the ejection in the first place… it’s not plausible to create this and still have a pilot. You’re talking about a system that is a better aviator, with more SA and more detail about aircraft systems than the human at the stick.
So, first, I don’t think we’re there with AI that is better than the pilot in this region of flight, second, to make that would be so expensive as to be ridiculous, for the incredibly rare event that a military plane needs to eject over a populated area yet also has a safe area like a body of water to crash into. Third, making that system would negate the need for a pilot in the first place so again, what’s the point?
I get the thought, but it’s silly.
b...bu... but all the twitter influencers told me... /s
4 - if you had control with some badass AI why not land the plane safely for a recovery... the example in both the OP and the GP are planes lost in the country they are from not in enemy territory. The planes are not cheap... why would you purposefully wreck it in in a safe location.
Why not rig it with explosives around the sensitive components and avoid the messy endeavor of trying to orient the plane for maximum destruction after ejection when that is likely to be unreliable at best?
Anyway, it’s moot. The people with the resources to actually make this stuff already hacked in and stole it. They compromised a whole CA just to get the F-35 design docs.
I’ll just reiterate, by the time a pilot is ejecting from the aircraft, everything has been done. Read through the incident reports and find me an incident where this wasn’t done, cite it please. I can’t find one.
Not saying it is plausible or not in the first place, I have no idea, but I don’t see how a lack of published reports of this happening in the real world proves anything.
My limited knowledge leads me to believe this would be an absolute last resort and has a high risk if injuring the pilot.
Also, installing these in the passenger seat of your car is expensive, difficult, and illegal just in case anyone is also thinking of this right now.
I doubt an autopilot would have regained control in a flat spin without an ejection to drastically change the dynamics of the aircraft. I also made the point later that a sufficiently capable AI that could would essentially be able to replace the pilot, rending them moot.
Look, the OP clarified that he meant he wanted an autopilot that tries to lawn dart the plane in an incident of ejection, the purpose of which was to save sensitive technology from the enemy. I still maintain that is silly and if we funded such a program it would be a waste of money.
It seems like they probably bail out when they've exhausted every option of being able to land it and survive. There are likely some scenarios where there's limited controls remaining, that wouldn't provide high enough odds of guaranteeing someone's survival, but that could optimize for something when it eventually makes contact with the land. In fact, it seems like there could be quite a bit of capabilities between where someone would want to bail out and where there are zero remaining controls.
What you all are imagining does not happen, and the odds of it happening are vanishingly small.
“The statement went on to add that the crash was caused by an issue with one of the engines during takeoff, but the jet's two crewmembers are said to have ejected safely and survived. The extent of the injuries to the apartment building's tenants as well as civilians in the surrounding area is unknown at present.”
Like, how the heck do you all know so much? The demographics of this site are unreal
This one? Which reads as though the back-seater (not the pilot) was the one that ejected and took the pilot with him?
And in fact, if it's reliable, it can help saving pilots lives.
Additionally, I highly doubt there are many privately owned military jets equipped with ejection seats that are allowed to fly, especially in residential airspace.
Also, as someone who works on FMS's the likelihood that a military program would spend the money required to code an AT/AP to have that capability is just too close to zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftcn3NwAZCI
tldr; they were out of airspeed and out of altitude barely within ejection envelope (i.e. exhausted all the options)
Military pilots most assuredly do not seek permission to eject. Given time they may indeed seek advice about the likelihood of a good landing.
This guy is a thoughtful YouTuber, former F-14 RIO (back seat guy), who has covered it a few times.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ward+carroll+ej...
My outside, civilian impression from lots of aviator interviews is that the military values its expensive hardware very highly and does not like it if you make expensive mistakes. But my impression is also that it does value the life of its aviators highly as well. They do not want you to die in general and they do not want you do die in order to save a plane.
The decision to eject is often a very very split-second decision. When things go wrong in the air they go wrong in a hurry, especially during takeoff/landing when there is very very little distance between you and the ground.
Just like any job, a mishap that is your fault might be a negative for your aviation career. But one that is the result of equipment failure or something else outside of your control isn't going to be a black mark. My impression is that the military generally tries to get these things right, because it is generally in the military's best interest to perform at a high level and because big expensive mishaps (particularly aviation-related ones) generate a lot of bad press.
The amount of time it takes to train up a replacement pilot vastly outweighs a new airframe acquisition. Furthermore, ejection is still an incredibly dangerous activity with plenty of chances for things to fail or go sideways, and a near 100% chance of injury. Like, canopy seperation failing, but seat rockets fire due to safety failure...
Suffice it to say, no, there is absolutely no pressure on pilots to not avail themselves of ejecting over and above the fact that controlled demolition of people tank at appreciable fractions of Mach, under fire, or in any of a myriad of inconvenient orientations relative to airstream and/or lithosphete and/or material formerly contributing to the ongoing flight of a perfectly good airplane is exactly nobody's definition of a good day except measured relative to the alternative of being the first to the site of the crash.
Also:
> During a training mission from Malmstrom Air Force Base, on Feb. 2, 1970, his F-106 entered an uncontrollable flat spin forcing him to eject. Unexpectedly, the aircraft recovered on its own and made a gentle belly landing and skidding for a few hundred yards on a field near Big Sandy, Montana, covered by some inches of snow.
Additionally there would be a nose down moment from the seat firing (newtons third law) and that may well have broken the stall.
