There’s no boilerplate involved. Trust and confidence are immense in command roles, particularly in a role like CO of a trust and evaluation squadron.
It’s also important to note that the Marine Corps itself did not lose trust in Colonel Del Pizzo - as per this article he was offered follow-on orders of his choice.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...
Flying cutting edge military jets isn't exactly a human right.
Sometimes you will save the jet, sometimes you will lose both. Military policy is not "better safe than sorry". There is some of jets, perhaps less than 1, where it is better to have a dead pilot than an unnecessarily crashed plane.
The cardinal rule for an in-flight emergency is that if the plane is flying, you're OK in that moment, there's no need to panic.
He was fired because as a test pilot, he panicked after the HUD malfunctioned, and ejected from an aircraft with an hour's worth of fuel that was not losing altitude or experiencing any mechanical failures, and did not make even an attempt to verify his primary instruments against the backup secondaries, or to use a functioning backup radio.
He could have used the backup radio to contact the tower to verify his altitude, speed, heading, rate of climb, etc and then get vectored back to reunite with his wingman ,and followed his wingman in for a landing.
Imagine just being struck by lightning, loosing main displays, and being at 1200 feet. All on top of flying in a plane with a reputation for electronic failures.
I'd be concerned too that the plane was about to freak out. 1200 ft isn't far.
In fact, the root of the word "seasoned" means "prepared" and he clearly was not prepared for the events leading to this incident. That through no fault of his own, hence he was not formally disciplined.
The Marines expect someone of his position to perform above and beyond their training. He didn't, so he lost that position with no formal discipline.
That's not quite right. The pilot doesn't have an outside oracle who tells them the truth if their aircraft is beyond saving. They have to make that decision under stressful circumstances and having only partial information about the world. Making that decision, to declare their own previously safe aircraft no longer salvageable in their own head is where the hesitation might happen.
I'm not saying that this was a bad call. The General has much much more information than I do. It is entirely possible that this was so egregious a case, and the plane was so obviously flyable that firing the pilot was the correct decision. I don't know.
What I'm saying is that you can't just say "oh they won't hesitate, because their plane will be unsafe". Because the hesitation (if it happens) happens before they decide that their aircraft is unsafe. Instead they will spend possibly valuable seconds thinking through if they truly have tried everything. If they are perhaps mistaken. If they maybe will lose their jobs because there was something they haven't seen clearly enough, but in the cold harsh light of an investigation will mean that they made a mistake.
Pilots are already heavily biassed against ejections. It is embarrassing, even if it was justified. It is a deviation from the routine. It is potentially deadly, potentially ruinous to their ability to continue flying on health grounds. This might be one more factor now which will bias them against ejecting. I hope the General made the right call.
I do, but perhaps this was meant to be "commensurate".
Or so I was told by a USN pilot.
In this case, the pilot is still flying. They are just not leading as prestigious and high risk command, because there are doubts that they suitable. There is no new cost, they are just rotating the roster. he will fly elsewhere and a different pilot will take that role.
It is only a loss if you double down thinking that he was the best or only fit for that role.
Shit can and will happen. The only real thing questionable is the damn aircraft.
Do you know how many things have gone wrong with the F-35? [0] It was a shit situation, the book was (unsurprisingly) crap, and you are potentially in a very expensive death trap. The guy choose to live. Honestly, his real mistake may just to have been willing to fly a F-35 in the first place.
[0] https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jet...
I think Ukraine is lots of evidence that of how important it is to have air superiority, even at extreme cost. If Russia had gained air superiority as many expected, the war would have been over shortly.
https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
That is 150M USD per plane. However, this might include maintenance costs, which would make it different from most F35 purchases that I have seen. Does anyone know any more specific details?
Even if the flyaway cost of a Grippen is $50 million the number of planes to accomplish the same mission is a lot more, and some of that number will be lives lost. I'm pretty confident it's within half an order of magnitude of F-35 price.
Edit: 5th generation jets are just incredibly expensive. I can't imagine how mad Turkey was when the US bilked them for their F35s, keeping both the jets and the billions Turkey paid.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240202005500/https://ca.news.y...
google 'for loss of trust and confidence in his ability military' and look at the news tab, every embarrassment to a military group gets thrown that bone.