However, see my other note as well, there would be a nose down moment when the seat fires. There would also be a massive drag profile change. Any of these things have good potential to disrupt a stabilized spin.
My main point is that it's almost certainly not the case that the pilot was actively making incorrect inputs before ejecting. The ejection itself is the variable that likely would disrupt a spin in such a situation, not the pilot no longer making inputs.
>Notably, the F-15, (with a crew of two), managed to land safely at a nearby airbase, despite having its right wing almost completely sheared off in the collision. The lifting body properties of the F-15, together with its overabundant engine thrust, allowed the pilot to achieve this unique feat.
Just posting here because it is awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_sho...
Sample dual ejection:
See, you say that, but this one seems to have done a good job of flying off to who the fuck knows where after the pilot ejected.
The F-35 is really a game changer. What a shitbox
I doubt the software is doing that today but why couldn't there be maneuvers the plane could do at 15 Gs that would help it survive?
For one, the jets are engineered around the limits of the pilots. These are high performance military aircraft where every ounce of weight matters, the airframe isn’t over engineered to support 15g maneuvers. Ripping the wings off wouldn’t help in an emergency.
I made the point later that by the time the AI is a more capable aviator, with the SA to do what OP was suggesting, the pilot is redundant. Take them out, engineer the plane to make those 15g turns with the extra weight you save not having life support, seats, canopy, etc.
One of the things I remember from Chuck Yeager's autobiography (his first one - I think he eventually had several) is that he called bullshit on this. His view was that the pilot was putting all his attention and focus into saving the aircraft, and stories about how the pilot steered a failing aircraft away from something important on the ground were not true.
Of course, after the fact a pilot is going to say he tried to save people on the ground...
(his view might have been cynical, but I expect it often holds true)
Exceptions defiantly exist, but it’s a very common reaction.
Real rough shit.
In my memory, my impression of Yeager's brief anecdote was that "the pilot heroically sacrificed himself to save the lives of innocents on the ground" was a common enough bullshit news story that he wanted to debunk it. A pilot would be focused on saving himself and his aircraft to the fullest extent possible.
There are many incidents that prove this wrong. The comment above yours is one example.
> There are many incidents that prove this wrong.
No, there aren't, and your saying so is just a failure in logic. Literally every instance of a crash would have to play out the way you insist it should, with a pilot taking into account the presence of population centers before ejecting, in order to "prove this wrong." (incidentally, I read your comment about having read every incident report involving an ejection since 1999. This is the sort of comment that, in the absence of further information, arouses skepticism and not trust.)
The tag team duo of MiG pilots who crashed in Michigan a couple of weeks ago didn't even agree on whether it was time to eject. They certainly hadn't placed the plane on some kind of safe trajectory (it landed literally right next to an apartment building). For that matter, maybe that incident is somehow an argument for selfishness: if they hadn't punched out right when they did, they would have been outside the envelope for a safe ejection.
Then, I’ll just tell you in my personal experience in the airplane, I’ve seen 2 pilots risk their lives moving away from a town and not die (luckily) but crash and destroy their airframe. The other pilots I flew with, I’d say 95 out of 100 would do the same.
Maybe Chuck was just a selfish asshole.
Every other option with the pilot on board. The plane _may_ be easier to fly without it.
FTA: “The loss of the weight of the crew, seats, and canopy, as well as the shift in the center of gravity, have seen aircraft pull out of an imminent crash with nobody left onboard.”
I think quite some pilots died this way because they were trying to the last second to save other lives.
If plane is that much out of control that you cannot do much, adding some code to try to do something might make things actually worse from my perspective.
Seems like a pretty good idea to self-destruct the most sensitive hardware (computers/chips/storage modules/etc) if recovery of the aircraft is no longer feasible.
Ooh, yeah. Let's add even more failure modes!
Not quite the same you are thinking about but something similar is documented behaviour of the Global Hawk. Obviously since that is a remotely piloted aircraft “everyone has ejected safely” is not the trigger for it.
The way it works at the flight planning stage the operators define pre-determined points, and if the system detects certain faults it cannot recover from it tries to fly to these points and crash land into them. They call these point “termination point” on land and “ditching point” over water.
In this document[1] you can read more about the selection criteria of such points.
This document[2] details for air traffic control under which conditions flight termination points are used. In short (page 22) when the aircraft is uncontrolable for landing or landing at a suitable airfield cannot be achieved safely.
1: https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a3/public...
2: https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/2019-05/atm-...
> "The jet’s transponder, which usually helps locate the aircraft, was not working “for some reason that we haven’t yet determined,” said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston. “So that’s why we put out the public request for help.”
There’s pros and cons to the enemy finding you but generally I’d imagine you want to give the pilot the chance to escape.
Doubtful you want to broadcast the position of the latest generation stealth fighter, however.
So it's not a guarantee.
I did read that stealth aircraft have transponders installed when operating in US airspace, so commercial radar can see them better. But it was not installed on this flight.
> "Also, the jet's configuration and its avionics' operability are an issue. The F-35s wear radar reflectors when on transit flights, as well as on many training missions and some operational ones. The Marine jets often wear missile rails for AIM-9Xs, as well. But if the aircraft was in its full stealthy configuration and had avionics issues, tracking it may have been troublesome."
But in military planes, it must be turned on explicitly, because, depend on target of flight, it is possible, it must be OFF.
In general, this is very frequent case, when pilot just forget to turn on ADS-B.
The linked article mentions that the pilot and navigator were considered missing. Other news reported also the presence of human remains near the crash site.